The new Ben Elton? ... Boris Johnson with one of his books. Photograph: Rupert Hartley/Rex
You can tell a lot about a man by his books, especially so if he's written them. However, anyone seeking clues Boris Johnson's personality and politics from his collected writings is faced with something of an uphill struggle.
Not only is he prolific almost to a fault, writing fiction, journalism, history and even poetry, but he has even waded from time to time into literary criticism, most memorably charting his halting attempts to read Middlemarch. He memorably described what is perhaps the finest 19th century novel as "a big, epically long, boring book".
He went on to ask, one hopes rhetorically, why exactly girls loved it so much; his given purpose in reading it was to "understand the female mind more", at what he admitted was a late stage. One hopes Boris's contingent of adoring female supporters will be able to offer him more tangible insights into their voting patterns over the coming years.
Boris was probably best known for being a journalist before he became an MP, and his collected writings, Have I Got Views For You, the title playing on his notorious appearances on Have I Got News For You, are every bit as knowingly buffoonish as you might expect. Stretching back to his early days as a young(er) reporter on the Daily Telegraph, Boris treats us to his trenchant views on topics such as hunting (surprisingly, he's against it), Dubya (even more surprisingly, he can see the good in him, albeit a long time ago) and, fittingly given the current climate, the Chinese ("Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil...it is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain"). It's always readable, frequently funny and hardly ever convincing.
Likewise the picaresque account of his Pooter-esque entry into politics, Friends, Voters, Countrymen: Jottings from the Stump, in which he describes his first faltering steps to power via Henley-on-Thames. The comic highlight here is Boris haplessly being called a cunt by various ne'er-do-wells in Clwyd South, an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to make friends and influence people. Somewhat more highbrow in tone, and frankly rather tedious, is his later book Lend Me Your Ears. With grandiloquent classical references, this in retrospect seems like his first attempt to be taken seriously as a political figure, dealing with such issues as the Maastrich Treaty, the fall of Thatcher ("the country's greatest peacetime prime minister") and racism. The latter is a singularly vexed issue for Boris, one probably not helped by his describing the reaction to the death of Stephen Lawrence as "hysteria" in the book. No wonder his ethnic minority vote was virtually non-existent.
If we skip over his plodding, efficient TV tie-in The Dream of Rome, we are left with two bizarre curiosities. His (to date) sole novel Seventy Two Virgins concerns the exploits of a brilliant but slightly buffoonish cycling MP who becomes involved in a terrorist plot. Claims were made on publication for a work of comic genius akin to Waugh, Wodehouse or (lowering standards somewhat) Ben Elton. The fact it is standing at a mighty 16,227 in the Amazon bestseller chart suggests this opinion is not too widely held.
But Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson's strangest literary moment to date was his recent collection of poems, The Perils of the Pushy Parents: A Cautionary Tale. This sub-Hilaire Belloc collection of rhymes prompted the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries to describe it as "brazenly buffoonish", and to wonder aloud whether a worse book might be published that year.
Boris's favourite word, apparently, is "carminative", meaning a highly beneficial spell. Let us hope that he directs his efforts towards producing such a purple patch at City Hall, rather than on the page.
