And obviously the party machine starts to think he’s got to resign and the news of this is brought to Churchill in his study in Chartwell. Some Tory cabinet minister is caught on a park bench at 6 o’clock in the morning in February with a guardsman, which is a total disgrace. His gift for language was so incredible…The great story about when the chief whip comes to tell him about some minister who’s disgraced himself on a park bench. And he shouts out, ‘Tell the Lord Privy Seal that I’m sealed in the privy, and I can only deal with one shit at a time’…That turns out, to my amazement, to be true. And I think it was my mother who used to tell us jokes about Churchill. You know, the famous one about when he’s in the lavatory and he’s told, someone comes to him and, the Lord Privy Seal has got a message for him. He would recite some of the famous lines from great wartime speeches. You write that when you were growing up, your father would recite Churchill quotes. The sheer scale of his achievement and in particular, in being the only man who could possibly have saved Britain and indeed western civilization in May 1940 from a catastrophe that would have disgraced humanity. In The Churchill Factor, you quote a source as saying that Winston Churchill was the greatest Briton of all time. We spoke with Johnson about Churchill’s legacy and his new book, The Churchill Factor. So when Churchill’s estate asked Johnson to write a biography to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death, the mayor agreed.

That is, his parents would often quote the British Bulldog around the house. London Mayor Boris Johnson grew up with Winston Churchill.

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