QUOTES BY BORIS

Boris infamously told a girlfriend that such was the number of his sexual partners that he hadn’t had ‘to have a w*** for 20 years’.

On cocaine: 1. ‘I tried it at university and I remember it vividly. And it achieved no pharmacological, psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.’ (GQ Magazine, 2007) 2. ‘I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.’ (BBC, Have I Got News For You, 2005)

On China: ‘China is becoming in our imaginations the fashionable new dread, the incubator of strange diseases, a vast polluted landscape of Victorian factories where coolies sit in expectorating rows, nourished on nothing but rice and the spleens of pangolins.’ (The Daily Telegraph, 2005)

On former colonial countries: ‘The Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.’ (The Daily Telegraph, 2002)

On the repeal of Section 28: ‘This British legislator [Lord Grenfell] is voting in favour of Labour’s appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it.’ (Spectator, 2000)

On Papua New Guinea: ‘For 10 years, we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing; and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour Party.’ (The Daily Telegraph, 2006)

On Portsmouth: ‘Full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs.’ (GQ Magazine, 2007)

On EU membership: ‘As for our own interests, they are still on balance served by maintaining our membership. This has brought palpable benefits to Britain in free trade and in bestowing on British citizens the rights of free movement and free establishment in the EU; and withdrawal would potentially mean a worrying loss of influence.’ (Boris Johnson, Friends, Voters, Countrymen, 2001)