JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (2 page)

My judgment has been more than borne out by Boris’s seemingly irresistible rise from mere newspaper scribe to political titan. I have watched his progress for the past two decades and it has not been achieved through bumbling or wearing his heart on his sleeve. As early as 2002, I invited readers of the
Independent on Sunday
to imagine him standing victorious on the steps of Downing Street with ‘his smiling, highly presentable wife and four scrubbed-up kids fresh from his election triumph. As he lifts his arm to wave to the jubilant crowds waiting in the sunshine, the shreds of his ripped jacket pocket flap gently in the early summer breeze.’

This was probably the first time that it was suggested in print that Boris might be a future prime minister. Indeed it was considered a slightly outlandish prediction by those who had not encountered him
up close, though not so now. The fact is that Boris stands out from the crowd like no other public figure of his generation. There may be a touch of the Marmite factor about him – many either love or loathe him. But a man who confesses to holding a ‘Messiah complex’
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about his own abilities to win over a crowd or get things done deserves a closer look. Just what drives this person who has already scored so highly in the lottery of life?

The Boris brand has sold well and made him a wealthy man. He owns two Georgian properties, one listed, together worth millions of pounds; he and his wife Marina have between them pulled in many hundreds of thousands of pounds a year throughout most of their almost two-decade long marriage. Publishers, TV companies, newspapers and events managers searching for an after-dinner speaker are prepared to pay well over the odds for a sprinkling of Johnson fairy dust. Yet one of the more consistent facets of his personality is the pursuit of money, a trait that often gives an impression quite the opposite of jovial generosity.

It is a puzzling preoccupation considering Boris’s obvious earning power and the evident combined wealth of the greater Johnson dynasty, who together own highly valuable houses or large tracts of land in Islington, Regent’s Park, Notting Hill, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Greece. ‘The thing about the Johnsons is we don’t have any money,’ Boris’s sister Rachel is apt to say when asked why her family are always in such a hurry. ‘We have to earn our keep.’
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Someone else described the psyche as akin to ‘tramp dread’ – the feeling that if you stop making money for an instant, you will end up sleeping in a cardboard box. However, the ceaseless drive to inflate the collective Johnsonian bank balance is sometimes hard to understand. Boris frequently tells colleagues how he frets about money and how he was angry with his father Stanley for selling his old Primrose Hill home ‘on the cheap’ for £4 million in July 2007. All the riches, the power and the glory are never quite enough, it seems.

What else is clear is that Boris is merely the (current) leading light of Britain’s most powerful – and certainly our blondest – media and political dynasty. The Johnsons, who seek to dominate our national landscape, not only include sister Rachel, but also father Stanley.
Collectively, they make merciless enemies and harbour long-held grudges. Rachel describes this as their ‘Sicilian’ side: cross them or criticise them – or worse still, mock them – at your peril. Accustomed to near-universal praise and affection, they ruthlessly close ranks against detractors.

In early 2010 Rachel, who assiduously maintains her links with Oxford University, nominated writer and critic Roger Lewis for the prestigious chair of poetry. He was a worthy contender and Rachel offered to recruit the Johnson ‘block vote.’ ‘But then she came back and said that Boris had gone ballistic about the idea,’ recalls Lewis. It seemed the Mayor had taken offence at a
Daily Telegraph
review that Lewis had written
four
years previously of an earlier biography of Boris by Andrew Gimson. Boris was, it appears, still seething.

Rachel emailed Lewis:

Rachel came back later:

In fact, Lewis had not written ‘ungraciously’ about Boris’s children’s names in the piece but he had questioned how Boris could risk hurting them by his persistent infidelity to Marina. After all, as a child Boris had been greatly affected by his own father Stanley’s philandering, his mother’s depression and their eventual divorce. Lewis’s answer to his own question was that Boris is ‘totally wrapped up in himself. As with Stanley, “abstinence and chastity count for nothing with Boris”. In due course, Cassia Peaches, Lara Lettice, Milo and Theodore Apollo might like to tell their father what they think of that philosophy.’
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To the point and uncomfortable, perhaps, but the overall tone of the piece was jokey – even indulgent – rather than hostile to Boris or his family.

Eventually, Lewis came a distant and unexpected fifth in the poetry chair vote to Geoffrey Hill, although it is of course impossible to say what role, if any, Boris’s eruption played in that. ‘I’d always thought that he was the nice and funny person you see in public,’ says Lewis, ‘but I guess you don’t get to be as famous as that by being nice to everyone. He won’t put up with being teased himself whereas he’s happy to dish it out. I thought as a public figure he was fair game for mockery but I was taken aback by his vindictive and rather petty streak. It was as if a sleepy old beloved labrador had turned round and bitten someone.’

For good measure, at the time of the appearance of Lewis’s
Telegraph
article in 2006, the commissioning editor Sam Leith received an email from Boris (then MP for Henley and shadow higher education minister). It stated simply: ‘Fuck off and die.’

While Boris avoids full-on public confrontation, he saves battles such as these for behind closed doors but those who have known him for years are aware that he makes a bad enemy and is now in a position of power. The wife of one of his Bullingdon Club cohorts at Oxford said that her husband would ‘not speak about Boris, even off the record as he is frightened of what he might do back. A lot of people are.’

There are frequently collateral casualties with the great Boris blunderbuss, the smaller characters who fall under his wheels. But maybe few enough for that not to matter, and anyway, ‘he makes us laugh, doesn’t he?’ And yet despite this coldly ruthless pursuit of his own advancement, Boris will on occasion take the opportunity to show kindness. For those he wants to keep onside, he has an instinctive feel for the gesture to a powerful person’s child, the handwritten note for a favour granted, or sympathetic word to a grieving schoolmate’s mother that prevents him from making the enemies that his actions might otherwise create.

In that, as in so much else, he resembles one of his political heroes, Benjamin Disraeli, who was also considered witty, alluring and clever,
but for a long time more an amusing character than a serious player. Like Boris, ‘Dizzy’ disdained the male clubbiness of the House of Commons, preferring the company of women and, as a serious bon viveur, was on occasion touched by sexual scandal. Disraeli, who once declared: ‘I love fame, I love reputation,’ also loved the pursuit of pleasure in contrast to his great foe and rival, the pious and tormented Gladstone. Like Boris, Disraeli knew how to command affection through artful flamboyance and humour, and is consequently credited with bringing the Conservative party into the age of mass politics. Like Boris, he also enjoyed a mystique and evasiveness, but dropped followers intriguing clues about his real self in his novels. Above all, he was known for lack of political fixity, having changed sides in the key political debate of his time, the Corn Laws, thereafter and forever tarred with both the inconsistency and loose cannon brushes. As a Jew in nineteenth-century Britain, he was much more of an outsider than Boris but none of that stopped him from completing the journey to Downing Street and being remembered as one of the towering greats of British politics.

Boris also likes to invoke Winston Churchill when he talks about his own multi-faceted career – noting the great war-leader similarly combined his beloved journalism with politics. Although he might have added that Churchill – another man with a great zest for life – struggled at times to be taken seriously after a patchy early career, having twice changed sides in the House of Commons. Indeed, although considered undoubtedly brilliant, Churchill was only grudgingly offered the premiership in 1940. But, as Boris has privately told sympathetic Tories, in the manner of Churchill, he also considers it his destiny to lead his country.

The fascinating question is: does Boris have, as they did, what it takes to go all the way? Are these grand comparisons absurd or insightful?

When I embarked on this book, I wanted to answer these and many other questions about Boris, the real Boris, to unpick the man from the artfully created myth. Not from the point of view of one drawn herself from the political elite, or the same caste or tribe as Boris – or even the same sex. Nor do I, like some of those who have indulged
him, wish to be him either. I don’t want to find excuses for his behaviour – as so many commentators have – but reasons. It is said to be the question he most dreads being answered, but it is time we knew: just what makes Boris tick?

Judging by the enthusiastic and generous support I have encountered from the many people I have spoken to during my research, I am not the only one who wanted to know. Whether we be rival politicians, newspaper editors, spin doctors, enthusiastic supporters, bitter opponents, Left-leaning teachers, fashionistas, cabbies, couch potatoes or conscientious voters, we all love talking about Boris, speculating about his motives and pondering his future. We want to know and understand him more. Virtually every meeting or discussion I had, with nearly 200 contributors across Britain, America and Australia, overran its allotted time. Trains have been missed, appointments delayed, families at home kept waiting because people never tire of talking and asking about Boris. His appeal reaches way beyond Westminster into the heart of the nation and overseas.

Like my interviewees, I want to find out whether Boris is the cleverest man in the world – as he is said to believe – or merely one of the most cunning. Could he be, as he seems to believe, our saviour in times of political upheaval and the ‘hackgate’ scandal – a refreshing, break-the-mould leader? Or is this unlikely sex-god merely a calculated conceit, like his famous pre-ruffled hair?

For a boy about to be saddled with such a comically florid name, the birth of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in the early afternoon of 19 June 1964 was a far from grand affair. His mother Charlotte, a 22-year-old student, endured the final stages of labour alone in a low-rent hospital known as ‘the Clinic’ on New York’s Upper East Side. Her husband Stanley, 23, had been persuaded to attend only one of her antenatal classes and was not entirely sold on the idea that ‘real men bothered’ with what he later described as the ‘horrific details’.
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So, when Stanley chose to ‘step outside’
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the hospital near the East River on East 70th Street in search of a hearty lunch, his timing may not have been entirely coincidental. In any case, the pizza he enjoyed on Second Avenue must have been quite substantial. By the time he returned, the baby had entered the world and was safely wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a long row of other arrivals in the nursery. His heels had been carefully dipped in black ink to make footprints, a rudimentary form of post-partum identity check to avoid mix-ups in a busy public maternity ward.

The ‘lusty’ newborn, weighing in at 9lb 1oz, already sported the whip of platinum hair that would help make him a national phenomenon but there was little else to indicate these were the first hours of the most famous member of what has become Britain’s leading – and certainly its blondest – political and media clan. Or indeed, that the little scrap of humanity would later become the first
Conservative Mayor of London with a bigger personal mandate than almost any other elected office holder in Europe.

Both Boris’s parents are English, but Stanley considered it vital to secure dual US/British citizenship for their son and registered him with the US authorities, as well as the British Consulate. For all his English eccentricities and mannerisms, by birth Boris is pure ‘Noo York’ and, in nationality terms at least, half-American.

Stanley was in the US on a Harkness Fellowship to study the then newfangled subject of creative writing at the State University of Iowa. Some of his fellow new graduates were perhaps surprised that he had won such a prestigious and generous prize as he had garnered only a second-class degree from Exeter College, Oxford. Charlotte, a bohemian soul from a family of liberal intellectuals, had accompanied her husband back in the autumn of 1963, but when she became pregnant with Boris, Stanley abandoned his studies. He had, in any case, grown disillusioned: his poetry – which had scooped the prestigious Newdigate Prize, back in Oxford – had not won the applause he had expected in Iowa and so he decided to change tack, and town, to a rather more Johnsonian economics degree at New York’s Columbia University. But first, he wanted to get some travelling under his belt and so the couple headed for Mexico, initially by car and then Greyhound bus.

By this time Charlotte was suffering from morning sickness, exacerbated by the altitude in Mexico City. She was dreading the 20-hour slog by bus back to the border and then on to New York, but fortune shone on the Johnsons, as it so often does: in Mexico, they met up with a kindly Russian émigré whose daughter happened to be the girlfriend of one of Stanley’s Exeter College friends. Boris Litwin showered the young couple with baby gifts and provided them with two air tickets, saving Charlotte much discomfort. In return, she gratefully promised that if the baby were a boy, he would take their benefactor’s name.