Boris Johnson - Pericles or Alcibiades?

Apparently Boris Johnson's great hero is Pericles. Simon Jenkins argues
that Alcibiades would be more appropriate:

"Johnson’s real model is not Pericles but his ward and brief successor as
Athenian leader, Alcibiades. A talented, handsome and vain playboy, he
could never kick the vices of his youth or rise to the tasks later
entrusted to him. His political loyalties were as unpredictable as his sex
drive, the latter embracing both his teacher Socrates and his putative
stepmother, Aspasia. When Athens tired of him, he defected to its enemy,
Sparta.

"He then defected to Sparta’s enemy Persia, and when this gambit ran its
course Alcibiades relied on charm, guile and “a silken tongue” to return to
Athens, where the mob welcomed his relentless optimism. “Strike first to
avert attack,” was his motto. He duly led the Athenians to military defeat
and eventual ruin. In exile he was soon murdered, either by his political
enemies or by relatives of a girl he had just seduced."

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At one time I had a reasonably positive view of Johnson, but that changed
some years ago, and now my opinion of him couldn't be lower.

His cabinet of hard-right extremists says it all.

Underneath his pleasant public persona, Johnson is cold, arrogant, amoral,
devious, utterly self-centred, and incompetent. He bears grudges for many
years, and pays them back. It seems that the people who know him best are
those who like him least.

"He is a far more ruthless, and frankly nastier, figure than the public
appreciates."
— Max Hastings

Mark D.