Boris’s big column backfires

Boris! Boris! Boris! For a week now, the cry has been incessant among our national media. Liberated from his parliamentary cage, what will the albino gorilla do next? And last night we got our answer: a new column with the Daily Mail, that organ of Middle England sensibility. Eagerly, the whole of Fleet Street awaited Johnson’s first column, published at 5 p.m today. What would he write about, they speculated furiously? State secrets, perhaps? A denunciation of Sunak, Gove and all the sinister forces that they embody? Or some great revelation about his future plans?

The answer, it turns out, is, er, no. Rather anti-climactically, Boris published his first Mail column on a weight loss drug – two weeks after every other newspaper did a feature on it. Johnson wrote how he hoped the drug would curb his chorizo and cheddar late-night raids but, alas, he didn’t quite take to it.