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autumn, he now set off on a gap year abroad.

    He spent the year teaching English and Latin at Geelong Grammar School, Australia’s answer to Eton – and now with annual fees of A$27,700 (around £18,000), the country’s most exclusive school. This choice was another demonstration of the Johnsonian fondness for the wealthiest and best (no sign of building latrines for starving Africans). All four Johnson sons attended Eton. Five out of six of Stanley’s children were to go to Oxford – it is what he says makes him proudest of his offspring. Only Julia, the younger, more rebellious daughter, broke out and went to Cambridge before giving up after less than a month and fleeing to University College London. This cannot have been an easy move and it’s rarely alluded to by the family. ‘Oh, it’s alright,’ her mother Jenny reassured a close friend afterwards, ‘Julia got her First.’
    In Australia, Boris was set to work on Geelong’s famous Timbertop campus – a year-long outward bound course for its Year Nine boys and girls, once attended by HRH Prince Charles and set in the wilderness of the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. Not only was he expected to teach the scions of Australia’s and New Zealand’s wealthiest and most eminent families, but also to help maintain its 325-hectare site of bush and farming land, 2km from the nearest road. In return, he received pocket money, plus board and lodging. Most of the 25 teachers and 40 assistants of various sorts lived on campus, where no television was allowed, access to phones limited and alcohol strictly forbidden. The teenage students in their care were expected to confront, ‘the challenges of something like a man’s life under conditions they have to conquer’. 13 Heating came from wood-burning boilers – and if not enough wood was collected, the residents (including the students themselves) went cold. It was a fairly tough regime designed to put backbone into the Antipodean ruling classes.
    As ever, Boris – who happened to be the only non-Aussie assistantin his time – made an impact. An extract from the Corian, the school magazine, calls him both Boris and Alexander, and notes, ‘he will, in particular, be remembered for his inimitably stolid style of tractor-driving. How such a rustic character could also have such a ready wit and such facility with Latin always remained a mystery.’ 14 Master and Chaplain of Treetops was the Australian Anglican priest, Peter Thomson – a powerful and charismatic preacher, whom Tony Blair had met at Oxford and found to be ‘spellbinding’ (it was under Thomson’s influence that Blair developed his faith in Christianity). Back in Australia, he also impressed Boris with his Aussie directness and charm, although he in turn remembered the Etonian on his team as being a ‘bit wild.’ 15
    During his gap year – although presumably not at Timbertop – Boris claims to have dabbled with a few illegal substances, such as the odd joint. Throughout adult life, he has always treated the subject of his drug taking – like most other serious matters – as a bit of a joke, with variations depending on the audience. In an interview with a women’s magazine he claimed that yes, he did try drugs, but no, not all seriously, and anyway the illegal substances around in his youth were ‘not the same as what the kids are having now. My drug-taking past is pathetic.’ 16 However, in a more laddish encounter with Piers Morgan in GQ in 2007, he was more boastful of taking cocaine at the age of 19 at Oxford: ‘I remember it vividly. And it achieved no pharmacological, psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.’ 17 And for comic effect on the BBC quiz show, Have I Got News for You in 2005, the story was, ‘I think I was once given cocaine, but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.’ 18
    Is this Boris’s way of quashing any suggestion that he has not experienced ‘real