Boris Johnson racked up £4000 in parking fines as a motoring correspondent

Boris Johnson apparently racked up £4,000 in parking fines at the cost of the magazine he worked for as a motoring correspondent, his former editor has revealed.

Dylan Jones, who was the editor for Condé Nast magazine GQ for 20 years until he left the role last year, recalled how in May 1999 he had lunch with Johnson at Le Caprice where he offered him a job.

While Jones noted he thought Johnson - who went on to become UK prime minister - "could give Jeremy Clarkson a run for his money," he didn't quite anticipate the number of parking tickets Johnson would get at the company's expense.

"There soon appeared to be something of a problem, however, as the managing editor started to get sent rather a lot of parking tickets," Jones wrote in The Sunday Times.

Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

“And when I say a lot, I mean a lot; in Boris’s own words, they started accumulating ‘like drifting snow on the windshield’.

Johnson worked for GQ for over a decade, and Jones even managed to calculate the parking fines he accumulated during this time, claiming he "had cost us about £4,000 in parking tickets."

However, Jones - who was awarded an OBE in 2013 for services to the publishing and fashion industries - felt that it was worth paying the fines and added: "But then he’d also written more than a hundred incredibly funny motoring columns, so I figured it was worth it."

Although Johnson acquired plenty of parking tickets, Jones noted how he "interestingly" never received any speeding tickets.

"And I’ve got a pretty good idea why,” Jones wrote.

“When the cars were delivered to his house in Islington, the car company always made a note of the mileage, something that is standard practice. The mileage would also be noted when they came to pick them up again. And on more than one occasion — OK, on many, many, many occasions — the mileage was precisely the same. So I leave you to draw your own conclusions.”

Recently, Johnson has faced pressure over the Partygate scandal after he was fined by police for breaking the rules during the first lockdown by attending a Downing Street party.

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.