As a motoring correspondent Boris Johnson cost his magazine ￡4,000 in parking tickets, his former editor has said.

       Dylan Jones, who edited fashion and lifestyle magazine GQ for more than two decades until 2021, hired Mr Johnson to work at the Conde Nast title in May 1999 over lunch at Le Caprice.

       “There soon appeared to be something of a problem, however, as the managing editor started to get sent rather a lot of parking tickets,” Mr Jones wrote in The Sunday Times.

       “And when I say a lot, I mean a lot; in Boris’s own words, they started accumulating ‘like drifting snow on the windshield’.

       Mr Jones added: “I once worked out that, over the decade he worked for GQ, Boris had cost us about ￡4,000 in parking tickets.

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       “But then he’d also written more than a hundred incredibly funny motoring columns, so I figured it was worth it.”

       Mr Jones, who was appointed an OBE in 2013 for services to the publishing and fashion industries, said “interestingly” Mr Johnson never received any speeding tickets.

       Dylan Jones ‘figured it was worth it’ to cover Boris Johnson’s parking fines because the then-journalist was ‘incredibly funny’ (Ian West/PA)

       (PA Archive)

       “And I’ve got a pretty good idea why,” Mr Jones added.

       “When the cars were delivered to his house in Islington, the car company always made a note of the mileage, something that is standard practice. The mileage would also be noted when they came to pick them up again. And on more than one occasion — OK, on many, many, many occasions — the mileage was precisely the same. So I leave you to draw your own conclusions.”

       The Prime Minister continues to be under scrutiny over the partygate affair, with former Conservative minister Steve Baker telling The Daily Telegraph on Saturday the lockdown breaches in Downing Street could significantly hurt the Tories at the local elections on May 5.

       But the PM has resolutely backed himself still to be in power in the autumn.