A Back Boris leaflet has arrived through our front door. Needless to say it hasn’t changed our minds and forced us to delete the StopBoris.org web site.

It has, however, left us slightly confused about Boris’s history, with respect to the London origins he appears so keen to play up in the face of two leading rival candidates who each scored ten out of ten in thelondonpaper’s ‘Bow Bells rating’ today (Boris scored six; saved from being last only by Siân Berry’s five).

According to this leaflet, Boris loves London because “It is the city of my childhood and adolescence. I have spent most of my working life here.” Elsewhere, the leaflet fills in a bit of his background as follows:

He was born in 1964 in New York and was educated at primary school in Camden, before winning scholarships to Eton and Oxford University.

This makes no mention of his time at the European School in Brussels, where Boris “spent some of his formative years”, according to David Cameron. (A convenient omission when aiming to appeal to Europhobes, perhaps.)

Wikipedia, which is obviously not authoritative, but provides the only independent biographical information I’ve got, says:

Johnson was born in New York and educated at the European School in Brussels, Ashdown House and then at Eton College, where he was a King’s Scholar, and read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Brackenbury scholar, and President of the Oxford Union.

Ashdown House is in East Sussex, Eton College in Windsor and, well, I think you know where Oxford is. So where’s this Camden primary school? And how did he find time for London to be “the city of [his] childhood and adolescence” in between attending all these places that weren’t in London?

While at StopBoris.org we’re not accustomed to writing things without bringing an anti-Boris perspective to bear, this is a genuine enquiry for an explanation from anyone in the know. Is Boris overstating his ‘Londoner’ credentials, or are we overlooking something?

For the record, I think people choose to be Londoners - they don’t have to be born here to be one, and indeed some people are born here and choose to move away, no longer wishing to be Londoners in the same way. But we are interested in any examples of Boris putting out dishonest information in his campaign, even if this is nothing like as serious as the outright lie about crime being put out by his team outside the hustings last night.

This entry was posted on Thursday 3 April 2008 at 19.45 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under Personal life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.