Boris Johnson has ditched his journalistic roots with proposals that could see his fellow hacks jailed for 14 years like spies

Boris Johnson was a posh-boy floppy-haired joke to many of his fellow journalists when he was ‘on the road’ for The Times and The Daily Telegraph a quarter-century-or-so ago. Many senior editors in London and their proprietors, though, rather enjoyed Boris’s bumptious bonhomie and his pithy turn of phrase, and promoted him accordingly. Mostly in a direction where writing a pithy phrase was what was required, where opinion is what counted. Not, necessarily, fact.