Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a wonderfully rackety figure. David Cannadine compiled a series for the BBC on prime ministers’ props – Chamberlain’s umbrella, Churchill’s cigar, Thatcher’s handbag.

Boris Johnson: The Gambler
Tom Bower
(W.H.Allen, 592 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a wonderfully rackety figure. David Cannadine compiled a series for the BBC on prime ministers’ props – Chamberlain’s umbrella, Churchill’s cigar, Thatcher’s handbag. Boris Johnson has never had need of such cartoon identifiers. His mop of blond hair suffices: he arrived in politics already a caricature entire unto himself, an oversize television celebrity – the Bertie Wooster who swallowed the dictionary. If name recognition is everything in politics, “Boris” has it; he is loved as much for his ­bicycle helmet as for his eccentrically sesquipedalian prose.

Loved by some, but not by all. An abundance of charm in a man can induce suspicion and envy. How is it that, given his well-aired infidelities, women fall at his feet? Can a polit­ician so bewilderingly ambitious (“I want to be world king,” he told his mother at the age of three) be taken seriously? Can a journalist, however swift and facile a supplier of copy, be tolerated if he never files it on time? Max Hastings said he would never trust Johnson with his wife or his wallet: how is it that, with an enormous majority, the British people returned him the keys to 10 Downing Street?

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