Why Boris’s gift to Dad was dead on arrival...

STANLEY Johnson was delighted when his son, Boris, and daughter-in-law, Carrie, declared that they were getting him beavers for his 80th birthday last year.

Sadly, the I’m A Celebrity star has revealed that the furry rodents never did arrive at his Exmoor estate — and he was instead handed the pelt of a dead beaver by Boris.

‘The Prime Minister actually promised to give me some beavers for my birthday down on the farm in Somerset,’ Stanley says.

‘It’s turned into something slightly more complicated, because the Government haven’t yet authorised the release of beavers to wild rivers. So he actually arrived with a beaver skin instead.’

To add insult to injury, the animal’s skin was in fact a gift to the PM and his wife from their good friend, the environmentalist Derek Gow, who has a ‘rewilding’ farm in Devon. Gow breeds beavers and wildcats in the hope of releasing them into the wild, and procured the pelt from a beaver which was run over by a vehicle in Bavaria, Germany.

He owned it for educational purposes; beavers became extinct in this country 400 years ago as they were hunted for their thick, warm coats.

Luckily, Gow also has a thick skin. ‘I do not care that Boris has given the gift away,’ he tells me, adding: ‘Stanley is a lovely man and has done a lot for the environment.

Gow wonders if Carrie rejected the gift because, although she loves animals, she may be disgusted by their fur: ‘Like with every present, some of them are useful and others may be repulsive and better given to your parents.’

Stanley hopes to be allowed to release wild beavers on his estate once the Government makes it legal to do so.

Boris hinted at such a plan during his keynote speech at the Conservative Party conference, when he declared: ‘Build back beaver.’