As rival journalists and Foreign Office officials from that period well remember, Boris Johnson first made his name as a Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in the early 1990s.

It was during that time that he almost singlehandedly invented "popular" Euroscepticism, writing stories about bans on bent bananas and suchlike. Johnson drove the Foreign Office and the European commission mad in the process, as he turned a hitherto fairly dry institutional story into one that could be talked about in emotive terms down the Dog and Duck.

In his wake came the likes of Christopher Booker, and the rest is history.

Boris's idea was simple – to stop the federalists' plans in their tracks by building popular opposition to them. Now, interestingly, I hear that one of those who watched him at work on his project to destroy the federal dream is writing a book about him.

Fellow journalist Sonia Purnell, who was his number two at the Telegraph office in Square Marie Louise, should have many interesting tales to relate. She believes that the only account of his life far, a biography by the Telegraph sketchwriter Andrew Gimson, doesn't tell the whole story. She wants to shed new light on Boris, on what makes him tick and on the extent of his ambitions – a subject of great interest in the Tory party at the moment.