Secretsquirrel1
If I were having a dinner party and could have either BJ or KS, I’d definitely invite Boris. Say what you will about his politics but he’s got so much charisma and I bet he’d be hilarious.
You might not find it quite as enjoyable as you think it might be. Unless you're the right class, of course...
This has been floating around social media for quite a while now:
www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2021/02/working-class-boy-balliol-bar-and-encounter-young-boris-johnson
I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a post from someone I do not know in real life, who quoted a 400-word post from someone else I know even less, a man called Damian Furniss, a writer and health and social care worker based in Devon. It described his time at Oxford, where, he writes, he encountered David Cameron and Boris Johnson. He confesses to quite liking Cameron, whom he describes as a laid-back slacker into cheroots and prog rock, and with the memorable line: “Even when I sabotaged his college beagle pack he took it in good humour.” (When someone sabotages my beagle pack, I hold the grudge for decades.)
But when he gets to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson the tone changes. He met Johnson, he writes, in the Balliol College bar on the eve of his interview. Johnson – halfway through his college “career” and three years older than the writer – was with a group of cronies. Bear in mind that Furniss was a working-class rural boy with a stammer. He imagined that Johnson would act as a kind of ambassador for the college. Instead, he alleges, Johnson’s “piss-taking was brutal. In the course of the pint I felt obliged to finish he mocked my speech impediment, my accent, my school, my dress sense, my haircut, my background, my father’s work as farm worker and garage proprietor, and my prospects in the scholarship interview I was there for.”
