Can Boris really make a comeback?

At his book launch this week, Boris Johnson reminded guests that were it not for the "tiny handful of random events" that led to his downfall, we would now be "slap bang in the middle of the honeymoon of the second Johnson term". There was much laughter in the room, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, but to read Unleashed is to realise "the author is certainly not joking". This is no candid farewell memoir. It reads like a "comeback manifesto" from a man who is still blowing kisses at MPs – "I don't blame any of them" – and thinks the book of his political adventures "has a few chapters left to be written".

Britain tends not to forgive its politicians – at the Tory conference I asked a roomful of activists how many would be open to a "Boris restoration", and "barely a dozen hands went up". But stranger things have happened, and it's easy enough to see how he might return. If Reform continues to grow in support and Tory polling fails to improve, Johnson will clearly make the argument that he alone can see off Nigel Farage, as he did in 2019. This case will be especially easy to make if Robert Jenrick wins the Tory leadership election, apes Farage, and gets nowhere. By-elections come around three or four times a year. It's not a stretch to imagine a local constituency party choosing Johnson as their candidate at the next one. Just as William Hague was powerless to stop the return of Michael Portillo, so the next Conservative leader may struggle to blackball the former ("and still undefeated") prime minister. Make no mistake: "a Johnson comeback could happen any time".

Property

THE PARISIAN CHÂTEAU Hidden at the end of a cobbled alley, this historic five-bedroom home offers all the charm of a country château, right in the middle of Paris. On the ground floor, a grand entrance hall, dining room and drawing room are flanked by a kitchen and utility room. Upstairs, there are three en-suite bedrooms, including the master suite with high vaulted ceilings. The adjacent guest house has two further bedrooms, and the entire property is surrounded by lush, tranquil gardens. The Musée d'Orsay is a short stroll. £15.6m

Heroes and villains

Blackadder with Baldrick: very much punching down

Villain
British comedy, according to British comedy producer Jon Plowman, for always "punching down". He's dead wrong of course, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Take Blackadder, who mercilessly mocks and bullies his socially inferior employee Baldrick for being poor and thick. Or Basil Fawlty, who does the same to Manuel "for being a stupid, useless foreigner". Punching down? Absolutely. And how do viewers respond? "By laughing their heads off."

Villains
The third of UK students who say they are incapacitated by "anxiety disorders". Sorry, but these people "shouldn't be at university at all", says Giles Coren in The Times. They're only there because of Tony Blair's insistence that further education should be available to all, which ironically meant that it couldn't be free any more – meaning the "brilliant poor kids who CAN read and CAN talk in a seminar and CAN get the goddam bus to a lecture" were frozen out. Why not boot the "flaky chancers" out, and leave uni to the "core of motivated young people whose intellect can cope with it"?

Hero
The anonymous donor who left the US federal government $7bn in his or her will. The donation – seven times larger than the previous record – is thought to have come from Fayez Sarofim, a distinctly un-famous Texan investor who made a $20bn fortune before his death in 2022. But no one's really sure.

Théâtre D'opéra Spatial by Jason Allen

Hero
Jason Allen, for stretching the definition of irony to breaking point. Allen won a Colorado digital art competition with an AI-generated painting two years ago, telling his detractors: "Art is dead… it's over. AI won. Humans lost." But he is now suing the US Copyright Office for ruling that the work (pictured) cannot be copyrighted, and can thus be freely copied and republished by anyone and everyone.

Villain
Qantas, for accidentally playing a relatively adult movie on every one of its screens during a 9.5 hour flight from Sydney to Tokyo. One of the passengers described the film, Daddio, as "40 minutes of penis and boobs".

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Quirk of history

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Pregnant? Try a cocaine lozenge

In the winter of 1886, a famed American neurologist called William Alexander Hammond began an unusual experiment, says Douglas Small in Aeon: to consume as much cocaine as humanly possible. He used several methods: fluid extracts of the coca plant; cocaine hydrochloride grains mixed into purified wines; hypodermic injection. He eventually hit his limit when he took just over an entire gram in one go. He woke up in bed the next day with no recollection of how he got there, and "quickly discovered that he had, at some point in the night, decided to thoroughly wreck his own library". After suffering what he described as a "most preposterous" two-day headache, he called a halt to his research.

Hammond may have been "unusually enthusiastic", but his fascination with cocaine was far from uncommon among medical professionals at the time. The drug had first entered the mainstream a couple of years earlier, when an Austrian eye doctor called Karl Koller twigged that it was "the world's first local anaesthetic". (Koller's friend, Sigmund Freud, nicknamed him "Coca Koller".) Doctors quickly found all manner of uses for it. You could get a cocaine nasal spray for cold and flu; cocaine lozenges for seasickness and pregnancy nausea; cocaine tablets for hay fever; cocaine toothpaste for toothache and bleeding gums. Those suffering from "Brain Fag, or Nervous Debility" could pay 2 shillings and 9 pence (about £11 today) for a calming cocaine syrup. "In the discovery of cocaine," one president of the British Medical Association declared, "a new era seems to have dawned." How right he was.

What to watch

The opening scene of Rivals is a true "statement of intent", says Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. The first thing we see is the bare behind of protagonist Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) as he ravishes a woman in red stilettos on Concorde with "supersonic elan". Returning to his seat, our hero is challenged about having sex in a toilet. "A loo," he corrects. "Don't be plebeian." Any fears that Jilly Cooper's most riotous novel has been Disney-fied on its journey to Disney+ evaporate instantly. Everyone in Rivals commits adultery and smokes like a chimney; they hunt and shoot in the Cotswolds and tell off-colour jokes; and no one pulls them aside for a po-faced lecture about human rights. The only nod to modern sensibilities is that "for every shot of naked female breasts, there is male nudity". In an era of "especially dour television", says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian, Rivals is an "explosion". "We should all be extremely glad it's here." Eight episodes, out 18 October.

Watch the trailer for Rivals here.