‘I’ve had two totally successful marriages’: Stanley Johnson interviewed

If anything could make me feel sorry for Boris Johnson, it’s meeting his father, Stanley. Before we met, he sent me a great list of press cuttings about his appearances with the Extinction Rebellion campaign, and ordered me to watch his recent reality show Celebrity Hunted on Channel 4 and read his latest novel, Kompromat. (The former, where celebrities become ‘fugitives’ and go on the run, was excruciating. But the novel — soon to be retitled The Brexit Conspiracy — is good fun, containing thinly disguised portraits of Putin, Trump, Murdoch, and also an ex-London mayor ‘whose ebullient exterior concealed a razor-sharp mind and a pronounced streak of political cunning’. The underlying thesis is that Putin is basically running everything, including our elections.) Stanley agrees to meet for coffee at the Ritz but not for a fortnight because he is just off to Berlin, Jordan, Puglia, and trekking with bears in the Abruzzi.

When we finally meet, he asks if I caught him on Good Morning Britain earlier. Alas, no. Don’t worry, you can watch it on catch-up, he reassures me. ‘They offered to send a car but I thought look, here I am, one of our longest-standing environmentalists, poster boy for Extinction Rebellion, it’s about time you started practising what you preach, so I went on my bike.’ Did he also cycle to Berlin, Jordan, Puglia, the Abruzzi, I wonder? No, he says, it’s OK to take a plane when he’s on important business. He was invited to Jordan by Prince Gazi to talk about the environment and he met the King — he shows me a photo of him plus King on his iPhone, and then several dozen photos of Petra, rose-red city half as old as time, etc. What about the bears? Has he got any photos of the bears? No, he hasn’t actually, because he didn’t see one, but he shows me a photo of a ‘watch out for bears’ road sign with bullet holes in it.