My debt to Boris Johnson

Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of the Express) for taking class As on the Prime Minister’s press plane, I sought to restore my reputation by giving an interview to a maverick young libertarian on the Telegraph. Boris Johnson wrote up our encounter favourably, along the classic out-of-Alexander-Pope-by-way-of-William-Rees-Mogg lines of ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ and ever since then I’ve found it hard to think altogether badly of him. Anyway, leaving the country last week, and with it a Tory party as self-obsessed and self-deluding as any junkie, it occurred to me it was time to return the favour: I’d like to use the pages of another of Johnson’s former bully-pulpits to invite him to grant me his first interview after he leaves office in September. I only lied about my heroin use to the editor of the Guardian (and who really cares about that?), while he lied about his partying to the entire nation, so any potentially exculpatory piece will necessarily be longer and more complex.