The sketchwriters also had a field day with the pleasing similarity between the word "piffle" and Johnson's third name, "de Pfeffel". Johnson was photographed trying to avoid the press while going jogging in a hat that might have suited Ice T or Will Smith, but which looked decidedly odd on the head of a pale-skinned, tubby, Old Etonian. Johnson denied that he had lied, but his earlier public comment that stories about the affair were "an inverted pyramid of piffle" meant no one believed him. After the then Tory communications director, Guy Black, accused Johnson of lying to him about the affair, Howard relieved Boris of his shadow ministerial post. Next details of his affair with Petronella Wyatt, which had long been hinted at in the gossip columns, became public. First Johnson was humiliated by Michael Howard, who made him apologise in person to the people of Liverpool after a Spectator editorial accused them of wallowing in their "victim status" over the death of Ken Bigley and the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. He appeared on Have I Got News For You, wrote a well-received book about becoming the Tory MP for Henley (Friends, Voters, Countrymen), and was promoted to the front bench as shadow arts minister Then came a catastrophic month late last year.
Not only the Spectator and the Telegraph, where he is a columnist, but also parliament provided a platform from which Johnson's unique blend of Wodehousian buffoonery and classical erudition won him an ever-increasing audience of admirers. Eton, Oxford, spells in local papers and then the Times, followed by a fast rise up the ranks of the Telegraph, led to the editorship of the Spectator in 1999. Under his bumbling but shrewd rule, the magazine was selling more copies than ever before (with a circulation of 70,000), and was widely considered to be a lively read with a sharp sense of humour which leant it appeal beyond its right wing political base The Boris phenomenon appeared unstoppable. Until nine months ago scarcely a cloud had darkened the Johnson horizon. Ha....ha....ha," one senses that his ataraxia is not as "complete and total" as he says it is.
"It will not be deemed an act of disloyalty to go and see it." He claims to feel "eirenic", "stoic", and even "ataraxic" (serenely indifferent) to this gross betrayal by his theatre critics; although when he adds sarcastically, "I'm sure it will be a thoroughly good lark. No wonder he is disinclined to go. "I'm certainly issuing no instructions to staff about it," says Boris, over coffee in his comfortably shambolic office at the magazine. Blunkett had to resign as Home Secretary, Liddle's marriage ended, and Boris was sacked from the Tory front bench. The liaisons which inspired the play include those between the magazine's married publisher, Kimberly Quinn, and David Blunkett; Boris, who is also married and is a father of four, and Petronella Wyatt (a former deputy editor of the Spectator); and the then married columnist Rod Liddle and the Spec's receptionist, Alicia Munckton. Despite its being performed at the King's Head Theatre in Islington, not far from where he lives, Boris Johnson has no intention of attending the play. "I don't know whether I'll have time to catch it before it closes," he says dryly. This is possibly because Who's the Daddy?, by the Spec's theatre critics Toby Young and Lloyd Evans, delves into history that Johnson hopes will soon be "wiped from the slate of memory" by "the blessed sponge of amnesia".
