The former prime minister Boris Johnson, 62, spends a week a month in South Florida as a visiting professor of political science at the University of Miami, an activity as lucrative as it is comfortable: little preparation, captive audiences, and the opportunity to present himself as the man ingenious that he has always cultivated. It is one of his very enriching businesses since was ousted from Downing Streetfour years ago.Since then, Johnson has lived, above all, on the conferences he gives around the world and on writing columns without editors to control him. Between 2022 and 2024, he billed around six million euros for these activities, according to the Financial Times and the agency that represents him, Harry Walker. To this must be added the copyright of his memoirs (his memoirs (2.4 million) and the annual allowance of up to 135,000 euros as former prime minister. His estimated net worth is between 18 and 24 million euros.

 The front-page pictures in the UK’s Saturday papers said it all. An inflatable blimp of the prime minister, some three metres high and with thumb turned up in a characteristic gesture of optimism, soared above a smiling Johnson himself in the now Conservative north-eastern town of Hartlepool along a shoreline where the ship-building industry had once thrived and where the Labour Party had reigned supreme since 1964.