ANYONE who’s watched a Gen Z-er overshare their private life on social media has breathed a sigh of relief that they were never compelled to display the inner workings of their unformed minds on permanent record on the internet.

Every half-formed brain burp, every painful break-up, every Nazi Halloween costume – these private shames were public property only when the protagonist was famous and relatively young.

Famous, young or a newspaper columnist, for isn’t the bold Boris Johnson experiencing the roosting of his opinionated chickens?

The Prime Minister once used his newspaper columns for baring his innermost thoughts, in the same way an arsey teenager might tweet that their least favourite teacher is boring without considering this might come back to haunt them. This isn’t quite Dear Diary, it’s more Pride and Prejudice.

How has Boris shamed himself? Let us count the ways.

Jo Swinson, in her headgirlish way, is desperate to dob in her competition and so has pointed to Mr Johnson’s comments about “comparing elite women athletes to wet otters.” It’s alright, Jo. All the other pupils know what Boris is like without any grassing. Concentrate on yourself, it’s exam time.

An unearthed column from 1999 details the former Foreign Secretary writing that young people had “an almost Nigerian interest in money and gadgets”. You may say he’s pushing racial stereotypes. Johnson probably thought he was showing a worldly knowledge.

He also, it recently emerged, wrote a piece for The Guardian in 2000 detailing how alarm bells went off in his head when he saw a “bunch of black kids” on the street to add to his comments about “piccaninnies” and “watermelon smiles”.

Onwards, and yet another archived Spectator column details Mr Johnson’s thoughts on single mothers, this one from 1995. And such thoughts they are.

A fecund glut of single mothers is producing “a generation of ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children,” he wrote.

The blame was laid at the feet of men. Quite right. Well, there are caveats.

There was, Mr Johnson said, £90bn being spent on welfare. It was “generally plausible” that if having a baby “out of wedlock” meant “destitution on a Victorian scale, young girls might indeed think twice about having a baby.”

But, while he concedes most young girls don’t procreate because they are looking for an easy state handout, he goes on to insult them further. They have children, he writes, to distract them from their “monotonous and depressing lives”. Having “a little creature to love” is a balm from the turmoil of their lives. Is “creature” supposed to be affectionate? Let us not dwell.

Men are to blame for women becoming “wed to the state” because the marriageable pool is so feeble. The modern British man has a “reluctance or inability to take control of his woman and be head of a household. Perhaps the problem really is economic: that he feels depressed and emasculated by the state’s superior ability and willingness to provide for his womenfolk.”

Women have a “natural desire to have babies” so the solution is to “restore women’s desire to be married” by resolving the emasculation of men.

It’s interesting that these stories about Mr Johnson’s scribblings are labelled “exclusive” and described as “unearthed”. His entire back catalogue is on the internet. You can just Google them.

It’s also interesting that anyone can find themselves very exercised by Boris Johnson’s views on single mums.

Galling hypocrisy is one issue. How many single mums has Johnson himself created? Does he even know? His second wife was pregnant with their child when they married – reportedly 12 days after his first divorce.

His long running affair with Petronella Wyatt lead to two pregnancies, one terminated and one miscarriage. Ms Wyatt, writing affectionately about her former beau, said that love drove him to want to be PM. That is, a lack of love. His family and the Tory electorate were not enough. “He wants to be loved by the entire world,” she wrote. She also said that he had told her of his “decidedly Eastern” views on monogamy, claiming he said, “I find it genuinely unreasonable that men should be confined to one woman.”

He wants to be loved yet love in return only when the object of such is young and blonde.

His hypocrisy over single mothers is, though, a secondary concern from his bleatingly rancid column.

What is truly wretched is his undisguised disgust towards the working classes. Would he recognise the women he impregnated out of wedlock as desperate for children to elevate their sad lives? Of course not, those women were not working class.

In another line of the column he mentions that books discouraging bastard children would be pointless as they would be “unlikely to be widely read in the estates of Liverpool or Hackney.”

He views these single mothers as a problem because they are not privileged. Because they are not privileged, he is not able to give them respect or empathy.

It is, as we should be well used to now, nothing but an unrelenting disgust for the working classes from Boris Johnson.

The most extraordinary line from him is this, a line which demonstrates insight into the great problem facing the Conservative party yet also a complete lack of self-awareness.

“I blame male Tory MPs in government for robbing the ruling party of any credibility on the moral issues which are coming to dominate politics... they have banged on about one-parent families, while getting their research assistants pregnant.

“The great economic issues of our time are social. They are moral. And yet the Government is virtually incapacitated from utterance by its own bumbling.”

Plus ça change, Mr Johnson. Plus c’est la même chose.

He is a man who should be incapacitated by his own bumbling. On December 12, let us hope he will be.