Will Self

Ports Fest July 3

Tickets are available for Will’s talk and Q&A this Saturday online at 2-3.30pm at Ports Fest. The talk “will explore ways in which we remember the fiction we read during childhood and youth, the role of memory, and our views of facticity” and Will will also read from his latest book, Will: A Memoir.

The empty theatre of Boris Johnson

“There’s something curiously out-of-focus about the Prime Minister, isn’t there? I mean, I’ve been up close and pretty personal with him on a number of occasions, and I still can’t help seeing him with a sort of fuzzy nimbus surrounding his roly-poly outline – as if he were one of those newborn babies covered with a lot of vernix. It’s widely bruited about that his dishabille is a deliberate affectation – like Harold Wilson’s pipe-smoking. In private the Labour premier and soi-disant ‘socialist’ smoked Havanas – but can we really believe that left to his own devices Johnson’s coif becomes immaculate and his clothing sharp? Of course, Tony Blair was beautifully groomed, but it didn’t stop him trashing his entire record by getting involved in a quixotic and criminal foreign jaunt.”

Read the rest of Will’s New European column here.