Like many people, I was startled this week by reports of Boris Johnson’s confession that he likes to spend time absorbed in handicraft, doing his bit for the environment by recycling empty wine boxes into model buses, peopled with happy faces.
Are we sure it’s not a joke? If given all we’ve seen is a doodle of a London bus, it is hard to imagine him crouched on the floor like a child cutting up wooden boxes, pouring out the stresses of the day.
Indeed, I have good reason to believe that I am right and that his model bus admission may have been an elaborate ruse. For I have seen Boris in the very act of creation. I know he loves painting; and, as a professional portrait and landscape painter, I can confirm that he is more skilled than you might think.
Like many people, I was startled this week by reports of Boris Johnson’s confession that he likes to spend time absorbed in handicraft. Pictured is Celia Montague's portrait of Boris Johnson
Over the years, I have met Boris at the odd book launch in London, and talked to him at some length on two occasions after he agreed to let me paint his portrait. That is, once he had established he wouldn’t have to buy the painting!
He has two charming physical characteristics. One is his voice — a lovely, warm chest voice with a great bubble of laughter and enjoyment in it.
The other is a quirk of the mouth that makes him look both shy and mischievous at the same time.
In the middle of his upper lip is a little protrusion, a very slight point — like the beak of a baby bird, which pushes down over his bottom lip when he’s feeling uncertain or playing for time, usually with a word beginning with ‘w’. In this case, ‘Waah . . . would I have to buy it?’
He was Mayor of London at the time and so I arrived at City Hall loaded with my gear, and waited about a quarter of an hour beyond the appointed time, listening involuntarily to some very intense, high-energy exchanges between the people in his outer office.
I dithered between canvas sizes, while Boris enthused over the colours provisionally mixed on my palette and looked as though he positively ached to be doing what I thought I was about to do. Pictured is Boris's self portrait
The tension began to affect me, so I put up my easel with much banging of my hammer upon the butterfly nuts. A minute of appalled silence followed. When I was at last shown into Boris’ office, I found him sitting all alone at the far end of a long conference table, pen in hand, before a huge pile of individual title pages for his forthcoming biography of Churchill. He had been tasked by the publisher with signing them, and very tedious it looked.
He came forward to greet me and we had a jovial conversation about all sorts of things: The Spectator magazine he used to edit, Latinate words, his biography, the importance of young people knowing their country’s history (he later told me the Churchill book was written with the intelligent 14 to 15-year-old reader in mind), and the ambience of his office.
Dauntingly lit by fluorescent strip lights, it was an austere board room, with a huge map of London, and a wall of bookshelves, leavened with framed photos and one or two personal things, including, tucked away high on the top shelf, a cartoonish Viking-style helmet with a love heart and the word ‘Prankster’ written across it.
A large, dramatic landscape by Boris’s mother, the painter Charlotte Johnson Wahl, of the view from his windows hung on one wall.
He told me he had also been given a large female nude, to cheer things up further, but because the model’s hand was suggestively placed, the painting had been dismissed to the darkness of a cupboard by Boris’ formidable Yorkshire assistant, Ann, with the verdict: ‘It’s disgusting...!’
Anyway, there I stood with my easel, a clutch of canvasses of different sizes, and a palette, viewing the lighting with dismay and wondering where to put him and what I could achieve in what was left of the two hours promised.
I dithered between canvas sizes, while Boris enthused over the colours provisionally mixed on my palette
