Hold the presses, this is a world exclusive. A Boris ex I sat next to last week gave me the scoop: he is absent-minded, disorganised and drops wine on sofas. The ex in question was Petronella Wyatt and we were at a lunch Rupert Hambro gave for Conrad Black. There were lotsa big hitters there, including Pa Johnson.

La Wyatt is a good girl, and she did have a bit of a rough time with Mr B, but she’s been grand where cashing in is concerned. Despite non-stop offers by the lowlifes that pass as journalists nowadays, she has refused them all. Ladies do not spill the beans, especially not for moolah. The offers would have tempted many so-called lassies I know, but not this Hungarian minx. Good for you, kid. You put the Kardashian and Hilton clans to shame.

Petronella did not take the advice I gave her, which is a shame. It would have been a real electoral winner. I told her that she should accept the highest offer, then sit down with a large piece of cardboard and an industrial pen, draw a life-sized picture of Boris’s willy — 14 inches with a vast circumference — and declare that his organ is far larger even than that of Superman. For any of you young whippersnappers who have never heard of Superman, he was the legendary star of a sex show in Havana, BC Cuba. As college boys, we paid 80 cents to see his act (I remember a braggart friend of mine saying on our way out of that ghastly place that he was not impressed). Such was his fame — infamy really — that Superman was included in The Godfather Part II.

Needless to say, Wyatt did not take my advice and she is the poorer for it. And Boris is probably breathing easier. It would certainly have taken Brexit off the front pages. I can see the headlines, even in the Telegraph: ‘From Supermac to Superman!’

I am surprised that Iain Duncan Smith, a very good man, is against an electoral pact with Nigel Farage, one that would guarantee victory. But sometimes people on the inside fail to see the obvious. Boris has either to prorogue or go up north with Nigel, where the good people voted Leave and were screwed by the unholy alliance of Eurotrash bureaucrats and the Hammond–Bercow axis.

But back to the aforementioned lunch: I had a brief chat with my first Spectator proprietor, Henry Keswick, or Sir Henry as he is today, and told him the following story. It was 42 years ago, and Jenny Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul’s wife and Alexander Chancellor’s assistant, rang and told me I’d better get down to Doughty Street and fast. Henry, tai-pan of Jardine Matheson, wanted a word. I was free to write wild stuff back then, so on my way there I tried to think of whom I had insulted and why. Once in the editor’s office, Henry got straight to the point. My father’s firm National Shipping had chartered a supertanker from Jardine’s and then broken the contract. Would I ring the office and have someone speak to Henry? The tai-pan wanted to settle, an everyday occurrence in shipping. Well, I was told in no uncertain terms by one of Dad’s chief executives not to get involved, and we ended up paying more in penalties than if we had stuck to the contract under a collapsing market.

When my father heard what had happened — a little bird told him — he went ape. He decided the executive needed employment elsewhere. We had 20 supertankers that ran up to 2.5 million tons. Jardine’s had 500,000 employees and knew how to play tough. After all, they had turned most of China into an opium den back in the good old days. Henry did not remember the details but we had a good laugh about it.

That very evening I briefly sat next to the loveliest, most sublime girl in Britain, Sophie Windsor, wife of Freddie, and also met her father, who is an old Corfu hand and remembers the Ionian islands before the developers and the tourists put them to the sword. All those European precious jewels have gone: Venice, Florence, Rome, Zante — my island — Corfu. You name it, well-off prols have ruined it. It is the same everywhere. Universities of great renown and learning have turned into politically correct, race-obsessed places where one either plays along and submits or is shown the door by racial vigilantes.

Civilisation is in terminal decline as far as free thought is concerned. A self-satisfied mandarinate leads a proletariat that is ever demanding of more for less, and those who resist the blackmail are instantly excluded by Big Brother, who uses the media to spread the word of who is in and who is out. Trump, Orban, Salvini, Boris and Murdoch are painted with the same brush (fascists) by unelected hacks working for lotsa moolah paid by quiet types like the Sulzberger gang, the Newhouse lot, and the Guardian types who run the networks.

Once upon a time, self-determination was considered the single highest goal. No longer. A robust sense of individual identity is no longer acceptable. We are now one, they tell me. I say shove it. See you at the Speccie parties this week.