His columns used to enrage the old liberal left and embolden the new and radicalised British far right. 
Now Boris Johnson is prime minister, he no longer has his own say in the papers. 
But his actions - and inactions - in government provoke the same kind of visceral response from the men and women who used to be his fellow newsprint commentators.

The Scotsman
Like Mr Johnson, Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine used to make her living as a journalist. The backbencher was back in print on Monday warning about what she sees as the PM’s plans to force an election and keep alive the spectre of a “no deal” Brexit.
Ms Jardine wrote: “We are confident, as other parties may be, that an election would be good for our party.
“But at this moment in our history we need to put the needs of the country first and ensure we negotiate the next few critical months, and avoid potential disaster, before thinking about electoral success.
“I am sure that to many of the public it is a mess. Believe me, I agree.
“In normal times, the number of political headlines we have seen each day would be considered a lot for a week, possibly a month.
Colleagues who have been in parliament for decades tell me that they have never known anything like it. Parliamentary conventions are being torn up left, right and centre.”

READ MORE: Alan Roden: Leave or Remain? Let's agree that families often disagree

The Daily Express
This is perhaps the greatest cheerleader for Brexit in the UK press. But The Express writer Leo McKinstry sounded distinctly u8nimpressed with the notion, floated by sources close to Mr Johnson, that the government would just shrug off a new law designed to prevent no deal.
He wrote: “In reality, Boris has only three choices. He could resign, refuse to implement Parliament’s new law or, best of all, focus on a revised Withdrawal Agreement. Superficially, resignation avoids the humiliation of having to make an appeal to Brussels for another delay, something he has repeatedly vowed never to do. 
“With his pledge intact, he could then fight the next election on a clean Brexit platform, perhaps backed by a pact with Nigel Farage’s party.
“But this option carries the terrible risk of installing Jeremy Corbyn in power as a caretaker Prime Minister.
“Far worse is the idea that last week’s legislation might be defied, with Government figures hinting its implementation could be blocked. Test the Parliamentary boundaries by all means, but toughness in negotiations cannot stretch to ignoring the law. That is the stuff of despots and revolutionaries, not British Government ministers who are meant to be guardians of the rule of law. Such a manoeuvre would make a mockery of a Brexit which is meant to bring back Parliamentary sovereignty not destroy it.”

The Guardian
The paper of the left is not a fan of Brexit and its columnist John Harris has described zealots on either side of the great divide. On Monday he considered another group of Britons: those exhausted by the whole thing.
He wrote: “The current condition of the country seems to also revolve around people and places that feel as if a particularly awful working week has somehow failed to end, and most of us simply want to switch off the lights and go home, wherever that is. 
“This sense may yet define the imminent general election, which could be odd: the electorate being offered its starkest choice for decades and the media combusting with excitement, while millions of people look the other way.”
Mr Harris detects some left-behindness, the feeling that some blame for Brexit, in this fatigue.
He said: “Even if the three-year Brexit saga has tipped so many voters into a kind of exasperated torpor, the explanation for all this surely goes back much further, to the Thatcher years and the birth of a politics so fixated on change and “reform” that after four decades it has left people feeling absolutely knackered.”

The Press and Journal
All the Brexit nastiness got to Susn Brown. The former moderator of the Church of Scotland yearns for a time of respect. 
She wrote: “While we might disagree with one another, we ought to still, to be able to respect each other. 
“I am afraid that sometimes when we see and listen to the proceedings in the UK Parliament or when we read reports of those proceedings, the rudeness, the name-calling and the shouting down, seems utterly disrespectful.”