Brexit means Boris

A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no longer come up to London.

Boris jumped at the idea and I remember our lunch as the last time I saw Bill exuberantly happy. Boris knew instinctively what a 93-year-old journalist who was struggling to write his weekly column needed, and filled him in hilariously on the London political and media gossip. The only slight awkwardness came when Bill stressed his admiration for David Cameron, and Boris’s impenetrable eyes momentarily turned just a little beady.

I think back to this lunch when I read all the abuse thrown at Boris by journalists and Tory MPs. I can’t say I know Boris well, despite our once having been Telegraph colleagues, mostly on different continents. I cannot say I even like him that much. I resented him when I edited the paper’s Comment pages for filing his column three hours late, which meant I couldn’t get home to see my infant children. Nor can I convincingly dispute the charge that he is a shameless self-promoter, or that he uses people, especially women, and discards them casually.

The Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Mirror titles, the BBC and Channel 4 are united in their loathing of Boris for his mendacity, frivolity and recklessness. My former editor Max Hastings has written that he would not trust Boris with his wife, which is surely insulting to the blameless Lady Hastings, and by extension to all women, as the phrase has a strange 1950s, John Junorish feel to it. It almost deserves its own hashtag.