"I shouldn’t really be talking to you like this." Those guilt-laden words, almost whispered down the phone many years ago could be straight out of a Mills & Boon novel.

But the deep, plummy voice at the end of the line didn’t belong to the kind of tall, dark stranger you might find in romantic fiction, but rather to a more rounded fellow with a mop of blond hair.

It was 1999. The setting was a slightly dingy staircase in a student terrace house on Plungington Road – or Plungy, as we called it – in Preston. And that phone call was a last resort.

The big assignment on my journalism post-graduate diploma was to write a profile piece on a writer whose work I admired. For me, in those early days, one byline caught my attention for his sharp one-liners and fast-paced put-downs of people in the public eye.

He was known for his reporting and snappy columns in national publications but otherwise there was little public information about my chosen subject. How time moves on when a quick Google search today unleashes thousands of column inches about the man who, like Madonna and Maggie, now needs little introduction other than his first name – Boris.

My brief back then was to research a writer and study their style for a 3,000-word profile. But we were forbidden from making personal contact.

Struggling to meet the word count based solely on an analysis of his writing, I made that sneaky phone call and explained my predicament. “You haven’t done an autobiography, have you?” I asked, already knowing the answer. And to be fair, why would he have? His response suggested he thought it was a good idea.

The person who knew him best was his mother, he declared, promptly volunteering up her telephone number without any hesitation.

Moments later, from the same bottom step, I was chatting to his mum, a lovely, warm lady, who happily answered my questions and wished me well in my chosen career.

Since then Johnson has gone on to lead London as its mayor, hit the headlines with his eye-catching stunts, including being suspended mid-air on a zip-wire, engineer Britain’s exit from the EU as the most prominent politician in the Leave campaign and cause mirth and shock around the globe following the announcement that he was to be our new foreign secretary. Following the news of his latest appointment, the international press, and journalists have had fun recounting his history of faux pas which have previously landed him in political hot water.

Among those was his description, in 2007, of Hilary Clinton when he wrote “She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”.

A year earlier, in 2006, when the Labour party was in the throes of another leadership crisis, the flamboyant frontbencher appeared to upset a whole country when he wrote: “For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour Party.” He said afterwards he would be happy to “add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology”.

If Boris’s mother could speak to me now, I wonder what she would say about her beloved son.

Motherhood has become a dominating feature in politics in recent times, with David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn trading blows over each other’s mothers in Prime Minister Questions earlier this year. The PM’s “motherly advice” to Corbyn then was that his mother would expect the Labour leader to wear a proper suit, do up his tie and sing the national anthem.

Corbyn obviously took note, sporting a much smarter appearance when he jokingly asked Cameron at his final Questions on Wednesday to thank his mother for advising him how to dress properly.

But mum-gate did Tory MP Andrea Leadsom no favours in her bid to be the next PM when she discussed her rival Theresa May’s childlessness during an interview with a journalist. It’s not a comment any sensible man would ever consider saying about a female rival, so why on earth would a woman?

Leadsom was accused of being manipulative and Machiavellian; others said that her interview showed she was inexperienced, naive and perhaps a bit silly. Either way, May is the new, unelected PM in this post-Brexit soap opera, with a bumbling clown-like character as the UK’s top diplomat. What will the Christmas omnibus have in store, I wonder?