Sports Calendar

“We’re great fans of yours,” a woman shouted from her car. (When did you last hear anyone say that to a Tory or, indeed, any candidate?) Harriet Wynn Jones stopped her Volvo to climb out and tell the flaxen-haired one: “I’m voting for you, not the Conservatives. You seem like an individual.”

“Great. Good-oh. Fantastic. Would you like some bumf?” But do not be fooled. Behind the jokes and the bumbling, Boris is plotting his comeback. Sacked for supposedly failing to come clean about an adulterous affair, he is plainly awaiting the call to return to the front line. When asked the question directly, he shimmied away.

“They were very nice to me. But obviously I can’t do anything at the moment. Oh look, there’s a Porsche. And a pigeon. Okey cokey.”

I tried again. “Are you missing life on the front bench?” He paused, and there was a flicker of seriousness. “I am, a bit, actually.” Then we are off again. “Box hedges here. Sure sign of Lib Dems.”

Similarly, his eyes narrowed when we approached, crab-wise, what Bertie Wooster would have called “Boris’s spot of girl trouble”. For those who have forgotten, Boris was found to have been jolly friendly with someone called Barbarella, or Salmonella, or something like that, who wasn’t absolutely 100 per cent his wife.

“Are you going to see Blunkett, the Opera?” I asked. (Boris and Violoncella are central characters in this forthcoming extravaganza, which tells the story of sexual shenanigans at The Spectator.)

“The whole thing fills me with horror really,” Boris said. “I need more bumf. That’s a big dog. Onwards and upwards.”

Boris is a delight to go campaigning with: irreverent, unpredictable and bursting with self-irony. All qualities that endear him to the voters and terrify the party leadership. He simply cannot resist finding the funny side.

By lunchtime we were in Shiplake College, the Henley public school where Boris was to address sixth-formers. Surrounded by boys in creased suits with fluff on their collars and exotic, ill-contained haircuts, the Tory candidate blended in perfectly; indeed, the surroundings seemed to accentuate his schoolboyishness: “Ah, sandwiches. We will fall on them like Harpies.”

He went down a storm. Not because his young listeners were Tories-bred-in-the-bone, but because nobody plays the anti-politician better than Boris, while remaining political to the core. Whatever happens in this election, the Tories must know that he is a huge, if unpredictable, party asset. I suspect Boris knows it too.

If yesterday was a Wodehousian performance of “What ho, Boris”, the sequel is undoubtedly “Boris in the Offing”.

BORIS’S BONS MOTS

Here is a small selection of Boris’s bons mots delivered yesterday

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