BREX FACTOR: The lovers’ guide to Boris Johnson

Why do women consistently pick the ninny who thinks it’s OK to say ‘picaninny’?

Poor Carrie Symonds isn’t the first to fall for his dubious charms. According to the latest polls, around one million Britons sweet-talked by Boris into Brexit now regret it.

Demand is growing for a morning-after June 23, 2016, pill but the fact remains that with his rapier wit, his rakish charm and his rabid lies, Johnson managed to get 17.4million of our fellow citizens to get into bed with him. They woke the next morning with fuzzy heads, just in time to see him doing the walk of shame with Michael Gove.

In the prescient words of a 2014 tweet from Guido Fawkes and Sun journalist Harry Cole, who dated Symonds until last year: ‘Boris has been consistently underestimated … do so again at your peril.’

Given his suspiciously clumsy way with words, what could Johnson’s favourite chat-up lines be? ‘Are you wearing a suicide vest, because your chest looks pretty explosive from here?’ Or ‘your father must be a bank robber, like those Muslim women remind me of, because someone stole the stars from the sky and put them in your eyes’?

What about, ‘know why you’re different from Barack Obama? I’m not criticising you for moving your bust’. If I were Symonds, I’d be worried. And not just because she’s nicknamed Apples, making her susceptible to being smashed up by an irate Kirstie Allsopp.

The problem is Johnson’s nodding acquaintance with the concept of loyalty. And you don’t need to ask Marina Wheeler, or Petronella Wyatt, or Helen Macintyre, or Anna Fazackerley, or Allegra Mostyn-Owen, about this.

Johnson is on £250,000 a year for writing a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph. This one he turned in for last Monday’s paper, on stamp duty and capital gains tax, was tedious in the extreme.

Just 24 hours earlier he’d penned a far more controversial one for the Mail On Sunday, the paper which sacked HIS OWN SISTER last week. And in what some thought was a controlled leak, it was the Sun which got the story of his divorce.

You don’t have to be Masters and Johnson to surmise that this falls into a pattern of – for want of a better word – shafting. In his desire to be the next one, Johnson has shafted the last two prime ministers of Britain. He shafted us all when he sexed up the benefits of Brexit and told us it would be economic Viagra. He’s probably promised Marina £350m a week divorce settlement.

At least our shafting is just over Brexit, however. It could be much, much worse.

So be careful out there, and don’t expect a DVD of I’m A Celebrity 2017 if Boris Johnson ever offers you a look at his old chap.