JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (10 page)

Sir Eric Anderson, formerly Tony Blair’s housemaster at Fettes in Scotland, became headmaster of Eton in 1980 and once a week taught Boris in Sixth Form Select – a handpicked group of the brightest boys.
A favourite memory of Boris’s wit was when Anderson once wrote ‘Business, Industry, Commerce’ up on the board and gave his pupils ten minutes to write down what these words suggested to them. If you want to know how Boris ‘gets away with it’, look no further than his brilliant answer: ‘These three words suggest to me that the headmaster dined in London last night.’ Of course, he was right and Anderson – who thinks the story sums up his former pupil’s special brand of wit – could give only an indulgent smile in response. But Boris had made his mark. Anthony Howard remembers going to speak at Eton after Boris had left and asking Anderson: ‘Who is the most interesting – rather than the cleverest – pupil you’ve ever had?’ He replied: ‘Without a doubt, Boris Johnson.’ And according to Anderson: ‘He’s a very memorable person. Anyone who’s spent an hour with Boris never forgets it. All I have to say to you about him is all good.’ Privately, a different message sometimes emerges from the Etonian ranks, with grumbles that despite his undoubted cleverness and panache, Boris was too much of a ‘showman’ to tackle anything really serious.

In common with Blair, being interesting at school often came at the price of a lack of attention to detail: Boris’s dislike of preparation undoubtedly annoyed his headmaster. When playing the lead in
Richard III
, he omitted to learn the lines so he had them pasted behind various pillars. It was funny for boys in the audience, but somewhat annoying for those who had invested a good deal of time and energy in the production. Since then, Boris has confined his acting performances to occasions when he can deliver his own lines.

David Guilford remembers that Boris was invited to join the Essay Society, a select group of clever boys convened by the head. ‘He delivered a paper once off-the-cuff – he was clever enough to half get away with it. The headmaster thought it was only half thought-out, but Boris was always so busy with so many things. He was popular, got on with people, so he got away with it.’

Despite his masters’ misgivings, Boris won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Classics. Hammond’s final report, written on 2 January 1983, predicted that he would be ‘easier prey than some to the temptations of Oxford life.’ Displaying a weakness for upmarket
laddish banter, Boris wrote under a photograph of himself toting a machine gun in the College Leaving Book of his determination to achieve, ‘more notches on my phallocratic phallus.’ Having stayed on to take his Oxbridge exam the previous autumn, he now set off on a gap year abroad.

He spent the year teaching English and Latin at Geelong Grammar School, Australia’s answer to Eton – and now with annual fees of A$27,700 (around £18,000), the country’s most exclusive school. This choice was another demonstration of the Johnsonian fondness for the wealthiest and best (no sign of building latrines for starving Africans). All four Johnson sons attended Eton. Five out of six of Stanley’s children were to go to Oxford – it is what he says makes him proudest of his offspring. Only Julia, the younger, more rebellious daughter, broke out and went to Cambridge before giving up after less than a month and fleeing to University College London. This cannot have been an easy move and it’s rarely alluded to by the family. ‘Oh, it’s alright,’ her mother Jenny reassured a close friend afterwards, ‘Julia got her First.’

In Australia, Boris was set to work on Geelong’s famous Timbertop campus – a year-long outward bound course for its Year Nine boys and girls, once attended by HRH Prince Charles and set in the wilderness of the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. Not only was he expected to teach the scions of Australia’s and New Zealand’s wealthiest and most eminent families, but also to help maintain its 325-hectare site of bush and farming land, 2km from the nearest road. In return, he received pocket money, plus board and lodging. Most of the 25 teachers and 40 assistants of various sorts lived on campus, where no television was allowed, access to phones limited and alcohol strictly forbidden. The teenage students in their care were expected to confront, ‘the challenges of something like a man’s life under conditions they have to conquer’.
¹³
Heating came from wood-burning boilers – and if not enough wood was collected, the residents (including the students themselves) went cold. It was a fairly tough regime designed to put backbone into the Antipodean ruling classes.

As ever, Boris – who happened to be the only non-Aussie assistant
in his time – made an impact. An extract from the
Corian,
the school magazine, calls him both Boris and Alexander, and notes, ‘he will, in particular, be remembered for his inimitably stolid style of tractor-driving. How such a rustic character could also have such a ready wit and such facility with Latin always remained a mystery.’
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Master and Chaplain of Treetops was the Australian Anglican priest, Peter Thomson – a powerful and charismatic preacher, whom Tony Blair had met at Oxford and found to be ‘spellbinding’ (it was under Thomson’s influence that Blair developed his faith in Christianity). Back in Australia, he also impressed Boris with his Aussie directness and charm, although he in turn remembered the Etonian on his team as being a ‘bit wild.’
¹⁵

During his gap year – although presumably not at Timbertop – Boris claims to have dabbled with a few illegal substances, such as the odd joint. Throughout adult life, he has always treated the subject of his drug taking – like most other serious matters – as a bit of a joke, with variations depending on the audience. In an interview with a women’s magazine he claimed that yes, he did try drugs, but no, not all seriously, and anyway the illegal substances around in his youth were ‘not the same as what the kids are having now. My drug-taking past is pathetic.’
¹⁶
However, in a more laddish encounter with Piers Morgan in
GQ
in 2007, he was more boastful of taking cocaine at the age of 19 at Oxford: ‘I remember it vividly. And it achieved no pharmacological, psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.’
¹⁷
And for comic effect on the BBC quiz show,
Have I Got News for You
in 2005, the story was, ‘I think I was once given cocaine, but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.’
¹⁸

Is this Boris’s way of quashing any suggestion that he has not experienced ‘real life’ while managing to dodge the outrage of Middle England? As with his rival OE David Cameron, contemporaries question whether Boris ever really indulged. Since President Clinton admitted that he had tried, but ‘not inhaled’ marijuana, a confession of a minor drugs ‘experience’ in youth has become almost de rigueur for any ambitious politician. Both Boris and Cameron are highly self-disciplined characters, who grew up at a time when it was considered
dull or odd not to at least give drugs a try. Both desire the appearance of being normal, but being iron-disciplined and self-focused, neither was anything of the sort.

Boris is strangely reticent about his gap year but it gave him the time and the distance to practise and perfect the Boris persona – with the ‘ready wit’ and ‘facility with Latin’ that made such an impact at Geelong. At the end of it, ‘Al’ was left 10,000 miles away in the Australian Outback and ‘Boris’ was to come to the fore at Oxford and thereafter.

Boris could not be going up to Oxford at a better time. For the previous two decades the ancient University had lost ground to its great rival Cambridge in terms of political importance. In the 1960s, the ‘other place’ had produced most of the then rising Tory political elite, such as Ken Clarke, Norman Lamont and Michael Howard. The so-called ‘Cambridge Mafia’ produced a clutch of Cabinet ministers and a party leader, though not a prime minister. But by 1983, the year Boris went up, the balance of Varsity power was shifting: Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister and at the height of her powers, was an Oxford graduate.

The political winds were also changing, with tradition back in the ascendant and the Michael Foot-led Left in chaos. Toffs were back in favour and Sloane Rangers and Young Fogeys were the rising social tribes. Since Granada Television’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
had transmitted a romanticised view of Oxford life into the nation’s living rooms in 1981, the town had once again been attracting the nation’s brightest ‘young things’. Could any young public schoolboy resist emulating the languid undergraduate style and charm of a young Lord Sebastian Flyte? The charismatic, but ultimately doomed character – or rather Anthony Andrews’ seductive TV portrayal – spawned a thousand tank tops, male blonds (bottle or
au naturel
) and cut-glass accents (real or affected) across Waugh’s ‘city of aquatint’ and ‘cloistral hush’.
¹
There were even a few teddy bears, too.

Boris found himself at the forefront of a gilded generation of Oxford undergraduates, who went on to dominate politics and the media in the early twenty-first century. While much of Britain languished in post-recession gloom with three million on the dole, at Oxford the air fizzed with future potential. ‘There was an arrogance and an ambition,’ says another alumnus James Delingpole, now a writer, journalist and broadcaster. ‘We all thought that we would be part of the ruling class; that we should be rewarded for being bright and working hard.’ One forward-thinking Balliol student spent three years having his photograph taken with as many Oxford contemporaries as possible on the (correct) assumption that a good number of them would become famous or powerful.

The roll call of Boris’s contemporaries at Oxford includes British Prime Minister David Cameron, Foreign Secretary William Hague, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, Education Secretary Michael Gove, Conservative fixer and thinker Nick Boles MP, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, PR tycoon Roland Rudd, BBC political editor Nick Robinson, Channel 4 political editor Gary Gibbon, Clinton press secretary George Stephanopoulos and US pollster Frank Luntz. Labour’s post-Blair/Brown elite was also well represented by David Miliband (followed a few years later by his brother and future Labour leader, Ed), Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper. Ian Katz, who was to become deputy editor of the
Guardian
, was also a contemporary and would later become a neighbour of Boris’s in Islington.

Boris talks of this time with affection, pride and a little faux horror. ‘What a sharp-elbowed, thrusting and basically repellent lot we were. We were always bragging or shafting each other, and in a way we still are, with our pompous memoirs and calculated indiscretions. When Toby Young began an article in [university newspaper]
Cherwell
with the words, “I work harder and achieve more than anyone else I know,” we all chortled in approval of this ghastly ethic.’
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So, young Boris was not alone in holding high expectations – but he was unusual in how he went about achieving them. It undoubtedly helped that he already knew many of his contemporaries from school. Eton then, as now, sends dozens of boys each year to Oxford. In Boris’s time – and he was no exception in this – Old Etonians would
often socialise with each other to the exclusion of others, join the same invitation-only clubs and support each other in student elections. Throughout his years at Oxford they represented a formidable tribal group and have, as we have seen, gone on to maximise the benefit of their school and university connections to become Britain’s new, or perhaps renewed, ruling elite.

To a foreign student, no matter how well connected or popular, they appeared an unassailable force. ‘It became clear to me how powerful Eton is as a manufacturer of cultural capital. It’s dispro-portionately powerful, devastatingly so,’ remarks Mark Carnegie, a wealthy Australian rower. ‘It’s like the Goldman Sachs of England but instead of financial capture, it has national capture. It makes you ponder, “Is Eton for the nation’s benefit, or is the nation for Eton’s benefit?” I’m a big Anglophile and I don’t understand the hold it has over this country.’

True to form, Boris joined the Bullingdon Club, an upper-class drinking society stuffed with Old Etonians on the make. The 1987 photograph of Boris and his fellow members – including David Cameron – striking arrogant poses in their Bullingdon livery is now so infamous that the photographers Gillman and Soame have withdrawn the copyright. At one time it was believed this was at the Conservative party’s request, so concerned were its image-protectors about the potential fall-out from such an image of brazen elitism, but it has since been denied.

The Bullingdon is a one-time hunting and cricket society founded in 1780 that evolved into a rumbustious – some would say repellent – social club for well-connected toffs. A version of it also features in
Brideshead
, where Waugh pours scorn on the ‘hearties’ as he calls them, telling a story of how they bully the ostentatiously camp Anthony Blanche by dunking him in the Mercury pond at the centre of Christ Church’s Tom Quad. In their absurd Bullingdon livery of blue tailcoats with mustard waistcoats – that even in the 1980s were £500 a pop
³
– Waugh describes its members as resembling a bunch of ‘very disorderly footmen.’
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The club, whose members are bound by a vow of omerta, was also portrayed on stage at the Royal Court theatre in London in early 2010,
albeit disguised as the Riot Club.
Posh
, a play by Laura Wade, exposed some of the Bullingdon’s worst excesses and what one reviewer described as its ‘casual hatred of the proles’.
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As Boris’s sister Rachel, who went to watch it (but left before the scene showing the ritual trashing of a private dining room at the end), said afterwards: ‘I think if the entire country was forced to sit through it there would never be a Conservative government again, let alone a Bullingdonian Old Etonian Prime Minister.’
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Or, she might have added, a Bullingdonian Old Etonian Mayor of London.