Christopher Shevlin

Have I ever told you about the time that I was chased out of a Helsinki graveyard by a squirrel? If so, stop reading now, because the rest of this just describes again the time I was chased out of a Helsinki graveyard by a squirrel. If not, I think you will find the tale at once strange, unnerving and – perhaps most of all – deeply boring. It is also, in every detail, perfectly true.

I went to Helsinki for a wedding. My friend and employer Robert Taylor was marrying his Finnish wife*, Tinka Tschamurov (she was keen to marry him in order to make her name sound more like the beginning of a children’s rhyme).

The night before my flight I did not sleep, but stayed up all night to

Scene: Somewhere in India, 500BC. Possibly near a lotus tree or something.

I am, on balance, glad that Boris Johnson exists. He has a blond dandelion of hair that is forever falling in his eyes. He says ‘cripes’. He’s somewhat stout. He’s an old Etonian but forgets to tuck his shirt in. I find him comforting in the same way that I find Jeeves and Wooster comforting. It would be even better if he had a monocle which kept falling into his soup, and if a young scamp called Toby kept on tying his shoelaces together whenever he sat at the dining table, and then cut the buttons off his braces so that his plus fours fell down when he stood up. He needs a long-suffering sidekick, an Austin 10 and series of scrapes which culminate in fat old Sergeant Barnes chasing him across a field which unbeknownst to them contains the most ferocious bull in Hertfordshire, leaving them stranded in the same tree and becoming firm friends until later Barnes discovers that it was Boris who inadvertently tipped off barmy Lord Abercrythe that the sergeant had eaten the last of his favourite fruitcake when he was supposed to be guarding the duke’s eccentric doily collection.

What bothers me, I suppose, is the nature rather than the fact of Boris's existence. If Boris Johnson were, for example, a fictional character then we could enjoy his improbable bumbling charm without having him fuck our largest and most important city to dust.