Quote of the day

From The Guardian (here):

“Do you think the foreign secretary’s intervention was helpful?” asked Marr towards the end of his interview with [Amber] Rudd on his Sunday morning BBC1 politics show. Rudd looked stoney faced. Probably because she was doing her best not to laugh. Since when had Boris done anything that might be described as helpful?

“Boris has an irrepressible enthusiasm,” she replied, choosing her words carefully. She must have felt like one of Prince Andrew’s teachers trying to find something nice to say about him in a school report. You could hardly tell the Queen that her favourite son was a bit thick, rude and badly behaved, so irrepressible enthusiasm would have to do as code.

Thus neatly hitting two birds with one stone.
  
And there is more:

Really, though, there is no mystery to the foreign secretary’s outburst. What defeats most politicians, in common with boxers, is time. For years, Johnson has been described as the Young Turk. Now, aged 53, he is merely part-Turkish.

...

It has been argued that Johnson’s long essay is low on substance and evades the gritty drudgery of deal-making. But that is the whole point. No senior British politician in living memory has believed so absolutely in the power of brio, charisma and will. He is the love child of Nietzsche and Wodehouse.