A long and well-documented history

Born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson — he began using “Boris” in a sort of rebranding exercise in high school — the soon-to-be-ex prime minister has a long and well-documented history both of evading the truth and of acting as if he believes himself to be exempt from the normal rules of behavior. His many years in public life — as a newspaper reporter and columnist, as the editor of an influential London political magazine, as a politician — have left a trail of witnesses to, and victims of, his slippery nature.

When he was editor of the Spectator magazine, he lied to the editor, Conrad Black, promising not to serve in Parliament while working at the magazine. (He did.) When he was first elected to Parliament, he lied to his constituents when he promised to quit his Spectator job. (He didn’t.) As a legislator, he lied to the party leader, Michael Howard, and to the news media when he publicly declared that he had not had an affair with a writer for the magazine, nor gotten her pregnant and paid for her abortion. (He had done all of that.) 

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When he was the Brussels correspondent for the right-leaning Daily Telegraph in the late 1980s, Mr. Johnson wrote highly entertaining but blatantly inaccurate articles designed to paint the European Union as a factory of petty regulation intent on stamping out British individuality — articles that helped establish an anti-Europe narrative for a generation of Conservatives and pave the way for Brexit, two decades later.

- Sarah Lyall, 'Johnson's lies worked for years, until they didn't', New York Times, 8 July 2022