Spectator competition winners: Boris Johnson in trochaic tetrameter

The latest challenge invited you to add to Sam Leith’s lines about Boris Johnson, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’: ‘Mayor of London Boris Johnson/ Much admired the lady’s pole-dance/ Mentored well her start-up business…’ Though Longfellow has long fallen out of fashion, in his day he was a poet celebrity, imitated by Baudelaire, parodied by Lewis Carroll and outselling Browning and Tennyson (he was also the first American to be honoured with a marble bust in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey). The poet J.D. McClatchy, writing in the New York Times, noted that on Long-fellow’s 70th birthday it was proclaimed that ‘there is no man living for whom there is so universal a feeling of love and gratitude, and no man who ever wore so great a fame so getly and simply’. What we’ll all be saying about Boris when he hits 70 remains to be seen but in the mean-time, here are some reflections, in your best trochaic tetrameter, on how he’s doing so far.