It is a reminder that for a few months in 1987/8 we were graced with the presence of the man who, according to one T-shirt slogan, is now the most popular Tory in the world. The young Boris was a far cry from the average E&S hack. He favoured wide-lapelled chalkstripe suits and silk ties and hung around the newsdesk with the pained, rather bemused air of a High Court judge in a bingo hall.

Boris (Ashdown prep, Eton and Balliol College, Oxford) left university, married unhappily and after one miserable week as a management consultant, drifted with the gilded ease of the truly well-connected into a job on the Times.

And the Times sent him to Wolverhampton to learn the job. As a new biography by Andrew Gimson recalls, Boris did the working-class thing. He spent three months on the Express & Star, lodging with “a woman called Brenda” near Bilston.

Who knows how Boris’s life might have turned out if he had heeded the homespun wisdom of his landlady? At the time, his marriage to Allegra was failing. “Boris, you’ve got to treat her like porcelain,” urged Brenda, while serving up his favourite night-time snack of oven-baked meat, potatoes, cheese and butter.

Confidence

But Boris, says Gimson, was “in too much of a hurry and too full of energy and ambition to treat his fine and delicate wife with the tenderness she needed.”

But if he had boundless confidence in his own abilities, the Express & Star newsdesk had not.

In a letter to his wife written from the E&S office (in office time, presumably?), the young Boris complains that his task for the day was to write a caption for a photograph of a man drinking a pint of beer while having his hair cut.

To add to the young trainee’s unhappiness, on one night out he was grabbed by the lapel by “a belligerent social worker called Bruce” who told him not to patronise the Black Country.

His biographer added: “Some of the toughest jobs in journalism are at the very bottom, where you are given the feeble stories nobody else wants to do, and have no scope to write them in the way that might suit your talents.”

Oh, please.

The Express & Star has always encouraged talent. If Boris had been a brilliant writer, he would have been given full rein. It may be unfair to judge a man on one surviving story but his 1987 effort, concerning a lack of job applicants, is pretty dull.

After his stint in Wolverhampton it was back to the Times where Johnson displayed his amazing journalistic skills by making up quotes. He attributed them to a respected history don who happened to be his godfather, to spice up a tale about a place being discovered by archaelogists in London.

Boris’s account included “a grotesque historical error” which made his godfather a laughing stock. When the don complained, says Gimson, Boris first lied and then tried to brazen it out. He was then sacked.

The rest is history. From disgrace to editing the Spectator, on to politics and into a small but significant corner of the nation’s heart. Boris is Boris and the best may be yet to come.

But with hindsight, giving Boris nothing more risky than picture captions at the Express & Star was perhaps not such a bad idea after all.

Boris – The Rise of Boris Johnson by Andrew Gimson is published by Simon & Schuster at £17.99.

l WHATEVER happened to landlady Brenda, the probation officer or Boris Johnson’s other local contacts? If YOU remember Boris in the Black Country ring 01902 319474 or e-mail p.rhodes@expressandstar.co.uk

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