Chip

"My ambition silicon chip has been programmed to try to scramble up this ladder, so I do feel a kind of sense that I have got to."

Boris describing his political ambitions, November 2005.

Hillary

"I want Hillary Clinton to be president"

Boris, on his blog,November 2007

Fox

"This is the Government that promised to build a New Britain, that told us that things could only get better, and what was their salient commitment to the nation yesterday, apart from some hoary old bilge about drunken yobbery? It was to pick on a small group of a few thousand eccentrics who like to potter around the countryside on their horses, endlessly breaking their collarbones, and to tell them that whatever they're doing, they mustnt.

This is government of the fox, for the fox, by the fox."

Boris , on the fox hunting ban.

Shakespeare

"They stared back at me, open-mouthed, and the longer I churned the air, and the more sweat ran down my brow, the clearer it was that not a single concept had penetrated the vast anti-magnetic force field of their indifference."

Boris , on teaching Shakespeare to a class of Australian 16 year olds, April 2005.

Kilroy

"She has succumbed to the charms of Robert Kilroy-Silk, he of the Aztec chiselled chin and skin the colour of marmalade."

Boris on Joan Collins supporting UKIP, June 2004

Essay

"Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another".

Boris criticising GCSE coursework, in the Daily Telegraph, May 12th 2005

"I look at these people in Washington, and I ask myself whether I trust them to embark on such a lunatically risky venture, and in the words of Amy Winehouse I say no, no, no."

Boris on War with Iran.

Rabbit

"Out of the corner of his eye he can see David Cameron accepting the acclaim of his party, and the vox pops of the swing voters announcing that they have been won over. He turns it off at last, and a silence falls in the study, broken only by the soft, rabbit-like munching of cuticles."

Boris on Gordon Brown, Daily Telegraph, October 4th, 2007

Sniff

"I did sniff him later on, and though there was an aroma of hot cassock he didn't seem notably drunk."


Boris on the Bishop of Southwark, in The Spectator, January, 2007.

Mouth

"Suddenly my mood changed; suddenly I felt a sense of desolation and morosity that we had lost Tony Blair, and I can tell you the exact moment when I caught the bug and joined the national mourning. It was the moment Gordon Brown opened his mouth."

Boris on Tony Blair stepping down as PM, June 28, 2007

Piglet

"There comes a moment in every Prime Minister's Questions when Tony Blair seems to wriggle off the hook. Houdini slips his chains. The greased piglet darts through the ring."

Boris on Tony Blair, March 2007

Schmaltz

"It was like being drowned in molasses. It was like being hosed in treacle. I was lying in a state of after-lunch torpor while the eight-year-old was playing and replaying her favourite track, and through the door it stole, and up the bed and into my ear until it filled the fjords of my brain with such glutinous aspartame-flavoured schmaltz that at last I could take it no more and cried: Enough!!"


Boris, on hearing the music of James Blunt

Hat

"Will I throw my hat into the ring? It depends on what kind of ring it is and what kind of hat I have in my hand."

Boris when asked by the Oxford Mail if he will stand for leader of the Conservative Party.

Cheeseburger

"I'm kicking off my diet with a cheeseburger - whatever Jamie Oliver says, McDonald’s are incredibly nutritious and, as far as I can tell, crammed full of vital nutrients and rigid with goodness."

Boris while campaiging at McDonald's in Botley, Oxford, May 2005.