Once the stop-start tourist crowds snapping their holiday shots over Westminster Bridge have cleared, Parliament Square takes on another mood; the slightly ominous calm of police officers and towering metal detectors that solemnly guard the seat of power somehow manage to make even the steadiest of heartbeats quicken in their chests. Such a habitat seems entirely incongruous for Boris Johnson, the straw-haired fop of the Conservative Party, the man who is not afraid to write about “blacks” and a “jihad on education” on his weblog, the man whose mobile phone has gone off twice live on television and who has been lauded by Paul Merton as “the man who will lead the Conservative Party into the seventeenth century”. He is the Tory Party’s top gimmick, and thus an unsurprising choice for David Cameron’s Shadow Secretary for Higher Education. The Cambridge University Conservative Association at last year’s Societies’ Fair chose to advertise themselves by using girls in extra-short tennis skirts to distribute “I heart Boris” badges. His PA warns me against asking any “awkward questions”, tells me he is under a great deal of pressure, and cannot possibly spare me more than ten minutes. When I tell him I am from Varsity he raises a perfectly preened eyebrow, shakes his head and breathes something about slipping through the net.

But when we walk in, clearing a space through the newspapers and finding a space on a rather shabby-looking green sofa, Boris has his nose in his own book. He is “researching” a talk he has to give in an hour, “somewhere or other in North London” and hasn’t yet begun. His trademark snowy mane shows all the signs of being ruffled by his hands, never by a comb. The remains of a celebratory fruitcake is scattered on the side and among the sugary debris I can just about make out a flag of St George. He looks distracted until I tell him I wish to speak about his role in the Shadow Cabinet. Suddenly, he fixes me with an unrelenting, intense gaze and leans forward, waving his hands around and spouting ideas with typical bluster.
“We must raise the standards of all universities!” He enthuses, “We must all go higher and higher! A rising tide will lift all boats!” Inwardly, he seems to be waving a Union Jack.

Boris seems on a mission to stamp out privilege, he’s a paradox in tweeds.

Boris Johnson is, despite his novelty packaging, a paradox in tweeds. He repeats the words “social equality” whilst exuding an Etonian charm. In a recent photograph of Cameron in the jacket of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, Boris was in the background sporting one similar. The new Cameron shadow cabinet can seem less a collection of politicians leading the country to social equality and more an Old Boys’ social reunion, yet Boris seems on a mission to stamp out privilege. “We have a system in this country whereby the elite, the rulers, avail themselves of selective education, either by having the economic power to move to an area by a good school, or by using fee paying education, or by pretending to be religious and going to a church school, and yet by their laws they deprive the rest of the population, the 90 per cent who don’t use fee paying education. That is socially unjust.” And yet a social injustice Johnson himself benefited from, he admits. But if he were given ten billion pounds, he explains, he’d reform primary education. “12 per cent of children are leaving schools unable to do basic mathematics. They are never really going to catch up. The single biggest thing you could do for equality and social justice is to make sure that all children by the age of 11 get a decent education.” He pauses. “That’s how you’ll get Oxford and Cambridge, once again, to be a great engine for social mobility.” Perhaps the pause represented the convenient gap in his explanation where the middle seven years should have been.

If he cannot fight social inequalities before Oxford and Cambridge, perhaps he can help us afterwards. Why aren’t there, as a recent report has posed, enough graduate opportunities? Cue trademark spitting and huffing and the answer “Now listen here Mary, this is unbelievable. I graduated in the 80s when it was tough, [now] we have no unemployment in this country. When I started out it was Thatcher and dog-eat-dog. Come on…”

If Boris is going to give us that unsympathetic, “during the war” attitude, how can he then encourage students that a degree is worth its increased price tag, especially after Cameron’s U-turn on Top Up Fees? “It’s a risk! Everything you do is a risk! Life is a risk!” Cue intermittent arm waving. “Its overwhelmingly likely that personally it’s the right thing to do, but no one in their right mind could guarantee that this very modest investment is going to pay off. I think on the whole it will, but I can’t guarantee it.” He goes glassy-eyed as he continues and I can distinctly see the flags waving once more, this time complete with the sounds of the brass band striking up and crust-less cucumber sandwiches being unwrapped. “It is a good thing in itself, you meet lots of wonderful people, you have a chance to work on wonderful magazines and newspapers, you’ll have a thoroughly wonderful time, all sorts of initiations will happen to you, spiritual, emotional, things will happen to you which are incredibly important, you will be exposed to other people from all sorts of walks of life and you’ll learn about your country and your fellow countrymen, which is vital.”

Inwardly, he seems to be waving a Union Jack

In which case, what are we to do if we have the “spiritual experience” and not the job we might have hoped for as, wide-eyed, we filled out our UCAS forms? The solution is revealed in typical Boris fashion; “If you don’t earn £15,000 over 25 years, you don’t pay it back. Suppose I’d gone to university and then been wise enough to marry some kick-ass banker from Goldman Sachs.” Is that his advice? “Absolutely. My advice to young men these days is get your wife to become a partner in a big law firm and you won’t have to pay a penny of your fees, because you won’t [have to] earn enough to qualify.”

It is at this moment, ten minutes to the second, that his hawk-eyed assistant returns. By the end of the session, “the most pompous interview I’ve ever given” he assures me, Boris is in full flood and seems to have forgotten his assistant, his book and even the talk he is supposed to be giving in less than an hour. Forgetting seems to be a regular theme. What advice would he give to graduates seeking a career now? “Oh, I would say, I would say to them, in the words of my grandmother, ‘darling… don’t worry. Darling… what did she say?” Creepily, his assistant seems able to recall for him. “Darling, don’t worry how you’re doing, worry what you’re doing.” It is perhaps Boris Johnson’s endearing quality, and just as well for him, that he does not seem to worry at all.

Boris' Biog

1964 – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is born in New York
1986 – Graduates from Balliol College, Oxford
1987 – After a series of journalistic endeavours, Boris trades in Wolverhampton’s Express & Star for The Telegraph
1999 – Succeeds as supremo at The Spectator
2001 – Moves in on Michael Heseltine as MP for Henley.