Eyewitness to a bout of Bojo baloney

Among the most affecting passages in investigative journalist Tom Bower’s new biography of Boris Johnson was the story of how Boris’s onetime mistress, Petronella Wyatt, miscarried their baby in november 2004.

The future Prime minister, we read, sat with Wyatt in the hospital and grieved with her.

Yet what will, perhaps, have raised a few eyebrows is the fact that the couple ever reached this very unfortunate position.

Earlier that year, Boris had been unceremoniously sacked from the Shadow Cabinet after lying to then leader michael Howard about whether or not he was having an affair with Wyatt, then his deputy editor at the Spectator magazine.

one memorable Saturday night that year, I was attending a swish black-tie dinner at the Tate modern gallery on London’s South Bank when we learned that the mail on Sunday was planning to publish a report the next day that Petronella had had an abortion as a result of her affair with Boris. (Her mother Verushka was the named source.)

I watched as Howard’s press secretary, guy Black, sacked Boris over the phone for having falsely — but memorably — sworn blind that claims of the affair with Petronella were ‘ an inverted pyramid of piffle’.

Looking back, it feels strangely characteristic of ‘Teflon Bojo’ that he could lose his job after lying to his party leader (not to mention his wife), and then carry on seeing his mistress — and get her pregnant again — before resuming his political career and rising to the top regardless.

PS: Bower also reveals that in 2016, when he was Foreign Secretary, Boris tried to reheat the affair with Petronella. She sensibly rebuffed him.