you must read Jeremy Vine's story, very entertaining. The man can write.
QUOTE:
Boris asked for a sheet of paper. Someone produced a piece of A4, the reverse side of our menu for the night. He laid it on his thigh, below the tablecloth.
“Anyone got a pen?” he said. “Quick!”
A biro slid across the table. Very quickly, taking it, the future Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary began to write what looked like a plan for a speech. It was now past nine-thirty. One of the organisers was staring at us imploringly from the other side of the room, as if thinking: “How much longer can we give him?” I felt that pricking of the skin again ― if I could sense the stress on his behalf, what on earth was Boris feeling? This was going to be a catastrophe. He was going onstage in a minute or two with barely-legible notes written on the back of a menu and no idea even of which event he was attending. An after-dinner speaker normally talks for twenty to thirty minutes. How much material did Boris have? Looking at the scrap of paper I could make out very little of what his scrawl said. There seemed to be about ten words. There was one at the very top that I could make out:
SHEEP
and then, a few inches below that, another in capitals:
SHARK
...
Eighteen months after the marvellous securitisation night, I arrived at an awards ceremony for a totally different industry. I cannot recall whether it was concrete or chiropractors, but once again I had dutifully done my research and brought my script. However, the organisers had asked for only five minutes of opening remarks.
“Is someone else speaking?” I asked.
“Boris Johnson,” the organiser said, a frown appearing on her brow. “Do you know where he is?”
And here we were again. He was due to speak at nine-thirty. He arrived seven or eight minutes before the actual moment, heaving and laughing himself into the chair beside me.
“Jeremy,” he said, “what is this?”
I told him. Others at the table helped. Did they have a pen, paper? Both were produced. A better ballpoint this time, and the back of the menu again. I watched, fascinated, as Boris pulled the paper tight across his thigh and wrote a few words ― yes, SHEEP was definitely one ― in a barely-legible scrawl.
Then he was on.
...
Johnson became Foreign Secretary after leading the argument for Brexit. He has had his ups and downs ― before deciding that everything he does is part of a brilliant act, we should probably call as evidence his shambolic run at 10 Downing Street in the summer of 2016. His leadership campaign was kyboshed at the very press conference he had booked to launch it. MPs who turned up to support him sat with their jaws slack as he told the world he would not be able to do the job. Surely that was a real accident? People who fake car crashes tend not to get hurt in them.
And yet.
I realised that those two Boris speeches had made me pose the fundamental question, the one that concerns you most when you listen to a politician:
Is this guy for real?
