BORIS Johnson racked up £4000 in parking tickets while working as a motoring correspondent, according to his former editor.

Dylan Jones, who edited fashion and lifestyle magazine GQ for more than two decades until 2021, hired Johnson to work at the Conde Nast title in May 1999 over lunch at Le Caprice.

“There soon appeared to be something of a problem, however, as the managing editor started to get sent rather a lot of parking tickets,” Jones wrote in The Sunday Times.

“And when I say a lot, I mean a lot; in Boris’s own words, they started accumulating ‘like drifting snow on the windshield’.

Jones added: “I once worked out that, over the decade he worked for GQ, Boris had cost us about £4000 in parking tickets.

“But then he’d also written more than a hundred incredibly funny motoring columns, so I figured it was worth it.”

Jones, who was appointed an OBE in 2013 for services to the publishing and fashion industries, said “interestingly” Johnson never received any speeding tickets.

“And I’ve got a pretty good idea why,” Jones added.

“When the cars were delivered to his house in Islington, the car company always made a note of the mileage, something that is standard practice. The mileage would also be noted when they came to pick them up again. And on more than one occasion — OK, on many, many, many occasions — the mileage was precisely the same. So I leave you to draw your own conclusions.”

The National:

READ MORE: Boris Johnson's partygate fine like a parking ticket, minister claims

The Prime Minister continues to be under scrutiny over the partygate affair, with former Conservative minister Steve Baker telling The Daily Telegraph on Saturday the lockdown breaches in Downing Street could significantly hurt the Tories at the local elections on May 5.

But the PM has resolutely backed himself still to be in power in the autumn.

In his 2007 book, Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars, Johnson boasted about how he accumulated fines by parking his Fiat 128 on double yellow lines.

The then MP for Henley wrote: “I parked all over the place, my favourite spot in Oxford being the yellow lines by the squash courts in Jowett Walk.

“Sometimes, it is true, I got a ticket, but what did I care? I had Belgian number plates.

“I let them pile in drifts against the windscreen until – in the days before they were sheathed in plastic – the fines just disintegrated in the rain.”

In 2020, Johnson’s Toyota people carrier was pictured outside his future wife Carrie Symonds' flat with unpaid tickets fixed to the windscreen.

Last week, Tory minister Brandon Lewis defended his boss over the partygate scandal by likening his fixed penalty notice to a parking fine.

“I think we do see consistently, whether it is through parking fines or speeding fines, ministers of both parties over the years have been in that position,” said the former Conservative Party chairman.

Speaking to Sky News, the Northern Ireland Secretary added: “You’ve asked me, can someone who sets the laws and the rules, can they also be someone who breaks the rules?

“That clearly has happened with a number of ministers over the years.”