JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (19 page)

Most of Boris’s stories speculated on the latest schemes of Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, who was then determinedly driving forward the process of European integration. During his extensive term of office, from 1985–1994, his career outlived that of his arch enemy Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister. He also pulled off some historic achievements. These included the Single European Market in 1986 (making the entire EU an open area for the free movement of goods and services), the Schengen Agreement of 1990 (under which most EU nations, but not Britain, removed systematic border controls between participating
countries) and above all, the Maastricht Treaty – which, when finally ratified in 1993, set in train greater political integration and the process towards the introduction of the Euro in 1999.

In 1989, Delors had set the agenda for reaching economic and monetary union in what was known as the Delors Report (with political union added to the mix as a result of a bargain between German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the French President, François Mitterrand). ‘The single European market needs a single European currency was their cry. We should not have been surprised. It had been their ambition for a long time,’ wrote John Major, after leaving office following the General Election of 1997.
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With his sights set so high, Delors’ highly tuned political manoeuvring skills came into play. The diminutive, yet formidable Frenchman frequently triumphed over the entire British government and diplomatic service, leaving them looking flat-footed and foolish. In hostile British tabloid land, however, he was regarded as dastardly, with the
Sun
resorting to the infamous splash headline of ‘UP YOURS DELORS!’

Even this semi-mythical Frenchman was eventually outsmarted by Boris, who won his battles where HM Government had failed, through speed, wit and his own brand of brilliant invective. Delors and his team of otherwise gifted advisers, though trained in the schemer’s academy of Parisian politics, seemed bereft of weapons with which to fight back. Both men shared the ability to charm, to flatter and to plan strategically – plus a feel for the ways and means of the EU derived from years of association therewith. But Delors specifically lacked Boris’s winning sense of fun, colour and the absurd, making this ultimately an uneven contest. ‘We answer his attacks,’ fretted one EU official, ‘but the problem is that our answers are not funny.’

Indeed, so powerful did Boris become while still in his twenties that some visiting Ministers of the Crown would delay press conferences until he deigned to turn up (while others fearing his difficult questioning would secretly pray he would not show at all). Virtually all would spend hours deliberating on how to ‘Boris-proof ‘ their policies or announcements. He was by no means universally popular within government circles, despite his self-appointed championing of
the British cause, because his natural wit, mischief and ambition made him impossible to control. There were rumours at the time that, at least on one occasion, the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd tried to get his friend Max Hastings to sack Boris. Hurd himself dismisses this as ‘rubbish’ and ‘not my style’ – and Hastings also says that he ‘never complained.’

Indeed, Hurd recalls that they had a relatively ‘joshy’ relationship, finding that joking with his fellow Old Etonian King’s Scholar, ‘helped to keep him off my back. Max and I had lunch at Wiltons once with Boris, and he went through his paces. But that was perfectly friendly.’

Hurd’s characteristic laid-back and generous approach was hardly met with reciprocal loyalty, however. Boris in turn accused him of ‘capitulating’ in key negotiations with the Europeans over a range of subjects, from lifting the export ban on British post-BSE beef, the talks on Maastricht and even the failure to send the troops into the former Yugoslavia early enough to avert catastrophe.
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And yet Hurd says Boris’s attacks were ‘within reasonable bounds.’ It is as if the former foreign secretary, who describes himself as neither ‘original’ nor ‘brilliant’,
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decided to indulge Boris because he saw in him the sort of sparkling young man he himself might have wished to be. Boris seems to have sensed – correctly – that Hurd was one important person he could attack with impunity.

But Boris was becoming ‘an issue’ for the British Government as a whole and undermining its negotiating position. Officials from that time talk of the ‘constant headaches’ he caused them, and there are elements of distrust that remain to this day. ‘The Foreign Office even set up a Boris unit, a team of people tasked with rebutting negative Boris stories or trying to stop them appearing in the first place,’ claims one well-informed Brussels source from the time. ‘They were utterly obsessed with him,’ confirms another. ‘Sir John Kerr [then Britain’s Ambassador to the EU] told guests at a private lunch that “we’re working on Boris.”’

A key Government source confirms Boris was a source of constant concern not only within the Foreign Office but right across the Major administration. ‘We were struggling to maintain our position in Europe,’ recalls one high-flying official on the Boris brief. Boris and the
Telegraph
newspapers were ‘key factors’ in the ‘presentation of policy,’ he confirms, but whatever the Government’s efforts to advance its arguments, ‘he still managed to put us on the back foot.’ Another Government source recalls: ‘He has a brilliant talent with words – and a great imagination [and] he wasn’t deterred if the facts didn’t quite sustain his line of argument. I would sometimes phone him up, astonished, and ask, “What was all that about?” He would just waffle [with vague excuses such as] “that’s the way I saw it”’.

Sir Richard Stagg, who went on to become High Commissioner in Delhi, but was then the British government’s press secretary in Brussels, remembers how Boris stood out from the rest of the British press corps – even those who quickly followed his anti-Delorian stance – by straddling the dividing line between reporter and politician. ‘He used these dull technical EU matters to sustain his thesis that a Delorian super-state was being created, but in a very entertaining way,’ explains Sir Richard. ‘The difference between Boris and most of the rest of the press corps was perhaps that he had a clearer intellectual idea of what he thought was right or wrong. Others wanted to lead the agenda journalistically. They just wanted a hell of a story, he had more of a political purpose.’

Hurd has vivid memories from the receiving end of what became known in Government circles as Boris’s ‘grenades’: ‘The image that stays in my mind is the end of a bloody day in the Council of Ministers [the meeting of EU foreign ministers]. It has been rough-going and you’re tired. Your private secretary says to you, “Now it’s the press, Secretary of State.” I heave a sigh. I go into the room and there is Boris, with his shaggy locks, in the front row. He is the best informed of the press corps; he grew up with the whole EU/EC thing. He usually puts his question late, well after my platitudinous opening remarks – I wait for it, I know it will come. The word “dread” is a bit high – it is more like a sparring match. The question is always critical, from some extra piece of knowledge that he has. I can still see him waiting to throw his grenade, and he does.’ Boris, he says warmly, was one of a group of people who saw it as their duty to make life ‘more difficult for me.’

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Of course Boris was lucky to enough to find himself at the centre of such a big story. Margaret Thatcher, who cherished Boris’s reports from the Euro-front line, fell from power 17 months after he arrived in town as a direct result of the EU summit in October 1990, in Rome. She had been the victim of an ambush by the Italians, who sprang on her the date of 1999 for the launch of the euro. Returning to the House of Commons on 30 October 1990, Thatcher famously declared: ‘No, no, no’ in response to what she saw as many and various European integrationist plots.

Two days later, Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned as Deputy Prime Minister in protest at her intransigent European policy – and within a month, she too had gone after failing to garner sufficient support in the inevitable leadership contest. The putsch was of seismic political significance and the end of an era. Boris greatly benefited from it. (He famously wrote that, while he disputed the account, his ‘wife Marina’ claimed to have found him sobbing in the street over Thatcher’s downfall, claiming it was if ‘someone had shot Nanny.’
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It is intriguing to note that in 1990, he was still married to Allegra.)

After Thatcher’s demise, the battle lines were drawn deeper between Britain’s ever-hardening Euro-reluctance and the enthusiastic Euro empire-builders on the continent. Europe dominated the agenda and Boris found himself on the front line. All the British newspapers staffed full-time offices in the city and there was a buzz to the place that suited him well. Many journalists sent to Brussels in the late 1980s and early 90s were, like Boris, rising stars. Some have indeed gone on to great things – Lionel Barber was to edit the
Financial Times
(he was then its Brussels bureau chief), Sarah Lambert (formerly of the
Independent
) later headed the European Commission mission in London and David Gardner of the
FT
became an internationally renowned authority on the Middle East. Yet his status as maverick-in-chief ensured only Boris emerged as a true household name and national figure. Under the Canadian-born tycoon Lord (Conrad) Black, who had been ennobled by Thatcher and mourned her loss, the
Daily Telegraph
and
Sunday Telegraph
newspapers became increasingly virulently anti-Europe. Boris, as ever, seized his chance to
up the ante. ‘He was feeding the appetite to make Delors and Brussels look stupid,’ recalls David Usborne.

While Boris’s stories were becoming apparently more heavyweight and certainly more influential on the affairs of the entire EU, his fellow journalists and former helpers were now seeing through the bumbling façade and becoming increasingly uneasy. Usborne continues: ‘He wasn’t making things up necessarily, just over-egging to a degree that was dishonest. I always assumed he didn’t believe that stuff. He couldn’t do! But he played the
Telegraph
game brilliantly. It was always clear he was going for the main prize but he compromised his intellectual integrity to get on. And I assume he has done that in the rest of his career since. I was irritated by it – not least because his father was an EU bureaucrat. I told Boris in a jokey way – you’re writing out of your ass.’

Boris’s opportunistic – some might say, pragmatic – approach to politics came to the fore in Brussels. Despite his supposed tears after the shooting of ‘Nanny’, it’s fair to say that he did not share her sense of ideological conviction. Indeed, it is very telling that few of his close associates believe that his Euroscepticism is anything like as rabid as it seems. Some don’t hold with the idea that Boris is actually Eurosceptic at all – but that he, in fact, felt much sympathy for the ambitions of Brussels, not least because of his father’s Euro-career and his own childhood and schooling in the city. David Gardner of the
Financial Times
recalls, ‘whenever Boris got on my nerves, I would threaten to out him as a federast. Under that confected exterior lurks a committed Europhile!’ Even Douglas Hurd, so often the brunt of his anti-European crusades, observes that although Boris ‘wasn’t one for wearing his opinions on his sleeve,’ he did not believe that he held ‘entirely negative’ views on the EU.

On one occasion, when an EU directive was criticised as invasive by Gardner in the normally pro-European
Financial Times
, its Brussels office was besieged by complaints from Boris. ‘Britain had just signed off what we thought was arguably the single most intrusive bit of legislation ever devised in Brussels – the Habitats Directive, which took central control over the status and future of whole swathes of the European landmass, particularly in countries like Spain,’ says
Gardner, occupying for once what might have been expected to be Boris-friendly territory. But Boris himself was incensed. ‘He jammed the
FT
’s fax machine with reams and reams of pages complaining about this “outrageous slur”. It got to the point where the fax actually ran out of paper and we decided not to replace it.’ So here was Boris in manic defence of the same interventionist EU he had created a top-flight career from attacking. Interestingly, in clannish Johnsonian style, he was also defending the directive’s author: his father Stanley.

Charles Grant, then the
Economist
’s correspondent in Brussels – and now director of the pro-Europe Centre for European Reform – started in town at the same time as Boris: 1989. He recalls how Boris’s stance changed. ‘He was not writing very Eurosceptic stuff for the first year or two. I always felt that even later, he just wrote that way to make a name for himself. He didn’t like that point of view when I put it to him.’ ‘Far from being a hardline Eurosceptic, I actually had the impression that he was really a federalist,’ agrees Peter Guilford, who used to play ferociously competitive squash with Boris when working as spokesman for Sir Leon Brittan, EU Commissioner from 1989 to 1999. Guilford was one of the few who Boris occasionally confided in, not viewing him as a potential rival. ‘But Boris also saw his job as to entertain, to please his editors’ prejudices and thereby advance his career. He put that before accurate news judgement and he was clever enough to get away with it. Boris brought the entertainment factor of Brussels coverage up, but the quality and accuracy down,’ he adds.

Indeed, many of those accompanying him during those heady years in Brussels could not fail to note that his published words were in stark contrast to the way in which Boris spoke privately about the EU and its dramatis personae. He was far more sympathetic, even affectionate in person than the anti-Brussels rants under his name in print. In truth, he can be said to be neither truly anti-European nor a little Englander. As Guilford puts it: ‘He was never quintessentially English, not in Brussels nor afterwards.’ In Brussels some began to feel annoyed about this apparent contradiction. It is telling that he rarely worked alongside other journalists but typically sought a quiet corner out of sight to write, or when he could, would absent himself from the pack
entirely to seek refuge in the
Telegraph
office. Like Superman, he would then undergo a startling and virtually instantaneous transformation from Bumbling Boris to Bilious Boris before penning yet another explosive tract.