For all his bluster, Boris’s premiership has the lottery ticket holder’s chance of a happy ending

Barring a miraculous confluence of luck and timing, the memoir of his time in Downing Street is likely to be closer to a leaflet than a book

Does he believe anything, other than in his God-given entitlement to occupy centre stage? (Reuters)

The Queen Elizabeth II Centre didn’t exist when I was at school nearby. In the earliest days of the Thatcher imperium, all that stood on the undeveloped ground opposite Westminster Abbey was a red phone box, and a kiosk serving weak tea, “coffee” to test the elasticity of the Trades Descriptions Act, obscure brands of fizzy drinks, and sweets.

A friend and I nipped to it one day for Mars bars, and were surprised not to find its previously omnipresent proprietor, a splenetic chap known to himself and everyone else as Greasy Joe, at his post. Where, we asked his replacement, was our nakedly ungenial host?

“Greasy Joe cannot be here today,” we were told. “He’s in court. He’s been had up for w****** in the telephone box.”