Have you seen Damian Furniss' description of his encounter with Johnson in 1984? Furniss had come to Balliol for an interview and was quite daunted by this. As you might expect, our Prime Minister To Be did his best to reassure him and put him at ease.
“I was a rural working-class kid with a stammer from a state school which hadn’t prepared me for the experience,” Furniss would recall in 2019.
“My session with the dons was scheduled for first thing after breakfast, meaning I was staying the night and had an evening to kill in the college bar. Johnson was propping up the bar with his coterie of acolytes whose only apparent role in life was to laugh at his jokes. Three years older than me … you’d have expected him to play the ambassador role, welcoming an aspiring member of his college … Instead, his 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. His only motivation was to amuse his posh boy mates.”
I'm not sure what's sadder. The fact that Johnson behaved like that or the fact that thousands of working class people appear to be blind to his faults, and those of the people he's surrounded himself with.