It's been a mixed week for Boris Johnson. They have been lately. A(nother) deputy mayor resigns, a mishap he could have done without. He criticises politicians such as, er, David Cameron, for describing Britain as a broken society, a mishap that he may have meant, though he says not.
A programme goes out revealing that he's a descendant of George II. And in a couple of days' time he's got to contend with receiving the Olympic torch in front of a few hundred million people.
Yet he remains a magnetic politician, who you - or perhaps I should say I - want to read about whenever possible. Boris in Beijing? Bring it on. It has all the potential in the world to go spectacularly wrong.
But I wonder whether any British politician could have dealt with it as amusingly and as naturally and in its way as diplomatically as Johnson today, when he was asked whether he had any criticisms of the Beijing Games, as my colleagues Tania Branigan and Matt Scott report.
"Had it been us, I don't think we would necessarily have done the switcheroo with the girl with the braces."
