Boris Will Address The Blues

On Monday 7 March, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, will address the Oxford and Cambridge crews who will be rowing in The Boat Race on 26 March. The oarsmen will weighed in at City Hall and the Mayor will acknowledge that it is 175 years since the university crews first raced on the River Thames in London. Read the press release here.

Who is Boris Johnson, a Non-Brit may ask? Boris Johnson, a Conservative politician, is a former MP (Member of Parliament) for Henley-on-Thames who has been Mayor of London since May 2008. He studied at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, and at neither school he rowed, which was obvious when he, as the MP for Henley, opened the Upper Thames RC's new boathouse in 2005 (see picture below from the 'Tideway Slug').

He is one of the few British politicians known around the country on a first-name basis, and his unruly hair and far from tactful outspokenness are some of his trademarks, as is his badly tied neck-ties, I think. In Britain, he is either loved, or regarded as a babbling fool who constantly puts his foot in his mouth. Boris has worked as a journalist for the Conservative Daily Telegraph, where he still has a column. Between 1999 and 2005 he was the editor of the weekly magazine The Spectator.