His reception this week at Birmingham New Street Station was near-ecstatic – hundreds of activists cheering, “Bo-ris! Bo-ris!” as he got off the train. It’s hard to think of any other politician, alive or dead, who would get that sort of treatment; not even Lenin, when he returned from exile to the Finland Station in Petrograd in 1917. Winston Churchill, perhaps, but only after he had delivered the country, and the world, from imminent takeover by the forces of evil. In an era when stand-up comedians are bigger than pop stars, Boris’s reception was more like the spontaneous outpouring of joy that greets Peter Kay at one of his stadium-filling shows.