Boris on pomp and Tory circumstance

Sometimes it's hard being one of Fleet Street's shaggiest right-wing attack dogs. If you're editing The Spectator, the Tory party's favourite school mag, you should be making the New Labour establishment - in your own words - tremble. And then Tony Blair spoils it all by telling you how much he likes your work...

Boris Johnson has been called a fair number of things in his short but steadily ascendant career. He's been called the "Bertie Wooster of Fleet Street", a "Dulux dog lookalike" and a "bulky Danish midfielder in the Jan Molby mould". One journalist described him as being like an "overgrown schoolboy who has just put glue on the teacher's seat" and another as the "love child of Scooby-Doo and Margaret Thatcher". That last one was mine, as it happens, a vain attempt to capture the striking impression that he made in a television documentary about the euro that was fronted by that distinguished commentator on economic matters, Ulrika Jonsson. And I think it's fair to say that, taken collectively, these remarks suggest two things about the place he occupies in British public life.

First of all, he's insurmountably likeable. Some of these descriptions were set out with hostile intent, it's true, but in the end none of them can quite bear to bring their teeth into play. They aim a belly punch and end up tickling. Secondly, he can relax in the knowledge that he's never going to have phrases such as "undue solemnity" or "inappropriate gravitas" sticking like burrs to his coat-tails. Indeed, when he worked as The Daily Telegraph's Brussels correspondent, it is said that he kept a memo on the wall from his then editor, Max Hastings, urging him to be "more pompous" in his reporting.

In Brussels, where he pioneered that successful journalistic genre, the EEC horror story ("Threat to British pink sausage" was one of his), the sense of mischief and irreverence effectively made his name. And it has hardly been a liability since - giving his political columns a Wodehousian vivacity not commonly associated with the form. What is an asset to a star columnist, though, can be a liability for an editor and that is what Johnson is now - having been chosen late last year to succeed Frank Johnson in the editorial chair at The Spectator, a fast-track position which brings with it the promise of greater things in the Conrad Black stable.

And so, since no editor has ever needed to ask me to increase the pomposity of my writing, when we meet for lunch my first question is an effortlessly earnest one - how important does he think it is to be serious? "I think people should be serious," he replies swiftly, "the world is a deeply serious place." So why isn't he showing the way? "I am, actually. Normally around paragraph five, after an extended proem... I think people increasingly need to be lured into articles about politics, they need some sugar on the pill... It suits people to say 'Ooh I don't take him seriously', but then it turns out they're the people who are feeling most wounded." I ask him to name some of his recent victims: "I think I've got the Government a bit. I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but there came a point whenever I went to a European Community summit, Alastair Campbell would go into an orgy of Johnson bashing... that was one of the occasions when the bomb drops down the chimney and actually rattles around in the engine room and blows it up."

Such explosions have to be the ambition of a light cruiser like The Spectator, but while Johnson believes that the magazine retains "the ability to punch massively above our weight", he concedes that he hasn't "rocked the stockmarket yet" during his eight months in office. He's proud of having taken a poke at the lobby correspondents and of a recent piece about right-wing political correctness; is pleased by praise for recent pieces about asylum-seekers (on which subject the magazine has been more liberal-minded than both Labour and the Conservatives); but seems almost hurt when I suggest that New Labour can weather criticism from The Spectator far more easily than the mildest scepticism from a notionally on-side publication such as The Guardian or the New Statesman. "Blair said officially to me that he much prefers The Spectator to the New Statesman," he retorts. Then he pauses for a moment, suddenly aware that his defence is going awry. "He said The Spectator was terrific... he loved it... actually, I'm rather defeating my own point here... He didn't mention that he was terrified of The Spectator but I know he is. They tremble."

This last remark is delivered in a very characteristic Johnson tone - a teasing parody of urgency that it would take a special typeface to record in print - Boris Ironic perhaps - the only difficulty being that you can never quite tell when it has taken over from the habitual floridity of his speech. He is fond of clichés - use one in his presence, as I do when I say that I think Anne Widdecombe has been stoking the fires with her statements on asylum-seekers, and he seizes it from you to take it for a run. "Did she stoke the embers of hate?" he says with relish. "Did she?" "You know where you are with a cliché," he explains when I ask him why he enjoys them so much. "You know what's going on, you get to the point much more quickly... all Conservatives must by definition like clichés. What is Conservatism if not a cliché writ large? It's tried and tested, it's handed down by the generations; if it ain't broke don't fix it."

As an expression of political fidelity, this is obviously a little ambiguous, but then that's characteristic of Johnson, too. He recognises that his rhetorical sugar might sometimes be at odds with the pill. Halfway through lunch he takes a call from Question Time, and when he has finished teasing the producer ("Are you trying to redress the anti-Tory balance? Oh, Anne Widdecombe... You want me and Anne Widdecombe?... a kind of Tory overload") he returns to where our conversation began. "I'm as fervent a Tory as anybody, but what I sometimes worry is that when I do go on and I try to say things in what I think is a reasonable and convincing way, it turns out afterwards that everybody thinks I've ruined the case."

Almost at once he goes on to demonstrate the effect. He once described the Tory party at the last election as being like Marlon Brando at the end of Apocalypse Now - sunk in moral exhaustion and ripe for slaughter - and when I ask him to update the metaphor to represent their current condition, he launches happily into a fantasy of resurrection: "Resurgent!... dynamic!... some Norse deity awakening from a long slumber..." My murmurs of incredulity only seem to encourage him. "The first breath of life is starting to make his fantastic blond nostril hairs twitch... watch out, they're going to be back, the Blues are going to be back," he continues.

I don't suppose it's his fault that what this prose poem summons in my mind is that classic Looney Tunes cartoon "What's Opera Doc", in this case with William Hague taking the Elmer Fudd role as a Wagnerian hero dwarfed by his horned helmet. But the disarming flippancy of his response didn't exactly rule it out either and made one wonder a little about his prospects as an active politician - he has twice stood for political office and is now said to be scouting for another constituency.

If there is a psychological explanation for the determined frivolity of his manner then it's soon clear that it isn't going to emerge over lunch. When I ask him whether he was teased at school he sees at once where I am heading and obligingly supplies a psychological backstory. "Of the leavers in my prep school I was the only one who wasn't made a prefect and I think I felt this very keenly. I think it encouraged me in my volcanic ambitions at public school and probably even until university. That's my psychological history, being teased for long hair and being slightly goofy at prep school, arrives at public school to rectify this injustice..." "Seriously? "No, not really," he adds quickly. "My life's been a terrible progression from obvious point to obvious point."

But that he is serious about some things becomes clear when he begins to talk about the current Government and, more specifically, about the euro - his big cause. "You only want the euro because you think chaps like me don't want it," he says, sitting up suddenly. "Shall I tell you the reason why you will feel sickened with yourself by your support for the euro? Why, in 20 years' time, as you look back at this episode, you will feel that you were wrong?" He has the wind in his sails now and is leaving quite a bow wave. "I am speaking directly now I hope to Independent readers. What will destroy the European ideal eventually are the very liberal values which you and I share, which we discussed earlier, about asylum-seekers. Europe is a profoundly racist construct; it is the attempt to build on the end of the Eurasian landmass a laager of nominally Christian white men and women and to keep people out, outside the stockade."

There is no call for Boris Ironic here. He is at last in earnest. He might be eminently pattable, disarmingly shaggy, but there is a bite there too.