Published: 20 October, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN

HE’S the likely lad, the local lad, the much-loved lad named Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – known to all as just Boris.

The sensational stories have already hit the headlines – the abortions he paid for, the humiliation of his wife and family, his total greed for money and fumbling lust for political power.

Yet roguish Boris rises above disgust piled high, miraculously seen as some saviour of our democratic system.

And despite the evidence of his deadly lack of loyalty to David Cameron, his party and many others, his support for bankers and trust in his own gigantic ego, commentators believe his maverick charm and bonhomie somehow add to the “gaiety of the nation”.

Journalist Sonia Purnell doesn’t believe in Boris. And, as everyone now knows, she has taken revenge for his disparaging treatment of her when they worked together by writing this brilliant and shattering biography.

She dishes the dirt from ditches galore while occasionally – and honestly – giving top marks: for example, to Boris’s attack on Cameron’s “broken Britain” eulogy.

Purnell understands completely the clever clogs hidden behind the mask, exposing him as a false god and mischief maker who has degraded further a democratic system seen by a growing army of protesters as no longer fit for purpose.

Luck, unfortunately, has played its part, both in Boris’s adventures and his desire to craft political career.

There are clues in Boris’s early days of abject failure as a pupil at Primrose Hill Primary School, both in learning to read and in trying to play the trombone.

There were no such problems later for the brothers Miliband, Ed and David, remarkably also pupils at the same primary.

Nor were there similar problems for David Cameron, like Boris an old Etonian and member of the Bullingdon Club.

Furlong Road, Upper Holloway, became Boris’s home after his marriage and he became a common figure cycling down the hill, initially as MP for Henley.

Since May 2009, he has made his London mayoral home in a £2million property in Colebrooke Row, behind the Angel, in Islington.

It makes for a good vantage point to view the fact that the real engine for change in this country is local government, London being a supreme example since a vast amount of the council tax it raises is exported out of the capital.

Local government is rarely subjected to the kind of analysis given to London’s £12billion budget, now under mayoral control, by Purnell.

Her revelations are most relevant and necessary when it is deeds, not words, that count when the voters go to the polls.

Voters will, for instance, be inflamed by the 44 per cent rise in transport fares introduced by Boris, his failed promise to cut crime, the chaos inside the Met Police under his charge, his support for Rupert Murdoch and phone-hacking News International, his scrapping of the cong­estion charge exten­sion that would have brought in £55billion, the £1.6m cost of each new Route­master bus brought back into action, the pathetic response from bankers to his Mayor’s Fund to support disadvantaged London youth, the high salaries of his staff at County Hall… These are just a handful of the issues.

The worst of all – and yet to be fully exposed – is the scandal of the Boris bikes campaign, which has littered London with endless rows of unused bikes, at an enormous cost, despite the sponsorship of one of the big banks.

It is this lack of judgment that makes Boris, now 50, unsuitable for any high office. Indeed, Boris the joker once declared: “I have as much chance of becoming prime minister as of being decapitated by a Frisbee or of finding Elvis.” But he is, at heart, a hoaxer too, his actions as dishevelled as his hair, a shooting star that has already fizzled out and fallen to earth.

• Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity. By Sonia Purnell. Aurum Press, £20