JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (16 page)

‘Allegra seemed rather brittle psychologically, somewhat earnest, probably insecure and rather unhappy,’ recalls one of her then colleagues Nigel Reynolds, who says she rarely socialised with colleagues. ‘Here was this rather beautiful girl, who on initial meeting maybe seemed a little bit spoiled and stuck up, but I don’t think that was the case at all. Her diffidence was, I think, some sort of private anguish. She didn’t fit in with Fleet Street’s rather bullish ways and perhaps felt herself to be an outsider. She tried to please and engage people round her in the way that a puppy does, but somehow she always seemed to come unstuck.’

Allegra’s confidence was not boosted when a
Sunday Telegraph
piece on which she collaborated with Boris in the summer of 1986 caused her profound embarrassment. In the article under her name she had made out that she had been present at an event that she had, in fact, not attended, although Boris had. The article accused Tina Brown, former editor of
Tatler
, of devoting a lunch to the pursuit of ‘tasteless details’
¹
about the notorious death of Olivia Channon, daughter of the then Cabinet minister Paul Channon, who had choked on her own vomit at a smart Oxford party. As Allegra had not been present at the occasion, Brown was able to dismiss the entire article as fiction. The row must have been wounding for Allegra and is also revealing about Boris’s occasionally cavalier take on journalism. And yet she still garnered praise from high quarters. Sarah Sands, another colleague, remembers that the then Diary editor Geoffrey Wheatcroft thought
Allegra so glorious, he used to say: ‘There goes the future editor of
The Times
.’ ‘But in fact,’ says Sands, ‘Allegra was not really a born journalist – she didn’t have the scrappiness, the competitiveness, cunning or low-mindedness. Boris did. He was a force of nature; she was shy, cooler.’

Despite her success on the cover of
Tatler
– and on another occasion, a Terence Donovan shoot for
Vogue
– Allegra had also given up on modelling. Incidents such as the time she had been told to hide her copy of
War and Peace
because a fashion editor would think it indicative of a lack of commitment had convinced her that it was all ‘superficial, personally unfulfilling, and even pernicious.’
²
The opinionated Allegra, who was on the books of the renowned Models One agency, also railed against being repeatedly told of the need to be efficient, punctilious, polite and cheerful, regarding it as ‘personality prostitution.’
³

Attracted by the orderliness of the law after the unpredictability of journalism and modelling, Allegra decided to train as a solicitor. But while embarking on this hopefully more promising new career coincided with a new life married to Boris, there were already cracks in the edifice. Boris had won his marital prize; now he was in an excellent position to begin the pursuit of his next one: a brilliant career. It turned out that the two were incompatible. ‘When we got married, that was the end of the relationship, instead of the beginning,’ is how Allegra puts it. Friends agree it was less a question of violent arguments between them, more a mis-matching of ambitions: Allegra wanted a marriage; Boris wanted glory. ‘I never saw them row,’ says Noonie Minogue, one of Allegra’s closest friends for nearly 25 years. ‘They didn’t.’ And nor did Boris see any major trouble brewing. On a skiing trip in the French Alps with eight other friends, including Minogue, at that time, he told the rest of the group how ‘ridiculous’ divorce was and how he didn’t ‘believe in it.’

In Wolverhampton the local newspaper repertoire of non-stories about stranded pets, dreary council meetings and petty crime was sapping Boris’s habitual cheerfulness. He lived in digs with two other lodgers and a landlady called Brenda, who wore a wig and mules. In his misery, he wrote to Allegra, saying that life without her was a ‘cold
cup of urine.’
⁴
Brenda, meanwhile, told Boris that he needed to treat his beautiful young wife ‘like porcelain’ but he was in too much of a hurry to take her advice.

Derek Turner, then news editor, remembers Boris as ‘the most disorganised person I’ve ever encountered; he was clearly not cut out for life in the Black Country.’ Many of the trainees sent up from
The Times
– Boris among them – were not exactly given ‘rapturous welcomes’ as ‘they seemed selected for their connections rather than their suitability for [journalism.]’ But typically, Boris won them over with his ‘easy manner’ and ‘likeability.’ Even so, after the three months were up, Turner recalls writing a report in which he concluded that Boris would ‘never make it as a reporter and any future he had in journalism would be as a specialist writer.’ It was hardly a glowing endorsement.

At last, the call came to return to London and the glamour of reporting for the world’s most famous paper of record. The red braces reappeared from the wardrobe and an exciting future seemed assured, but his shambolic manner did not impress the hard-faced
Times
’ news editors. Boris continued to be deployed in the backwaters of journalism and given low-grade jobs, such as rewriting copy from wire news agencies for the inside news pages. One can only imagine how desperate the star of Eton and Oxford must have been for an opportunity to shine.

As one of two graduate trainees that year, he was assigned to shadow a senior reporter to observe how the professionals did it and he was lucky enough to be teamed up with seasoned Fleet Street legend and future
Telegraph
news editor David Sapsted. Unlike some of his less-indulgent colleagues, he warmed to the young Boris. ‘We were chalk and cheese – he, breathlessly posh and educated in the classics, me a hardened hack who had left school at 16 to become a trainee reporter on my local paper in Romford,’ says Sapsted. ‘But I took to the guy. For anyone with a penchant for dishevelled English eccentrics, it was hard not to.’ Sapsted took Boris on his first outside reporting job, an interview with the traumatised daughter of an African dictator, who had escaped death threats in her home country. A natural bantering joker, Sapsted found a way to encourage his
interviewee to relax and got the story in the bag. Boris was clearly uncomfortable with the whole process, however, sitting on a sofa in virtual silence throughout.

As Turner had warned, it quickly became clear that he was not cut out for the role of news reporter, with its requirements of physical stamina, easy familiarity with people from all backgrounds and foot-in-the-door bravado. He would rather other people did the ‘dirty work.’ ‘I got a call from John Jinks, the
Times
news editor, at home one evening,’ recalls Sapsted. ‘“Sappers,” he said, “Charlie [Wilson – the editor] wants you in Dover first thing in the morning to cover the National Union of Seamen’s strike. We sent Boris, but it’s kicking off down there and he can’t cope, so we want you to take over. Tell Boris to get his arse back to Wapping but do it nicely, will you – don’t make him feel bad.”’ In fact, he seemed only too pleased to be recalled. ‘When I broke the news to Boris outside the ferry port entrance the following morning, he was more than happy to return to London,’ Sapsted recalls. ‘I got the feeling – and not for the first time – that Boris preferred sitting, thinking and writing, rather than being on the front line.’

By spring 1988 and coming up to the age of 24, Boris could not have been feeling entirely comfortable about his second career choice. Not least because his younger sister Rachel, although still a student, was now outshining him by editing the
Oxford Myth
, a collection of deliberately provocative and pretentious essays about life at the university – probably the best of which was written by Boris. The tome garnered 45 reviews in the national press – not all of them bad – and provided Rachel rather than her brother with some useful notoriety. Meanwhile, there was Boris on a paper whose editor was rooted in the values of hard news and prized most the reporters who delivered it, but according to Sapsted, ‘could never quite get his head round Boris. The two were simply from different planets.’ Indeed, perhaps it was the pressure to make some sort of impact on
The Times
that led Boris to make the first public howler of his career.

The story was a harmless tale involving the discovery of the long-lost palace of Edward II by archaeologists digging on a building site
on the south bank of the Thames. Boris had been assigned because he seemed to know his history. So far so good, but he could not resist inserting a titillating paragraph about how the King would use the palace to cavort with his catamite, Piers Gaveston. The quote he used was sourced to a certain Dr Colin Lucas of Balliol College, Oxford. Suddenly the story became far more exciting than mere archaeology and was promoted to the front page.

Lucas had been a friend and housemate of Stanley’s at Oxford and was Boris’s godfather. Over breakfast on 20 May 1988, he came in for a bit of a shock. Not only had Boris not checked the quotation with him, it was, simply put, pure historical tosh. Piers Gaveston was beheaded in 1312, making it hard for him to cavort round a palace not constructed until 1325. Lucas, an ambitious fast-track academic on his way to a professorship at Chicago University and eventually the vice-chancellorship of Oxford, did not see the funny side. In any case, an expert on the French Revolution rather than medieval English kings, he risked becoming the laughing stock of history departments around the world. He complained to Charlie Wilson, the editor, who in turn replied: ‘Our reporter stands by his story.’ Lucas wrote back, saying there was no way that Boris could have obtained this quote from him because it was not right. His letter began: ‘Much as I would hate to damage the career prospects of a young journalist (particularly when he is one’s godson), but …’

Four days later, Boris penned another story, which aimed to defuse the row by backtracking on the original. It’s not clear whether this second quote from the historian is any more accurate a reflection of anything he actually said than the first: ‘Edward II is reputed to have led a life of wine and song with his catamite Piers Gaveston. But if 1325 (the date of the palace) is correct, that could hardly have taken place in this building since Gaveston was executed in 1312.’ In any case, it sealed Boris’s fate. He was summoned to appear before the editor, who told him that it was a ‘heinous crime’ to make up quotes on
The Times
. According to one account, rather than being contrite Boris pointed out that ‘most’ of the quotes on the paper were made up. Following this heroic but futile Last Stand, he was sacked. Wilson was one of very few bosses throughout Boris’s professional life not to
indulge him: from the school of hard knocks rather than Eton, he seemed immune to his protégé’s charms.

As Boris himself admits: ‘I left
The Times
in inglorious circumstances.’
⁵
But he has never truly repented, instead seeking to blame ‘whingeing historians’ and Lucas’s ‘ruthlessness’. Eight years after the event, he said: ‘I was asked to provide detail about Edward II. In desperation, I rang up Colin. He brilliantly extemporised some stuff about silken-haired youths and Piers Gaveston, which I put in. The problem was that the castle had not been constructed while Gaveston was still alive. A lot of whingeing, snivelling, fact-grubbing historians wrote asking sarcastically was this the same Colin Lucas who was an expert on the French Revolution. I had applied Colin’s description of life in Edward II’s court to the palace, which he did not intend. Colin showed his ruthlessness in vindicating the accuracy of his remarks.’
⁶

Boris also got his own back on his first editor. Later he was to describe Wilson as ‘a man straight from a Britflick gangster movie’
⁷
but long before that, he was to triumph over his nemesis by walking virtually straight from Wapping into a job on
The Times
’ arch rival, the
Daily Telegraph
. Boris knew the editor Max Hastings because as President of the Oxford Union, he had invited the distinguished former war correspondent to speak at a debate on 21 May 1986. He must have known he had made an impression that night and ever the consummate networker, he immediately contacted Hastings after being ejected from
The Times
and asked for a job (around this time, he was also offered a role by the Conservative Research Department but still fancying his chances in journalism, turned it down).
⁸
Hastings decided to take a gamble on this unknown quantity: after all, seeing him in action at the Oxford Union had persuaded him of Boris’s potential. It was not necessarily his glittering academic prizes that made Boris an appealing catch – as Hastings has noted, ‘a brilliant career at Eton and Oxford [is] so often the precursor of a lifetime of obscurity.’
⁹
It was more a question of standing out from the crowd, as he recollected from that Union debate: ‘I remember feeling cross that the evening seemed a benefit match for the presidential ego. No, let us be frank: I realised that this callow white lump in formal evening,
dress was a lot better at playing an audience than I was.’ And he went on: ‘Over the next few years, he developed the persona which has become famous today, a façade resembling that of PG Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle, allied to wit, charm, brilliance and startling flashes of instability.’
¹⁰

It was Boris’s great good fortune that Hastings hired
The Times
’ reject. No longer the star graduate with an unblemished record, without Hastings’ patronage, it is quite possible that Boris would have been lost forever to journalism at this point. Don Berry – Hastings’ right-hand man, known as ‘Uncle Don’ for his friendly unflappability – remembers his editor’s interest in ‘bright young Oxbridge types.’ ‘Why did Max take him on? He said he would take any of them and give them a chance – he would be approached by lots of well-connected people. But if their kids didn’t have talent, they would soon be out.’