BORIS JOHNSON was the breath of fresh air that the Tory party had missed for a generation and had even been talked about as a future leader.

Instead he has been caught out by the traditional Tory malaise that has accounted for such party figures as David Mellor and Cecil Parkinson and has even tainted the memory of John Major, the former prime minister.

The blond-haired MP for Henley was able to get laughs out of all sides of the Commons, and the Tory leader Michael Howard clearly wanted to tap into that fun streak when he appointed him shadow minister for the arts earlier this year.

The 40-year-old, who also edits The Spectator magazine, had made misjudgments before. Like the time he was caught trying to help out his old chum, the aristocratic fraudster Darius Guppy, and was mercilessly ridiculed on Have I Got News for You, the satirical quiz show that would also make his name.

But he rode out those uncomfortable times and famously hit back at the likes of Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, the captains on Have I Got News for You. He revealed in a newspaper article that many of the supposed ad lib lines and cutting quips delivered by the show’s participants were in fact scripted.

Johnson was welcomed back as the show’s guest host when the BBC dumped Angus Deayton over tabloid revelations about his own lurid sex life. Now Johnson looks like having gone the same way.

His Dennis the Menace demeanour was lampooned by Private Eye but his wit and self-deprecating humour always managed to get him out of the scrapes.

However, this morning he is surveying the wreckage, not just of his own political career but potentially his marriage too.

The Tory leader last night sacked him over lying about his affair with Petronella Wyatt, the society figure and daughter of the late Lord Wyatt. A series of revelations in newspapers alleged that Johnson got Wyatt pregnant when their four-year affair resumed a few months ago.

It is suggested that they agreed to terminate the pregnancy and Johnson then decided to stay with his wife Marina, barrister daughter of the veteran BBC reporter Charles Wheeler. They have four children.

Gossip columns have been nudging and winking for three years over the apparent close relationship between Johnson and Wyatt, the former deputy editor at The Spectator.

Johnson, who earns about £300,000 a year, outraged Liverpool in the aftermath of Ken Bigley’s murder by terrorists in Iraq when an editorial in The Spectator accused the city of wallowing in “victim status”. He was ordered by Howard to vist the city and apologise.

Johnson was born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson on 19 June, 1964, the son of a senior European commission official and great-grandson of the last interior minister in the imperial Turkish government.

At Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he was regarded as a fierce intellectual, but his happy-go-lucky persona led to him becoming the Oxford Union president.

His journalism career stalled when he left The Times in 1988 after making up a quote but was revived when he became the Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. He was made editor of The Spectator in 1999 and stayed on after being elected to parliament in 2001 in Michael Heseltine’s old seat.

Under his relaxed regime the Tory-backing magazine was dubbed The Sextator after a series of affairs featuring Rod Liddle, now a columnist at The Sunday Times, and Kimberly Fortier, the magazine publisher who crossed the house to have an affair with David Blunkett, the home secretary.

Johnson has so many other outside interests — including writing and speech engagements — that Howard thought hard and long before making him shadow arts minister in May. He has also managed to pen a novel called Seventy Two Virgins.

However, it is Johnson’s interest in Wyatt, the daughter of the late chairman of the Tote who as Woodrow Wyatt was a fiery Labour MP and a close friend of Margaret Thatcher, that may prove his undoing.

He was caught in a classic if unintentional Fleet Street ambush last weekend. One tabloid said an unnamed MP had made his mistress pregnant. It said the unnamed woman had initially decided she wanted the baby but went on to have a late termination at the private Portland hospital in London on October 18.

The paper quoted the unnamed MP as dismissing the story with the words: “The whole thing is an inverted pyramid of piffle.”

A rival tabloid quoted Johnson by name as denying an affair with Wyatt. It used such similar words from him — “It is an inverted pyramid of piffle” — that anyone reading both articles could not help but identify Johnson. It is that lie that has now led to Howard sacking him from the Tory front bench.

Wyatt’s mother, Lady Verushka Wyatt, appeared to make matters worse after she was asked by a third tabloid if her daughter and Johnson were romantically involved. She allegedly replied: “Not any more. Not as much.”

At the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards at Claridge’s last week Howard gently teased Johnson about his interests. The Tory party leader described The Spectator as “political Viagra” and praised the “terrific enthusiasm” with which the editor took on his various duties and urged him “to keep it up”. Wyatt, a columnist at the magazine, pulled out of the engagement at the last minute.

But Howard’s words are now being seen as a sign of his unease about the infidelity allegation so soon after Johnson’s magazine accused Liverpool of being “hooked on grief”. Last night, for Howard and Johnson, the joking stopped.

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