‘I laughed until I cried, then retched’: Boris Johnson on the wit of Simon Hoggart

I really can’t remember exactly how I came to appoint Simon Hoggart the wine correspondent of this magazine, but I have a feeling that it must have been in the aftermath of one of those long lunches at which it was then — and I hope and believe still is — the privilege of the staff to get sozzled at the expense of the wonderful and benevolent proprietors.

It might have been a parliamentary awards judging lunch. Perhaps it was just a lunch. At any rate Simon was there, and he started doing impressions of some of his favourite House of Commons characters.

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I am pretty sure Sir Peter Tapsell cropped up. But the star turn was what he claimed were the exact words of a monologue he had recently heard at another such lunch from the lips of another great man: a Conservative minister, as he then was, a prodigious figure well known to readers of this magazine but whom there is no need to identify.