Boris Johnson’s been living it up for years

The Downing Street press team were predictably in denial when I was the first to write in September 2019 of Boris Johnson’s casual, hedonistic lifestyle. I wrote about how one visitor had said his living quarters looked like “student digs” and the cleaners had their work “cut out” tidying up after the prime minister and the then Carrie Symonds. “He seems to be getting back into the routine of a newspaper office,” I’d quoted my informant as saying, adding that he came down to start work late, invariably looking dishevelled.

Of all people, it was Sue Gray who finally confirmed that the picture I had painted of Johnson’s lackadaisical Downing Street was all too true. Indeed, it was the very worst kind of newspaper office, with the boozing starting from 4pm, even during the lockdowns. The Sunday Times went on to confirm, too, what I had reported about Johnson’s tardiness in coming down to start work each day.

Johnson has never fully appreciated that the culture at the centre of government and a newspaper office ought to be very different. The long, boozy lunches he’d enjoy during the days we both worked together on the Daily Telegraph – the papers he’d glanced at thrown on the floor around his desk for others to pick up – clearly remains now his modus vivendi.

I recall, too, how sub-editors, whose thankless task it was to phone Johnson to attempt to fact-check his columns, knew that the later in the afternoon they phoned him, the less sense they were likely to get out of him.