Boris Johnson accumulated around £4,000 in parking tickets during his decade as motoring writer for GQ, the magazine’s former editor has claimed.

Dylan Jones, who edited the Condé Nast fashion and lifestyle title until last year, hired Mr Johnson in May 1999.

‘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.

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

Mr Jones said Mr Johnson did not get speeding tickets, adding that he has ‘got a good idea why’.

Appearing to suggest that he may not have always driven the cars he was employed to review, he said: ‘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.’

Mr Johnson bragged about letting parking fines pile up in his 2007 book ‘Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars’.

He said that as a student in Oxford he would regularly park his Fiat 128 on double yellow lines.

Then an MP for Henley, he wrote: ‘I parked all over the place, my favourite spot in Oxford being the yellow lines by the squash courts in Jowett Walk.

‘Sometimes, it is true, I got a ticket, but what did I care? I had Belgian number plates.

‘I let them pile in drifts against the windscreen until – in the days before they were sheathed in plastic – the fines just disintegrated in the rain.’

More recently, his Toyota people carrier was pictured parked outside his now wife Carrie Johnson’s flat with parking tickets on the windscreen in 2020.

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