Imagine a Republican mayor of New York talking like this-

‘At the moment I am like some underwater sea creature, a gigantic coelenterate, sucking everything in, and later on I am going to start expelling.’ (It turns out that even Boris’s own staff can’t understand him all the time. When I ask them later what a coelenterate is, they’re unsure and suggest he can be prone to making up words.

Then I discover he was, accurately, referring to a family of deep-sea invertebrates.)

‘It’s going to take me some time to come up with a complete theory of urban civilisation but I am sure I will. There is so much to do, so much to do. This job gluts the appetite for power. It doesn’t leave much time for anything else. ’

London's Conservative Party mayor, Boris Johnson, from a rollicking Daily Mail interview.