[JWR] This is the genius of the act: He's Bertie Wooster with Jeeves' brain. Out on the street, he's everybody's friend; among his actual alleged friends, he's utterly ruthless: Within twenty-four hours of entering 10 Downing Street, he'd pulled off the bloodiest cabinet reshuffle of "modern times", as the papers say - although actually I can't think of a bloodier one even from non-modern times. (Only four members of the May regime were retained: Michael Gove, Amber Rudd, Baroness Evans and Matt Hancock.)Is he a nice person? Well, he's left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he's used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy - a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.
What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation - a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street.