I feel a grave disquiet about our interest in Boris Johnson’s personal life

The stories about Boris Johnson’s private life – and not just the latest ones – give me grave disquiet. My feelings of uneasiness, though, do not derive from what he might get up to, which I’m not much bothered about, but from the fact of their publication.

I see why news organisations, including my own, do the stories, because such things can be properly in the public interest. If someone comes along and wants to make life or death, peace or war, Remain or Leave decisions on our behalf, I suppose we ought to know what they’re actually like. If they’re not by nature trustworthy, it’s at least as well to know. As the old aphorism goes, a man who can cheat on his wife can cheat on his country.

Yet I feel uneasy.

I suppose part of it is just personal guilt and hypocrisy. I know many journalists whose private activities would not stand up to public scrutiny. We’ve all of us, in our trade, done things we’re ashamed of (including becoming a journalist in the first place). It’s worth remembering that Michael Gove went through his cocaine phase when he was a journalist. He was hardly alone. The stories I could tell...

Of course I can’t share them for legal reasons, and because no one cares what journalists, apart from a few telly stars and those who became politicians, get up to, or used to get up to.

A sadly now forgotten – real – Tory MP of a rare wit, Julian Critchley, once remarked that the only vice a politician could indulge in safely is a bag of boiled sweets. Correct.

It doesn’t necessarily do you or the country any good, though, being virtuous. The naughtiest thing Theresa May ever did was, famously, run through a wheat field, at least up to the time she betrayed Brexit (just joshing there).

Leave aside the affairs or the drugs and the rest of it. I really, really want to know whether Boris ever burned a £20 or £50 note in front of a homeless person in Oxford, as I believe may have been a tradition in the toffs’ dining club of which he was a member. It would be an event, of its nature, that took place in public. Maybe it’ll come up at the Tory hustings. I’d like to hear and read about any such shameful episode. Fair turns the stomach it does.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor