Boris’s Missing Millions

Andy Coulson, the phone-hack editor turned PR man, says we should stand by for “the fastest prime ministerial memoir in history” as the departing PM gets rich quick.

In The Times he writes that Boris’s calculation will be which move “will set (him) up for the brightest and most lucrative future?”

From a financial point of view, he might well have concluded it is better to “be ousted rather than to resign”.

Well, no, it turns out.

The accepted narrative about Boris post Number 10 is that he makes a bomb — £5 million a year, The Guardian reported.

He will join the lecture circuit, rattle off best-selling books and join boards.

This will enable him to pay for as many marriages or children as he may acquire.

I don’t wish him ruined (hang on, do I?) but I really doubt this.

It is hard to see how he meets the criteria for sitting on a board, or indeed anything serious.

So he has to go back to being the jokes guy.

Even on that, he is seriously compromised. Earlier comments mocking Chinese accents, working-class males and almost everyone else looked bad three years ago and worse now.

His advice for dealing with The Spectator’s female publisher was “just pat her on the bottom and send her away”.

Is Ernst & Young, or Barclays Bank or indeed any large company, really going to think it appropriate to hire this guy to do the funnies at their staff awards?

If they did, wouldn’t there be a massive backlash and not just from women?

One notion is that he makes it big in America. This is a British conceit that assumes many Americans even know who he is.

I think he might have to look much further afield. Saudi Arabia perhaps.

Doing PR for Boris Johnson always looked a thankless task. It is hardly any easier now.