Boris Johnson "I think people should do all sorts of things": Mayor of London Boris Johnson. 

Even Boris Johnson's fans tend to think he spreads himself rather too thinly. That to be mayor of one of the biggest cities in the world along with being a journalist, novelist, celebrity cyclist and father of four means it is impossible to do any of those things properly. ''Like much of Boris' writing,'' wrote his biographer Andrew Gimson about his popular history The Dream of Rome, ''it would have been better if he had taken more trouble over it.''
Well, Boris - and, given he is probably the only living politician in Britain who is enough of a celebrity to need only one name in headlines, that is what I shall call him - is having none of that.'

 ''Writing is just politics by other means, isn't it?'' he says snappily. ''To adapt Clausewitz, or someone like that, it's just a way of continuing one's activity and bringing what you've got to say to the widest possible audience.'' (Carl von Clausewitz, by the way, was a German military theorist who died in 1831; I looked that up.)

 ''People now have a very kind of 1970s demarcation approach, like a British Leyland factory circa 1978,'' he says. ''There is a very strict view that some people should write and some people should do politics … I think people should do all sorts of things. Indeed, there was a very good manual of rugby union football I found from the 1920s that went even further and explained how props should be perfectly prepared to be wing three-quarters and so on and so forth. And I think that would be a good thing.''