Boris - he needs no surname - is not perfect. But he has his good points:

1. He is not Ken Livingstone.
2. He is intelligent and well-educated.
3. He likes a laugh.
4. He invented the word "bemerded".
5. He puts his foot in it. I can sympathise.
6. He helped save Ancient History A-Level.
7. He has a nice voice.
8. He knows what is wrong with Islam and has said so, although he recently backtracked for electoral purposes.
9. He is unpredictable.
10. He hates bendy buses.

He also admires Pericles. Red Ken probably thinks Pericles rhymes with clericals. From The Telegraph:

By next weekend, Boris Johnson could be the new Mayor of London. It is a prospect that astonishes the many people who wrote him off as a clown, prompting them to ask in a bewildered tone whether Boris has suddenly become "serious".

As his biographer, and someone who has known him for 20 years, I would argue that Boris always has been serious. He has made people laugh more, perhaps, than any politician of our times (not much competition there, you may say). But this does not mean his Merry England conservatism is shallow or lacking in intellectual roots.

His jokes owe much to his father, Stanley, but on whom will Boris model himself if he becomes mayor?

With most of our politicians, confined as they are by their knowledge of only one language and only one time - the present - the best one could hope for would be an admiring reference to what Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg have done in New York.

Instead, this classicist takes us back to the first flowering of democratic politics in Athens: his hero is Pericles, leader of that city state in its golden age in the fifth century BC.

As far as I can see, none of the politicians and pundits who wonder whether Boris is "serious" has troubled to glance at Pericles.

[...]

Like the ancient Athenians, Boris is uncensorious about what people get up to in private, but determined that the law must be respected.

His plan to stamp out rowdy behaviour by hooligan children on the top deck of buses is not just some shoot-from-the-hip wheeze, but an expression of his deep understanding that liberty and civilisation depend on the rule of law.

Since Boris has shown that he is both willing and able to learn from the past, perhaps he should turn his sharp brain to the history of Islam. For someone who can read Greek, William St Clair Tisdall's clear, precise English should be a doddle.