Faux Bojo

To his friends and family, he’s Drew Galdron. To the satire-loving British public, he’s Boris Johnson impersonator Faux BoJo. Far from being a quick cash-in on the current British Prime Minister’s unlikely to rise to the top, Galdron has been impersonating Johnson for at least a decade, a job that offered him some comfort in terms of increased work when Johnson was elected in December 2019 (Galdron is a committed pro-European with strong views on the Conservative Party). As 2020 has got weirder, so he has become more popular, perhaps not something that could be said of the man he impersonates. He has appeared on comedy shows such as The Last Leg with Adam Mills, but also on serious news and current affairs shows such as Channel 4 News and This Week in Politics. He has also been featured in publications such as The Sunday Times Magazine.

Galdron, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Johnson, hails from the East London borough of Havering. He began finding work as a Johnson impersonator whilst the latter was Mayor of London. Johnson’s central role in the Brexit referendum of 2016 gave Galdron’s work an added impetus, and he has regularly travelled the country appearing at anti-Brexit events and mocking Johnson’s public persona and approach to politics as well as his beliefs.

When Johnson became Foreign Secretary, the stakes were raised even higher, but even Galdron must have struggled to foresee that the man he made a living alternately taking the mickey out of and actively campaigning against would become a Prime Minister whose very name evokes the same kind of strong reactions as the Brexit project he is a key figure in.