Love’s Labour’s Lost as Boris faces bill for £500k

BORIS JOHNSON has discovered there is a hefty price to pay for high office.

The newly-appointed Foreign Secretary is believed to be having to pay back a £500,000 advance to his publishers because he no longer has time to write a book about Shakespeare.

The father-of-five had been commissioned by Hodder & Stoughton to write a biography of the Bard to coincide with this year’s 400th anniversary of his death. But Mr Johnson, 52, has conceded he doesn’t have the time to complete the book before the end of the anniversary.

Mr Johnson is a prolific author whose previous titles include bestsellers The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History and also The Dream Of Rome, an acclaimed history of the Roman Empire.

The Foreign Secretary could have drawn from his recent experience in writing on Shakespeare, after political observers suggested that the ruthless way Michael Gove ended Mr Johnson’s hopes of winning the Tory leadership was distinctly reminiscent of Brutus’s stabbing of Julius Caesar in the history play. Mr Johnson paraphrased a line from the play when he announced his decision not to run in the contest, saying: ‘A time not to fight against the tide of history but to take that tide at the flood and sail on to fortune.’

But the New York-born politician has managed to complete one task.

Mr Johnson, who has previously enjoyed dual nationality, has given up his American citizenship, which meant filing tax returns on both sides of the pond. He sorted out a deal with US authorities in March with the help of his friend US ambassador Matthew Barzun – but not before paying a sixfigure US tax bill last year after selling his Islington townhouse.

Hodder & Stoughton declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Mr Johnson.

A Foreign Office spokesman confirmed that the Foreign Secretary was no longer an American citizen.