An excerpt from an article in today's Guardian by Martin Kettle.
For many years it struck me as amusing rather than ominous that the place where I first spent any time with Boris Johnson was a Munich beerhall.
We were journalists covering a defence summit in the 1990s. We’d both filed our pieces – he to the Telegraph, me to the Guardian – and we were bored. So, along with the man from the Times, we took a taxi into the city centre and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beer and chatting. Johnson made a lot of good jokes, and one or two rather loud and tasteless ones about Hitler and Munich beerhalls.
I didn’t then, and still don’t, know Johnson well, but I have never much altered the views I formed of him over those beers in Bavaria long ago. He is very entertaining company, if you like that sort of thing.
But he is neither an intellectually thoughtful nor a morally serious person. He ridicules not just foreigners but most people other than himself. He is very bright but not very wise. He possesses both bottomless self-regard and incontinent ambition. And among the many things I would never trust him with is my country.
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