What’s that, you say? Boris making a flippant comment that gets him into hot water? Really?….
Yes, BoJo has been at it again, dismissing the £250,000 annual income he receives from writing for the Daily Telegraph as “chicken feed”.   “I don’t see why on a Sunday morning I shouldn’t knock off an article – if someone wants to pay me for that article then that’s their lookout…” Boris told the BBC.
It turns out that the Telegraph contract is worth significantly more to Bozza than the £140,000 he earns for his “day job” as Mayor of London. Johnson claimed that he writes as a means of relaxation anyway, and in a slightly bizarre defence of these earnings he told the Beeb “I write extremely fast”. (Here at Boriswatch Towers we also write extremely fast but it doesn’t appear to be earning us a quarter of a million smackers every year….)
In Boris’ defence, he should be commended for donating a significant part of these earnings to charity – in excess of £50,000 a year.
Liberal Democrat spokesperson Norman Baker isn’t impressed. “This is an enormous amount of money and for Boris Johnson to dismiss it as ‘chicken feed’ shows just how out of touch he and the Conservative party are from the reality of life for millions of Londoners struggling to make ends meet in the depths of a recession.”
Tory leader David Cameron is also likely to be unimpressed having ordered all Conservatives to give up their second jobs by December in order to fight the General Election campaign. Boris, however, isn’t sure if this rule applies to him – “Well I’m not a member of his shadow cabinet and I’d like to see what the detail of that is.”
£250,000 buys over two hundred tons of organic chicken feed and so here at Boriswatch we hope that he either has a big garage, or an awful lot of chickens….