JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (13 page)

It would have been understandable for him to feel nervous about being accepted by such an exalted family. Willie, who was chairman of the art auctioneer Christie’s, had two real ancestral seats rather than a dilapidated hillfarm on Exmoor. One was Woodhouse, a stately home in Shropshire, and, until it was sold, the seventeenth-century Aberuchill Castle in Perthshire (about which Gaia once admitted to having ‘not the slightest idea’ how many rooms there were). Through her father, Allegra was firmly rooted in generations of minor English nobility – not for her or Willie the Johnsonian insecurity of tenure or lack of roots. Indeed, the Mostyn-Owens can trace their ancestry back to Owen Glendower, the last native Welshman to claim the title Prince of Wales and a Welsh nationalist hero on a par with King Arthur in England. For Boris, Allegra was properly posh and the omens were not entirely favourable. Gaia Servadio, a formidable character, is said to have ‘scared the life’ out of him, while Willie Mostyn-Owen is quoted as having coldly described Allegra’s suitor as ‘rapacious’ and ‘willfully scruffy’.

The engagement also prompted a minor stir of astonishment on the couple’s return to Oxford. ‘Boris’s relationship with Allegra was rather difficult to understand,’ recalls Anne McElvoy, an Oxford contemporary. ‘Well, it was, and it wasn’t. Of course, she was a very glamorous girl but there was always a sort of distance between them. I remember going to his rooms once when I was editor of
Cherwell
and he said, “I can’t believe it says in your paper that Allegra is having a
very glamorous party.” “Well she is,” I replied. “But she hasn’t invited me!” he cried.

‘I think getting engaged at Oxford was all too soon. It was like they were rehearsing, playing at being grown ups. I think he was a boy who had always done everything precociously early – in the same way as he wanted to be President of the Union so that he could play at being prime minister.’

Furthermore, already there was a strong – even destructive – streak of rivalry between Boris and Allegra. ‘They used to compete on everything, even down to who had the best orgasm,’ remembers one contemporary. Perhaps that explains why Boris told Allegra’s mother that he had never skied when he joined the family on the French Alps one winter. Allegra and her brothers are acknowledged as accomplished skiers, but Boris, too was no slouch on the slopes: as a child, he had also gone on family skiing holidays.

‘All my children ski very well, as did I in those days,’ recalls Gaia. ‘I had rented a flat and he came to join us, but I was quite concerned because he said he hadn’t skied before and the slopes were difficult. But he threw himself down, and I kept thinking he’s not going to make it, he doesn’t know how! But he always did, and so I thought that boy must have enormous courage and determination. He takes things on and he will go far.’ Evidently, Boris’s little ruse had worked.

Meanwhile, Sebastian Shakespeare was being put through his paces by Stanley, who has always doted on his daughter, with her libidinous laugh, toothy smile and helmet of blonde hair. Although Sebastian went out with Rachel for most of his three years at Oxford, he formed the distinct impression that Stanley wanted his eldest daughter to advance the Johnson project by ‘marrying above her station.’ Stanley, he recalls, ‘had no compunction’ in making it clear that he felt Shakespeare – though thoroughly well-born and successful by non-Johnsonian standards – was neither rich nor grand enough to fit the bill. ‘Charlotte was very sweet towards me, whereas Stanley went out of his way to discombobulate me,’ he reveals. ‘I got the impression that I didn’t cut the mustard for him.’

Stanley had his unique ways of testing Sebastian’s mettle that made the keen young suitor feel distinctly unwanted. On his first visit to
Nethercote, Stanley gave Sebastian and Rachel a lift, ‘and drove us like the clappers, 90mph down these country lanes. I was absolutely terrified, but he was testing me, literally trying to shake me out. I was probably meant to crack. He wanted to see what I was made of.’

Indeed, this odd behaviour was not untypical. ‘There was also the memorable Wellington boot episode. We went out for a walk one very wet day in Nethercote and he insisted I wear his boots, even though I had my own. I thought it was curious, but it seemed rude to turn him down. Within a few minutes, I was awash with water as they had a bloody great hole in them. He cackled with laughter – and so did Rachel. It’s a Johnson jape, isn’t it? He’d got one over on me in front of Rachel because I was being polite. My ego didn’t just wilt, it comprehensively drowned.’ And as someone else, who has suffered at the hands of a Johnson jape, puts it: ‘They are much better at charm than they are at manners.’

Stanley’s antics worked, it seemed. After Oxford, Sebastian – later editor of the
Evening Standard
’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ – and Rachel drifted apart. In 1992, she went on to marry the blue-blooded Ivo Dawnay, an Old Etonian former journalist whose father was a private secretary to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, one grandfather Lawrence of Arabia’s commanding officer and the other Eighth Earl of Glasgow. Rachel occasionally holds grand gatherings at the home of the current Earl of Glasgow – the thirteenth-century Kelburn Castle, with heart-stopping views over the Firth of Clyde. (She would also insist they live in uber-modish Notting Hill, when Ivo, with less to prove socially, was rooting for a cheaper house in the less-fashionable west London surburb of Acton. ‘That insistence on the best is very Johnsonian,’ says one of Rachel’s closest friends.)

On their return to Oxford for the new Michaelmas term of 1985, Allegra became joint editor of
Isis
. Guppy was poetry editor, while Rachel reviewed books. Allegra also ran an interview with Anthony Goodman, then President of the Union, relaying his advice to any would-be successors that, ‘you do have to be able to play off one clique against another and still look as though you’re doing no such thing.’
¹²

Meanwhile, Boris rapidly set about planning his second assault on the presidency, no doubt bearing those words in mind. Boris Mark II was far more ambiguous politically, no longer the central casting Tory and standard Old Etonian candidate. He became deft at dodging questions about his political allegiances and made more use of his humour, personality, appearance and nice line in self-deprecation. In effect, he put himself through a hugely successful one-man rebrand much closer to the
Have I Got News For You
Boris that was to emerge nearly two decades later.

This personal remodelling was not so difficult as it sounds. Then as now, part of Boris liked being an establishment figure but there was also another side that revelled in his more esoteric background. Boris was now seen far less often with Guppy – at least in public. Allegra, although still with him, was also less visible and, according to contemporaries, ‘kept to her very narrow social circle just as Boris was realising he had to, for political reasons, spread out from his OE core.’

‘Allegra didn’t particularly hang on Boris’s arm at Union events,’ confirms a fellow Union activist and now prominent Tory, ‘but her relationship with him was something everyone was aware of – although that didn’t stop him from having a reputation as someone whom the ladies quite liked. It was more moths to the flame than flame to moths. Boris was slimmer then and really quite physically striking. Allegra, though, became completely off-bounds for everyone.’

Boris II would now spend time with a more mixed Oxford crowd, without actually becoming close to them. He was a more egalitarian creature, or perhaps more calculating. Certainly, he now sought out talent irrespective of background to help him take another pop at the top job. Many of them – often a little over-awed – were only too happy to be enlisted by a figure so glamorous and notorious.

This ‘disciplined and deluded collection of stooges’
¹³
– as Boris himself has referred to them – did all the hard graft for him through the autumn of 1985 in return for little more than the reflected glory of the candidate remembering their name and a vague promise (usually forgotten) of returned support in the future. As Boris himself explains: ‘The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception
of the stooge.’ Or, as Abraham Lincoln once put it: ‘If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him you are his sincere friend.’

Boris’s new acolytes drew lessons from the Sherlock victory and replicated much of his formidable electoral machine. Amateurism was out, replaced by a driven professionalism, albeit cunningly concealed by Boris’s buffoonery. As he conceded shortly afterwards, it is essential for a candidate of his background not to ‘appear too gritty or thrusting, or too party political.’
¹⁴

‘We managed to reach our tentacles into parts of the university community that others weren’t reaching,’ observes Anthony Frieze, one of Boris’s stooges-in-chief. ‘Although it was against the Union rules, which banned campaigning, it was total politics. Out of sight in private rooms, we had lists and lists of people to canvass, and who controlled which cell. It was all driven by a very strong sense of coalition with the SDP-supporting Limehouse Group – which helped with the grammar-school boys. We let them think that we were all for the realignment of politics, that Boris was “one of them” – the whole thing was a game of flexible geometry.’

So much for Boris’s legendary disorganisation; he also went out of his way to befriend fellow student Frank Luntz, who has gone on to become a key backroom figure in American polling and politics, but was then only starting out. Through a highly sophisticated poll conducted by Luntz, Boris was able to analyse his target audience in detail. Luntz’s forensic involvement, which predicted the result to within 1 per cent, raised Boris’s game well beyond the usual realm of student politics to a semi-professional status. A self-professed ‘Reagan-Thatcher Conservative’, Luntz informed Boris that he had no need to change – or
appear
to change – his politics to win. ‘I told him he was so popular that even in Oxford, where Conservatives were hated, he could have run and won as an outspoken Tory. He could have changed the whole image of Conservatism but he just didn’t want to do that.’

Instead Boris chose to reflect mid-80s realities by becoming a politically androgynous personality, seemingly offering something for everyone. One contemporary recalls: ‘You could read anything you
liked into this new Boris. So, if you were from a northern comprehensive like me, you liked the “I’m funny and you like funny, so vote for me” pitch. He promised an entertaining Presidency for the summer term when people want laughs rather than worthy debates on care for the elderly.’

Boris II also instinctively believed that he needed to rinse out the shades of blue from his electoral persona – that any kind of Thatcherite pedigree would now be the kiss of death to a Union campaign. On 29 January 1986, Oxford dons voted crushingly to refuse to give the Iron Lady an honorary degree in protest for her government’s cuts in education funding. This was the first time since the Second World War that an Oxford-educated Prime Minister had been denied the honour and illustrated the depth and breadth of anti-Conservative hostility. Boris studiously avoided the confrontation advocated by Luntz.

‘He was in a curious way both apolitical and extra-political,’ recalls one undergraduate from the time. ‘He did not appear partisan at all, but rather happily mushy in the middle. If you were left-wing Tory – and most Oxford Tories
were
, rather than Thatcherite – then you could say he was probably “one of us.” If you were part of the SDP ascendancy or a Liberal, then you thought, “Well, he’s hanging out with our lot, so he must be one of ours.”’ Such an astute observer as Nick Robinson, now the BBC’s political editor but then President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, had no idea of Boris’s true political loyalties. ‘I had not the faintest clue that Boris was a Conservative. Indeed, I would have told you, if you had asked me at the time, that he was a supporter of the SDP/Liberal Alliance. I think he must have taken the decision not to be seen as a Tory because he knew that to do so would be to lose.’ It also meant that Boris was able to avoid the poisonous Conservative factionalism at Oxford at the time, which could have badly divided his vote: he is not one to join cabals.

There has long been controversy over whether Boris actually joined the SDP at this time as part of these calculations. He almost certainly joined the University branch – most politically active undergraduates did so as a way of keeping tabs on interesting political events, but he
is unlikely to have joined the national party. That did not stop him from adopting their most eye-catching and totemic policies when it suited – as well as attacking Conservative policies, including their uncritical support of the then right-wing US Government led by President Ronald Reagan.

The most illuminating example of how Boris could trim with the wind came in what was for him the most important speech he made to the Union. The Presidential Debate on 28 November 1985 was his chance to set out his manifesto for a second attempt on the Presidency in the vote to take place the following day. He knew he needed to harness SDP votes to win and therefore spoke passionately in favour of the motion: ‘This house has had enough of two party politics.’

That night, he told the assembled Union masses: ‘There are two reasons why we should vote for a vote that counts. There is an overwhelming case for some type of electoral reform, some form of proportional representation. What sort of democracy is it where one party can get only two per cent less of the vote than another party and end up with a hundred fewer seats in the House of Commons? People will point to places like Italy. For them, a change of government is like a minor reshuffle and it works. They have a standard of living higher than ours.

‘[First past the post] causes a crude polarity, a Manichean dichotomy and is dividing the nation. The two old big parties are retreating into their heartlands and currying favour by adopting rigid politics. The ruthlessness of the current electoral system is forcing out views and opinions, which we may not take seriously until it is too late. This motion is no more than a statement of fact – we have had enough of two party politics. The country has shown it in general elections, local elections and by-elections.’
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His finale met rapturous applause. In contrast, when Carnegie responded, ‘There isn’t room for more than two parties in politics,’ he was hissed.