I hired Boris Johnson to be my motoring correspondent in May 1999. I took him to Le Caprice for lunch and offered him $1.20 a word for a monthly 1,000-word column in the magazine I’d just become editor of, GQ. We sat at the corner table, the one Princess Diana always used to have, and as Boris furiously made his way through the bang bang chicken, he accepted like a shot.
“What a wizard idea,” he said, looking, rather alarmingly, like Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films. “This is going to be a lot of tremendous fun.”
