“DO you think this country would ever elect a buffoon as Prime Minister?”, I once asked Boris Johnson, many years before he ran for the highest office in the land.
“Have I over-buffooned it?” he chuckled. “It’s very difficult to be both, I agree.”
“I don’t really buy into this buffoon thing,” I replied. “I think you play it all up to make money and charm the public, when underneath lurks a calculating, ambitious and very serious brain.”
“That’s very kind of you, Piers,” Boris responded, “but you must consider the possibility that underneath it all there really may lurk a genuine buffoon, and that may be why I am finally prohibited from getting very much higher because it may be the psychological effort needed to haul myself into a more serious, gaffe-free zone proves too difficult.”
Watch Piers' explosive interviews on his Uncensored YouTube channel
Incredibly, despite never hauling himself into a gaffe-free zone, Britain’s biggest buffoon did indeed become Prime Minister. And, far more predictably, it was a total disaster, culminating in him resigning in disgrace after breaking his own rules and lying to Parliament about it.
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I assumed, or should I say hoped, that would be the last we saw of the unkempt, blathering, fork-tongued, shambolic parody of a human being in public life.
But I should have known that such shamelessness knows no bounds.
Boris is now back, with a book called Unleashed, which is an ironic title given that most of us would very much like him to remain tightly leashed, and preferably muzzled too.
Unsurprisingly, the book is a perfect reflection of his time as Prime Minister — a disingenuous, self-aggrandising, lazy load of old tosh.
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It glosses over his many failings, pumps up his few successes, and is clearly designed to be a platform for him to make a glorious comeback like his hero Sir Winston Churchill.
But Boris is no Churchill.
In fact, he’s more like Churchill the dopey, hairy bulldog from the insurance adverts who says yes to virtually everything he’s asked.
Boris has done that throughout his scandalous professional and personal life — without a thought or care for the consequences, or for keeping his word.
And as he has been doing the media rounds for his book, his interviews have merely served to remind the world what a dishevelled, chaotic, dissembling shifty-eyed buffoon he really is.
He smirks, he japes, he ducks, he dives, he spews long words or Latin phrases hoping nobody knows what any of it means, he tells endless brazen fibs, and he desperately tries to avoid personal accountability for anything.
Boris once infamously ran into a large fridge to avoid being interviewed by me and Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain, after promising to do so.
‘You big girl’s blouse.’
He devotes a whole, typically hyperbolic, page of his book to the incident, saying: “We were surrounded like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the end of the movie, the cameras of the nation’s breakfast TV shows were trained on our fridge, like the rifles of the Bolivian army.
“We emerged from our refrigerated refuge amid national derision, and an incontinent Piers Morgan denounced me as a coward and a fridge hider.”
Yes, I did, Boris — because you were a coward who hid in a fridge rather than honour your promise.
And nothing’s changed.
On Wednesday, some of my Piers Morgan Uncensored team jumped Boris as he arrived in our building to do an interview with Times Radio.
They asked him if he would do an interview with me too.
He was too busy — obviously!
They then asked if he wanted to record a video message for me instead.
He did.
“Piers, why do you never let me come on your show?” he chortled.
“You big girl’s blouse!”
Of course, as he well knows, I’ve asked him many times to come on my show, and he’s always taken the fridge-equivalent option instead.
So, even when he’s talking about interview requests, Boris can’t help lying.
Don’t get me wrong — I love a good comeback.
When Thierry Henry returned to play for Arsenal five years after leaving, and scored the winning goal against Leeds, it was magical.
But a return by Boris Johnson to No10 Downing Street would feel like the kind of magic I had to endure as a Britain’s Got Talent judge when the hapless auditionee’s tricks all went wrong.
It’s a very firm “NO” from me . . .
END OF MERRY DANCE
TWO months ago, I wrote a column hammering the Strictly snowflakes led by Amanda “PTSD” Abbington, who’ve been moaning about the beastly way the show’s professionals tried to turn their clod-footed amateur gyrations into something vaguely resembling dancing.
This triggered a lengthy message from Ms Abbington denying she’s a man-hating troll, insisting she adores men, and just “hates bullies”.
Since then, a BBC report concluded she’d endured a bit of saucy “inappropriate” banter from Giovanni Pernice, and her more serious claims were rejected.
The investigation also found she too engaged in inappropriate banter.
Sadly, none of this has stopped Ms Abbington from absurdly continuing to portray herself as a modern-day Joan of Arc.
She even told Newsnight she was relieved to get a cancer scare because it meant she could leave the show and escape Pernice’s supposedly evil clutches.
At this point, I realised there’s no depth the attention-seeking narcissist won’t plunge to in pursuit of self-pity.
It’s time to ignore her.
WHO DARES LOSES
HOW shameful that the SAS, which has so courageously faced many dangerous enemies, is now facing an existential threat from human rights lawyers.
My spleen tangibly inflamed when I learned that it’s become almost impossible for the world’s most elite fighting force to legally engage terrorists these days, and that many veterans of the regiment are being hounded with historic vexatious lawsuits after risking their lives to keep us safe.
They’ve gone from their well-earned motto of Who Dares Wins to the risibly ill-deserved reality: Who Dares Loses. It’s a sickening betrayal of our SAS heroes, past and present, and it must stop.
MARISA'S TOP JOB ON INDUSTRY
I JUST binge-watched the new third series of the brilliant BBC banking drama Industry, and it was even better than the first two.
The acting’s great – especially by Marisa Abela and new addition, Game Of Thrones star Kit Harington – and the action gripping.
But it’s the show’s refusal to depict life as anything but complicated, unpredictable and morally challenging that most appeals to me. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s a real jaw-dropping shocker, and after my initial horror and outrage, makes perfect sense.
SNOW WHITE WOKE
RACHEL ZEGLER, the stupendously woke Latina star of Disney’s new version of Snow White, insists it’s OK for her to play the part because the character’s name is not based on her skin colour but on her resilience.
This is despite the original Grimm Brothers fairytale saying the princess had “skin as white as snow”.
I wonder what Ms Zegler would have said if Daniel Craig had been cast as the lead role in Black Panther and explained that the character’s name wasn’t in fact based on his skin colour, as written in the original cartoon series, but his resilience?
DON'T STOP ME NOW
A NEW survey by cancer charity Marie Curie revealed the songs we apparently most want to listen to as we die and included predictable choices such as Sinatra’s My Way and The Best by Tina Turner.
But I’d prefer to go out to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now – “I’m having such a good time.”
Because, unlike so many whiny, miserable spoiled- brat celebrities who constantly moan about their awful lives and how unhappy they are, I absolutely love my life, and if I keeled over tomorrow, would have zero regrets about any of it.
As Bob Marley said: “Love the life you live. Live the life you love.”
HYPOCRITES
MINISTERS in the new Labour government seem to be in a competition to see which is the biggest hypocrite.
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Latest entrant is Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who declared that private schools don’t need astro pitches for sport, hours after playing hockey on one herself.
If there’s one thing worse than a hypocrite, it’s a champagne socialist hypocrite preaching the politics of envy while privately filling their boots – or in Ms Phillipson’s case playing hockey in them – with the very same privilege they profess to despise.