Boris Johnson's heroes

This week, Boris Johnson published The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. It tells the story of a journalist, wit, orator, plump pleasure-lover and veteran politician who yearns for decades to become Prime Minister. After a helter-skelter career crammed with setbacks and blunders, Churchill finally achieves his dream — and achieves supersonic greatness, too.

Boris suggests that Churchill saw himself as the greatest man in the greatest empire on Earth, and therefore the greatest man on Earth; perhaps even the ‘greatest man in the history of the world’.

What modern politician could possibly hope to emulate such a titan? Boris probably has a pretty good answer.

It’s not the first time the Mayor has hero-worshipped someone built in his own image. Over the years, Boris has amassed quite a collection of pin-ups who reflect his own characteristics and aspirations…

Pericles

Boris’ hero of heroes is the general who ruled Athens in the fifth century BC, at the height of Ancient Greece’s power and sophistication. The Mayor even has a bust of Pericles, complete with the famous dolichocephalic skull (it means ‘long-headed’, as Classics buff Boris will tell you) in his office in City Hall.

It isn’t hard to see the parallels between Boris and Pericles, a terrific speechifier with an eye for the Athenian ladies, who ruled over the most famous city in the world. The Athenians even made the wise decision to build their own version of

Boris Island by deserting the old, congested Phaleron harbour and moving to a new superport at Piraeus.More than anything, Pericles was an election-winner — year after year, he was voted in as Athenian leader, from 461-429 BC. Surely 32 years in Downing Street would be enough, even for Boris?

Ulrika Jonsson

When this fellow blonde bombshell passed on her disco-dancing skills to Boris, he was suitably dazzled. She was, he said, ‘a bit like a nymph descending from Parnassus or Olympus’. Boris is a self-confessed admirer of the female form. As he told Piers Morgan of Victoria Beckham: ‘I stood behind Posh in a ski queue and saw the tattoos on her bum. I like her.’

Keith Richards

In 2010, Boris made an urgent plea for the lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones to be given a knighthood, like the band’s lead singer, Sir Mick Jagger. Boris has hero-worshipped ‘Keef’ for 35 years, ever since, at a party as a teenager, the future Mayor danced on a chest of drawers and smashed several chairs as he pogoed to ‘Start Me Up’. As Boris has written: ‘It was Keith I pathetically aimed to emulate at the age of about 16 when I bought a pair of tight purple cords (a sheen of sweat appears on my brow as I write these words) and tried with fat and fumbling fingers to plink out ‘Satisfaction’ on a borrowed guitar; and my abysmal failure to become a rock star only deepened my hero-worship.’

PG Wodehouse

Evelyn Waugh said of Wodehouse: ‘One has to admire a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.’ Boris pumps out those Wodehousian one-liners with apparent ease: among them the ‘giant hormonal valve’ that opened up our souls during the Olympics to a wave of happiness, and the ‘charismatic megafauna in the Serengeti’, as he referred to London’s new double-deckers. His double act, addressing a brick at this year’s Tory Conference, was a great example of the type.