The tragedy of the stooge is that even if he thinks this through, he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.

From an essay entitled "Politics" on his campaign for the Oxford Union presidency, published in 1988 in The Oxford Myth (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), a book edited by Rachel Johnson, his sister, as quoted in Andrew Gimson Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson London: Simon & Schuster (2012 edition), p. 91