JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (12 page)

Leapfrogging the lower slopes of Union politics was seen as ‘rather cheeky’ by Union hacks but this time Boris lodged his nomination for Secretary – a far greater prize in self-advancement – well before the deadline. He was running against Claire Copperman, a clever woman
from St Hugh’s College with hair almost as blonde as his. She was not quite so funny and certainly not so well known as Boris. After some energetic deployment of the Old Etonian forces, Boris won comfortably.

His ascent to the ultimate goal of the Union Presidency – previous incumbents include William Ewart Gladstone, Tony Benn and Benazir Bhutto – now seemed assured. The post was widely seen – including by Boris’s predecessor as MP for Henley, Michael Heseltine – as the ‘first step to being Prime Minister.’
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However, it is worth noting that although the last two elected Prime Ministers – Tony Blair and David Cameron – were Oxford-educated, both eschewed an Oxford Union career. Heseltine, who invested a lot of his time in the Union and eventually became President at his second attempt, never made it to Number Ten.

In his memoirs, Peter Mandelson specifically advises young undergraduates interested in a political career to avoid the Union and political activism during university to focus instead on the academic opportunities. Back then, though, Boris badly wanted the Presidency and all it represented. But a formidable ‘Stain’ stood in his way in the shape of the talented and ferociously organised grammar-school boy Neil Sherlock, then newly elected Union Treasurer and later a senior partner at a City accountancy firm and Liberal Democrat grandee.

The looming contest between these two starkly divergent men – the sparky redhead from Surrey versus the glamorous blond chancer from Eton – would lead to a titanic and ill-tempered contest that strayed dangerously into class warfare. Those who fought in this battle in the Michaelmas term of 1984 are still in part shaped by it today – perhaps most of all Boris. After an interlude of a quarter of a century, Sherlock likes to joke that he and Boris now finally find themselves on the same side, through the broad-church of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. Back in those days, though, they were bitter opponents.

‘Boris seemed to take victory for granted,’ recalls a Sherlock supporter, now an influential left-wing Tory thinker. ‘He assumed he would be a cult choice for the freshers coming in, whereas in fact they were very, very polarised in their view of him. This was Boris Mark
One – a witty high Tory of conventional right-of-centre views, whose only real distinguishing features from all the other Old Etonians were his hair and personality. The fact that he was most comfortable with people like Charlie Spencer and Darius Guppy meant that if you were from a state school like me, you just didn’t want to know – there was a large element of class war at that time.’

Boris recruited the usual suspects of well-born public school alumnae to rally the vote, including his aristocratic girlfriend, Allegra Mostyn-Owen. Said to be the most desired girl in Oxford of her time, she was frequently compared to Sir Max Beerbohm’s fictional femme fatale Zuleika Dobson, who drove undergraduates to despair with her beauty. In July 1984, she even graced the front cover of a resurgent
Tatler
magazine as her elegance, startling blue eyes and obvious intelligence seemed to encapsulate the perfect mid-1980s amalgam of brains, looks and breeding.

The newsagents opposite the gate to Trinity College, where she was studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics, was covered with billboards of her face. Such fame merely served to make her appear even more elevated and untouchable – except to the super-confident or the terribly deluded. ‘There were plenty of posh, ambitious boys around, who looked at her amazing cheekbones and saw high-class breeding material,’ recalls one of Allegra’s college friends. Bagging this most glorious prize against such intense competition – particularly when he was neither rich nor landed and still confined to the lower ranks of the Union – raised Boris’s university status considerably.

At this stage she was a far bigger figure than he was but now she was determined to help her man succeed by issuing an invitation to Sherlock to visit her rooms on Trinity College’s Garden Quad on Armistice Day, November 1984 for afternoon tea. She pleaded with Sherlock – who could not help but be moved by such a fabulous young Sloane alternately showering him with praise and admonitions – not to stand against ‘my Boris.’ Though he very much enjoyed his cup of tea in fine bone china, Sherlock did not lose his head sufficiently to agree to make way; he also became more than a little suspicious when Boris turned up just as he was leaving. He knew then
that his adversary must be running scared to have drafted in a secret weapon.

Boris was unable – or perhaps unwilling – to reach outside his natural Conservative heartland to non-core voters. Instead he relied on the traditional public school networks – mainly the invitation-only Old Etonian-dominated Gridiron and Bullingdon clubs – rather than running a proper campaign. On one occasion he even handed out bottles of red wine to Gridiron members in a particularly brazen, even crass attempt to ‘buy’ their votes. ‘Such displays of naked ambition were totally out of place,’ recalls one undergraduate there that day. So, for all his charm and fame, he lost out to Sherlock’s hard graft and broad-appeal competence. Boris scooped a creditable 558 votes – or 46 per cent of the turnout. Sherlock, however, triumphed with 661 votes: a majority of 103.

The shock was palpable – Boris supporters talk of this time as if almost a bereavement. How could such a talent, with his sense of epic entitlement, be deprived of his rightful prize – and by, gasp, a
Stain
, too? A good deal of snobbish and unpleasant personal abuse was heaped on Sherlock by Boris supporters – who pulled faces and called him a ‘horrible, spermy little man’, who spoke with a ‘funny accent’ and who was ‘patently uncharismatic.’

Boris was undoubtedly shaken up by this rare setback. Here was a boy whose only real other ‘failure’ to date had been his inability to master the recorder at primary school but it was, quite likely, the making of him as a politician. It taught him the unassailable truth that no one can truly succeed in politics if he relies entirely on his own cadre. Just as President Clinton (one of Boris’s role models) would later reach way beyond the natural base of the Democratic Party in the US through his personal charm and charisma, so Boris appreciated the Old Etonian networks in themselves were not enough to realise his ambitions. Hitherto regarded as the Establishment candidate, Boris saw, just as David Cameron would later with the Conservative party, that he would have to decontaminate his personal brand.

Thanks to a recruitment drive by ex-President Larry Grafstein, who had worked hard to democratise the Union and move it away from a public school enclave, it now had some 5,000 members. No longer
could a few dozen Old Etonians fix the result in favour of one of their number as in the past, simply by voting tribally. The new Union was more representative of the University as a whole: class still mattered, but it was something that could no longer be allowed to define you if you sought political office. The Union’s finances – previously so precarious that closure seemed imminent – had also been put on a surer footing so the new President would have to be seen as a safe financial guardian to boot.

‘The new Union intake of people from normal schools, whose fathers, sisters and brothers had not been to Oxford, meant that Sherlock was able to run a devastating Meritocrat versus Toff argument,’ recalls one Sherlock supporter. ‘Neil put out the word that, “This is your Union now, do you want to keep it? Or give it back to nobs like Boris?” We also homed in on whether Boris was competent enough to look after the money.’ Sherlock himself says that, ‘It was easy to paint Boris as a particular type of character. Tim Hames [who went on to become special adviser to the Speaker of the House of Commons] ran the campaign and as he has said, if we ever hit above the belt, it was entirely unintentional.’

For a brief interlude after his defeat, Boris focused his attention on another area of his life. He had first won Allegra’s affections through a classic episode of Boris bumbling – calculated or otherwise, one can only guess. One evening he pitched up for one of Allegra’s parties in her rooms at Trinity, clutching the customary bottle of wine – a night early. She did not know him – although he, like virtually every male student at Oxford at the time, knew of her – but she invited him in, anyway. They drank the wine and got chatting.

To a girl sometimes isolated by her own beauty and instincts, according to her friends, here was someone who seemed thoroughly at ease with her looks and was also surprisingly emotionally switched on for his age. Boris made her laugh; they dined out at Indian restaurants and gradually became friends. He seemed to be – and
was
– different from the over-forward, arrogant young pups who had been her past suitors. And, at least at first, he did not seem to be making a play for her and was not then widely known for chasing women.

Soon Boris’s infamous charm melted the ‘Ice Maiden’ as, according
to one of her friends, ‘all the jealous blokes used to call her.’ Others left in the cold began to dub her Ms Allergic Mostyn-Owen in the university magazine
Cherwell
. Just as Boris polarised female opinion, Allegra was either worshipped or dismissed by men, some branding her histrionic, distant or even ‘a little crazy’ and ‘over the top.’ She was also known for holding fixed left-of-centre views and could be rather chilly with those who did not share them, including her boyfriend. Boris is said to have once told her: ‘What I like about you is that you’ve got principles.’
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Admiring young undergraduates, all too aware she was out of their league, noted that she did not often speak to people outside a very narrow social circle. ‘She didn’t have to,’ observes one. ‘Just her presence made a magnificent contribution to any event, just being there, saying nothing. We used to congratulate ourselves if she merely acknowledged our existence.’ However, Lloyd Evans believes her extraordinary good looks did little to make Allegra happy: ‘I always found her strangely closed – I thought that her staggering beauty meant that she didn’t really have to develop her social skills. I always thought she was a bit cursed by that. Women like Allegra probably feel that whatever gifts are showered on them, it’s never quite enough. And so she came over terribly grand, and she talked to me as if she were launching a ship.’

In the circumstances, the attentive Boris must have seemed even more of a support and champion, and after she appeared on the
Tatler
cover, something of a refuge from unwanted attention. He frequently sent her letters through the university’s pigeon post system, telling her in one that she reminded him more and more of his mother. Others have also observed a similarity over the years – particularly both women’s brand of rather ethereal intelligence. On other occasions, he warned against men whom he accused of being ‘all the same.’ He finally persuaded her to go out with him by telling her that otherwise he could not continue to devote so much time to being friends with her, but would focus on his Union ambitions instead. Now dependent on her ambitious young suitor, she agreed, allowing Boris to start calling the shots.

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In the second long vacation of their degree courses during the summer of 1985, Boris and Allegra went on an extended tour of Spain and Portugal with his sister Rachel (who was a year below Boris at Oxford) and Rachel’s then boyfriend, Sebastian Shakespeare. The trip became known to them all as the ‘Animal Atrocidades’ tour and was in part financed by Boris and Rachel working on a report on Animal Cruelty commissioned by contacts of Stanley’s at the World Wildlife Fund.

‘We were going round the Iberian peninsula in a car investigating what we called “atrocidades,”’ recalls Shakespeare, who so closely resembles the blond Johnsons that he likes to joke that he is their long-lost cousin. ‘We had to research beach photography of monkeys, bull-fighting and the treatment of donkeys, take pictures, interview people and put together a film. Boris and Rachel had been commissioned to do it and Allegra and I were there for the ride.’ With their genius for publicity, the Johnsons were even interviewed by an ex-pat British radio station in Torremolinos.

The trip was not entirely relaxed, however. ‘Allegra could be brittle,’ Shakespeare remembers. ‘She came across as quite cold, supercilious. She wasn’t. It was just an unfortunate manner she had; she was very beautiful and that accentuated it. It wasn’t a stormy relationship between Allegra and Boris, but she was obviously quite besotted with him, quite evidently more besotted with him than he with her.

‘And she was fabulously well-connected all over the place so wherever we were on this jaunt, she would set up all these wonderful houses for Boris and her to stay at. Rachel and I would have to stay in grotty B&Bs down the road. Maybe there wasn’t room for all of us in these luxurious boltholes, but I think she was probably showing off to Boris.’

After about ten days of travelling together, Allegra left the party. Thereafter, Boris seemed deeply troubled. ‘He would ask us every night whether he should marry Allegra,’ recalls Shakespeare. ‘So it was obviously playing on his mind even at that stage as to whether it was a good idea. I expressed caution for all the traditional reasons such as that he and she were a bit young. What puzzled me was that
I think he had already got engaged to Allegra without saying anything. Yet even then he was not only having doubts, but actually voicing them.’

Indeed, unbeknownst to Shakespeare at the time, the 21-year-old Boris had already hatched plans and was as good as engaged. On paper, at least, it seemed as if he was the one pursuing the idea more than Allegra. It is possible that after a difficult childhood, he wanted the security and comfort only marriage could bring. On 8 August, Boris wrote to Allegra from the Pension Amazonas in Lisbon to ask whether she had yet broached the subject of marriage with her socialite mother Gaia and wealthy Old Etonian father William, known as Willie.