The boy is father to the man.
Notice he leaves the mess for others to clear up, and expects to sail on regardless.When he was at Eton in the early 1980s, Boris Johnson did something that seems to have set the tone for the rest of his adult life.
Cast in the title role of a production of Shakespeare’s Richard II, he didn’t bother to learn his part.
The character of Richard II has 758 lines in his eponymously titled play. The part requires the actor to be on stage for most of the two-and-a-half hours running time. You can’t ‘wing’ Richard II. But Boris Johnson tried.
Pasting his lines on bits of paper about the place he hoofed the speeches and made up the rest – throwing in jokes whenever there was an awkward silence.
His father Stanley, who was in the audience, thought it was all ‘a hoot’. Nobody else did.
The other children who had spent hours attending rehearsals and learning their parts saw their hard work reduced to the ‘Boris show’. The headmaster, Eric Anderson, was furious.
Cf. "No border in the Irish Sea."