An earlier version of this piece was sent to the editor on July 14, and I was expecting it to appear on July 16, but here we are two months later, and Boris Johnson is in Turkey as the British Foreign Secretary, paying a visit of solidarity to Parliament, which was bombed during the coup attempt. In those two months, there have been many changes in Turkey, as there have been in Johnson's career. Johnson's first mission abroad was to the U.S. where, at a press conference, he got lost in the Middle East and referred to the current "crisis in Egypt." Hopefully this visit to Ankara will help put things in place for him and help him to get to know the old country better. But of course, that's a minor issue compared to the fact that he won the poetry competition set up by the Spectator to insult President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan back in May. I wish I could be a fly on the wall of the presidential office to see what act of contrition Johnson will engage in to make sure bygones will be bygones.Johnson has been a figure who seems to have taken to the adage:"All press is good press," and knows how to maintain his reputation and continuous presence in the papers. He claimed a lot of headline space during Brexit debates telling voters to fear Brussels (if not Ankara), and then was touted as the next prime minister by the conservative papers after David Cameron's resignation. After his withdrawal from the race, which turned into some kind of war of attrition where current Prime Minister Theresa May proved to be the sturdiest candidate, the media talked about how he did not have the courage to clean up the mess the country will be in during the actual exit process. There were columns on his treachery, his cowardice, and conjectures on the kind of information the other candidates must have had on him to force his exit. His time as Foreign Secretary so far has been rather quiet, but the visit to Ankara could change all that.I first heard of Johnson in 1999 in a dining hall in Oxford. It was my second visit to Britain, and I knew very little about politics, British or Turkish. I fell into a conversation with the man sitting next to me who asked me where I was from. I told him to guess and to my surprise he did guess that I was Turkish, because he had seen a list of the guests' name at the lodge. He recognized Turkish surnames, he explained to me, because he had a Turkish friend. He said this friend's great grandfather had been a Turkish diplomat, a bit of a maverick, and that he had been assassinated in Turkey. This was hardly the sort of conversation you had with someone you met for the first time and I wasn't quite sure if it were true. I had not heard of Johnson's famous great-grandfather Ali Kemal, who had been assassinated during the Turkish War of Independence for backing the wrong parties. A few days later my friend sent me a film project he was working on featuring this friend of his, and that was the first time I saw Johnson's mop of yellow hair. In the pitch Johnson was being billed as the funny man who would attract large audiences.My friend's project never came to anything but I kept seeing Johnson on TV and came across his pieces in several conservative papers and magazines. I saw time and again in the British households I visited that whenever he appeared on screen, the audience started laughing - he did not even have to say anything. When on one of those occasions I told a friend about his Turkish ancestry, she said, "Yes, he has quite the Turkish look, doesn't he?" Everything about him seemed to be cause for hilarity. Then in 2005, to further prove what a good laugh he was, Johnson wrote a comedy-thriller, if such a genre exists, called "Seventy Two Virgins." Yes, you read that right. The novel is about an Islamist terror plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, a plot that is foiled by a bicycling Tory MP. While the title clearly makes a reference to the number of virgins supposedly waiting for deluded suicide bombers when they die, it could also be read as a tongue and cheek reference to Johnson's own relationships with the fairer sex, which continue to provide unending material for gossip columns. Johnson carried on writing funny pieces for the Spectator that I enjoyed reading and the political references of which went straight over my head. One thing that seemed to come up in his pieces and interviews was that he thought Greek civilization superior to the Roman one. I could not quite understand why this, to me, rather esoteric point exercised him so much, but back then I wasn't aware of the importance of a classical education for the British elites. What I understood at the time was that he considered the Romans arriviste, as he no doubt did many people he came into contact with. Having been educated at Eton and receiving a classics degree from Balliol College at Oxford University, Johnson was the go-to man when current politics needed to be read through classical examples. And this is exactly what he did in his much-quoted Daily Telegraph piece in 2007 when he spoke for, not against Turkey's accession to the European Union.Johnson's idiosyncratic language with its adjectives and exclamations, which one would expect to find in P.G. Wodehouse's novels rather than hard politics, seems to be one aspect of his charm. He offers entertainment of the first caliber, and it turns out entertainment was just what Londoners felt they needed in the mayoral election in 2008. It was when he became the mayor of London that the Turkish public started to take an interest in his ancestry as he made the odd reference to his lineage when the occasion called for it, as in the context of the London riots that happened during his time as mayor. His fame relied not so much on his policies - maybe except for the London "Boris bike" - but his witticisms, which were compiled in a volume in 2013 edited by Harry Mount, who happens to be Cameron's second cousin. But I will not go into how inbred the British elites are here, that you can imagine - and imagine the worst - for yourselves. It is in a London Review of Books review from July 18, 2013 of this volume, "The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson," that Jonathan Coe gives the best explanation of Johnson's charm and influence over the British people. The review is titled "Sinking Giggling into the Sea," and paints a bleak picture of how savvy politicians like Johnson portray themselves as harmless buffoons "who mean well," and that the laughter that they wrap around themselves leave no space for real criticism.That Johnson meant to run for the head of the Conservative Party became clear in 2015 when he published his book on Winston Churchill. There is no surer way to tell the British public that you mean business than to claim that you have a very good grasp of the politics of its most cherished prime minister - quite a departure from a novel about an Islamist terror plot in Westminster. Many commentators agreed that Johnson's support for Brexit was calculated to increase his chances of becoming the leader of the Tories with no regard or plan as to what would happen if the country did actually leave the EU, and how it would affect the common man. Johnson's understanding of politics seem to have everything to do with power plays and nothing to do with policy; he has the sort of background that makes policies irrelevant because you feel even if Coe's proverbial ship should go down, Johnson would have his private yacht to sail off in.I do not know how present the Ali Kemal myth was in the Johnson family home when Boris was growing up, but I should think the rather tragic and bloody way Ali Kemal was assassinated, which would not have looked out of place in a Greek tragedy, would only have added to Johnson's sense of grandeur. In keeping with classical Greek imagery, commentators drew parallels to Julius Caesar and Mark Antony when he spoke after Cameron resigned. While Johnson may be savoring these references, albeit arriviste Roman and not Greek, I wonder if it is possible to run a country's foreign affairs on mere buffoonery. It has been said that May appointed him as a front rather than for the hard business of negotiating Britain's interests abroad, which job she will probably be handling herself in her capacity as "iron lady." Because, you see, Boris Johnson may not be so funny in other languages. Some jokes are truly lost in translation.* Assistant Professor at Fatih Sultan Mehmet University