Boris Johnson quits his £250k news column

Boris Johnson has quit his lucrative newspaper column, and a commission to write a book on Shakespeare has been put on hold.

The Foreign Secretary has ended his £250,000 contract to write a weekly article for The Daily Telegraph following his appointment to the Cabinet.

Hodder & Stoughton has postponed publication of Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius — which had been due out in October, but it expects to release the work in the future. Mr Johnson received an advance of around £90,000 for the book.