You're a nasty piece of artwork, aren't you? Boris Johnson erotic sketch is unearthed

 
27 March 2013

In Monday night’s documentary Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, the Mayor told interviewer Michael Cockerell that as well as wanting to be prime minister, he also dreamt of being a great artist. So the Londoner has now unearthed one of Boris’s early endeavours, a drawing he submitted to the Erotic Review in 1998, just before he became editor of The Spectator.

Boris’s sketch is meant to depict Lady Godiva on a horse. He faxed through the picture, recalls Rowan Pelling, who was then editor of the Erotic Review and is now a columnist on the Daily Telegraph, for a competition in which readers were asked to guess which journalist named Johnson had drawn it — Frank, Paul or Boris.

Those with a critical eye may note that Boris didn’t care to give Lady Godiva long tresses to preserve her modesty. Furthermore, the horse “looks more like a donkey”, observes Pelling.

“I’d like to think we had a large and priceless collection of Boris Johnson’s kruptadia in our archives,” says the current editor Jamie Maclean, but sadly it isn’t so. “We thought it Chagall-esque at the time, but now I look at it again I think it’s closer to James Thurber.”

Boris’s mother, Charlotte Fawcett, is a talented painter but my colleague Brian Sewell doesn’t believe the talent has passed down the bloodline. “This picture really has no artistic merit,” says the Standard’s esteemed art critic. “And it isn’t in any way erotic.”

The Londoner didn’t ask Eddie Mair what he thought, lest he rudely called it a nasty piece of artwork.

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