JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (22 page)

‘When she was younger, people would say that with her beauty and wealth, she would have the world at her feet,’ her mother reflects. ‘And after she married Boris, it seemed they would, indeed, have it all. But they were not compatible. Boris is a man who needed someone very obedient and silent, who would be willing to stay in the back-ground and create a soothing home life, while giving him space to build a glittering career. My daughter wasn’t that kind of person. She’s not always been the most self-confident person, but she’s very strong-minded. Boris was very ambitious and Allegra is very sensitive.’
¹⁶

For some time, Allegra was very angry about the split. Two sources at
Private Eye
claim she tried to sell stories on her former husband, insisting the satirical magazine, ‘expose Boris before it is too late.’ Whether this is true remains unclear, but unflattering articles did indeed appear at this time, including a little-noticed one in August 1995 under the headline: ‘THE CROOK, THE
SPECTATOR
, THE HITMAN & HIS EX-WIFE (PART 94)’. First it noted that in the previous week’s
Spectator
Boris had written that the problem with the modern Briton was, ‘his reluctance or inability to take control of his woman and be head of a household.’ Considering its alleged source, the piece is worth quoting at length. It continues: ‘These moral lectures sound a little odd when one learns that Johnson had to arrange a quickie divorce from his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, after discovering that he had impregnated his lover, Marina Wheeler. Johnson’s belief that a man should take charge in the household scarcely tallies with his own domestic habits. He is notoriously reluctant to pay for anything (he wasn’t even prepared to foot the bill for his first honeymoon) and is almost incapable of dealing with income tax, insurance policies and other such duties that often fall to a head of the household. “The modern British male,” Johnson concluded in the
Spectator
last week, “is useless.” Speak for yourself, matey.’

Meanwhile, Allegra took to drink to fight her demons. She went through a tempestuous time, with some of her less-constant friends dropping her, claiming she had ‘changed.’ The ever-loyal Noonie
Minogue observed Allegra’s troubles were ‘very complex’ and that, ‘things were going to be hard anyway, not just because of what happened with Boris.’ But Allegra’s plight and condition was doubtless in stark contrast to Boris’s own marital bliss.

If anything, Boris became more self-sufficient and private once he recovered from the breakdown of his first marriage. It is as if the hurt he experienced made him determined to be ever more invulnerable. ‘Boris never once let his hair down,’ recalls Chris McLaughlin, who worked out in Brussels for the
Scotsman
. ‘He was never that matey with anyone; he never stayed long when we all got together. He liked to go off and have posh dinners but I don’t know who with. We used to wonder whether he might be shy, but surely he can’t have been given everything that he’s done? He was certainly a character and we would all talk about him a lot. We were trying to work out where he was coming from and never really found out.’

Many other journalists formed close friendships, living as they did far from home in a foreign city. But while Boris would sometimes be present at a gathering, say, in the Irish pub near the Berlaymont called Kitty O’Shea’s or the press bar at the European Parliament, he would never quite join in. Some took exception to his aloofness, interpreting it as arrogance. One senior rival, quoted elsewhere in these pages but who declined to be named here, decries what he sees as Boris’s ‘contempt of people he considers inferior in any way. He has a profound sense of class and hierarchy. He always went to receptions far less well-dressed than the rest of us because he believed he didn’t have to make an effort.’

Chris McLaughlin takes a more benign view despite Boris’s reputation for never standing a round: ‘He never bought drinks at the bar. I don’t think it was meanness, but perhaps he didn’t know the rules.’ Lunch was rarely, if ever, on Boris either. ‘He was amusing in his cups, but you were always wary,’ adds a senior EU official, who had observed Boris since his early days in Brussels. ‘I was told never to lend him money as he never paid it back – so when he asked for the equivalent of £50, I refused.’

He played the buffoon with new arrivals right up to the end of his
time in Brussels, even when he was already a star. ‘I arrived in 1993 as the foolish new boy,’ recalls James Landale, then the bureau junior for
The Times
. ‘Boris had been there four years by then, but came into press conferences very late, dishevelled, bumbling and groaning to me, “Oh, god, have I missed anything?” Not knowing better, I would fill him in on a story that got four paragraphs on page 27 in my paper, but with Boris’s spin made the splash and a page two lead in the
Telegraph
. I soon discovered that Boris’s ability to do this to people was going to be a real pain but that these stories were, shall we say, more speculative than full of actual content.’

There was another incident with Gardner, who protested to Boris over his direct lifting of six paragraphs from his story in the
FT
, commas and all. Boris cheekily replied that such slavish copying was surely permissible, ‘because we consider the
FT
to be a primary source.’ Of course, through flattery and fun, he got away with it.

Peter Guilford explains how Boris worked: ‘The key was, he did use people, he used everybody. It was in a charming, buffoonish way. But he used them. The reason people put up with it, by and large, is that at a certain time, when he sensed he had to, he would make time for everybody. It would be at some unorthodox time, like during a squash match or skiing down a mountain. And now that he’s famous, everyone remembers it.’ (Or at a funeral – Boris is also remembered for being kind to his original mentor Geoff Meade at the funeral of his first wife Sandra, giving a fine eulogy in her memory.)

Even when Boris embarrassed Guilford by badly misquoting him, he was forgiven. ‘I rang Boris and gave him a bollocking. He didn’t fight, never does – he rolls over and asks for his tummy to be tickled. I went along with it because I didn’t want to spoil my friendship. It’s the same for everyone.’ A well-known broadcaster based in Brussels at the time summarises Boris well: ‘He gets away with murder because he is very charming.’ Despite the charm, Boris’s rivals eventually became more circumspect in his company. Even Geoff Meade, who had done so much to launch him in Brussels, became wary and combines talk of his affection for Boris with disdain for his ‘lying, conniving’ side. ‘I’m always very careful what I say to Boris as I know he’ll always try to benefit from it,’ he says.

Certainly, the information exchange tended to be one-way: he was not a sharer. He disliked colleagues entering his office when he was working and even avoided cooperating on stories, as is the norm in journalism. Sometimes he could be outright obstructive with those instructed to assist him.

However, charm, manipulation and sheer individualism had served Boris well. When he finally packed his bags for London in 1994, he was leaving as a star. But in truth, his departure also saved him from embarrassment among his peers in Brussels, who by now were openly laughing at the latest ‘Borisism’. James Landale witnessed his declining powers: ‘There was a sense by the time I got out there that it was the end of an era – that Boris had become such a pariah amongst the EU officials that no one would talk to him any more. He was by then a caricature figure, and he had to go.’

Tony Robinson remembers Boris as unfailingly courteous (and, unlike many of his peers, polite to Mrs Robinson) but also the author of ‘complete inventions’ that undermined him as a serious player. ‘The stories generated a simmering annoyance amongst his peers, but that never spilled over into real anger. What did happen though was perhaps worse, as his conduct invited them not to take him seriously as a journalist capable of producing actual facts.’

To mark his departure in 1994, his fellow journalists performed a revue, for which Landale penned a poem mocking Boris’s flexible relationship with the
actualité
. Based on another infamous Boris non-story that proclaimed Britain was about to quit the EU in favour of EFTA – the Swiss-dominated, loosely-knit European Free Trade Association – it was closely modelled on
Matilda
by Hilaire Belloc. The
Telegraph
’s foreign desk takes the place of Matilda’s aunt. It began:

Landale then writes about one of Boris’s stories having been found to be false and concludes:

Afterwards, Boris sent Landale a note: ‘Dear James, Thank you very much for your poem – I think. Yours, Boris.’ ‘Well,’ says Landale. ‘We’d all suffered from Boris’s antics, so there was an element of payback in it – I guess he knew that.’

His credibility shot, Boris started his search for an escape route from Brussels. Back in London, there was also the feeling that it was time for fresh blood. In any case, the spotlight was moving a thousand kilometres to the southeast and the bloody events in the Balkans. Sensing the winds of change Boris had been lobbying bosses in London to allow him to reinvent himself as a war reporter – considered the most macho assignment in journalism. He managed to talk himself, along with one other journalist, onto a high-powered last-minute delegation to Belgrade and Croatia during an EU summit in Luxembourg. His sense of nervous excitement was palpable. ‘We were only gone for about 15 hours, but we met Milosevic and were in the room when a lot of the talks were going on,’ another journalist recalls. The trip clearly inspired Boris, but the
Telegraph
newspapers never agreed to his requests. They knew that he was far more valuable in the political – where interpretation was allowed, even encouraged – than military arena, where such creativity with the facts might actually prove dangerous.

Boris surmises that his lack of success in becoming a war reporter may have been linked to his notoriety as a prodigious spender of the
Telegraph
’s money. Long before he sought to portray himself as a paragon of thrift during his mayoral campaign, he described the newspaper’s reaction and his own wry interpretation of its response: “‘Nay Boris,”’ the Foreign Editor Frank Taylor eventually returned, “if you go to Yugoslavia, you’ll just take them all out to lunch.” This seems to be some sort of reference to my expenses claims,’
¹⁷
he wrote
sheepishly but with an element of journalistic pride; his expertise in this area was legendary. ‘Boris was indeed a major claimer of expenses,’ Taylor confirms. ‘It may have been a bit extravagant, but that was Boris. The bean-counters would go on about it, but I took a pretty liberal view.’

For the next few years, he would regularly travel back to Brussels but it was clear that he was ready for new challenges. His departure in 1994, although not mourned by all, certainly left the Belgian capital a duller place. Many, especially those not subscribing to the view that all Eurocrats were power-crazed empire-builders, had been outraged at his creative licence. And yet, his personal charm prevented them from becoming enemies. One rival, who grew exasperated with Boris’s antics, nevertheless remembers: ‘The French press railed against Boris, but they also loved him. He had a real panache and made the press room a more interesting place to be. When he came back to Brussels a few years after leaving and made an appearance at the Commission, the atmosphere was electric. Everyone was pleased to see him, even Bruno de Thomas [the rabidly French spokesman for Jacques Delors], despite the run-ins they had.’

‘Oh yes,’ agrees Geoff Meade. ‘When Boris was here, it was a golden era. We will never see his like again.’

But times had changed, and now Boris would have to change, too.

Boris and Marina make a couple of extraordinary contrasts. He is ursine, blond, exuberant and tweedily scruffy. She is tiny, bird-like, with a curtain of jet-black hair and a neat wardrobe of colourful designer clothes. But although he may be twice as big and twice as loud as Marina, in some ways she is arguably the steelier of the two. She can certainly thrash him on the tennis court with some dastardly shots and whatever the outward appearances, she has scored many notable victories against him since the start of their marriage.

When they arrived back in London in 1994, many expected the pair to settle in the fashionable west London district of Notting Hill. Boris’s sister Rachel lived there and it would soon lend its name to the new generation of rising Tories, notably David Cameron. But Marina favoured the New Labour heartland of Islington in north London and that is where they quickly headed. The choice turned out to be far more influential in Boris’s life and political outlook than just any ordinary and random house move. And, together with Marina’s growing influence, it is part of what has made him over the past few years such a curious and interesting political mix – and arguably electable as mayor.

They settled in busy, redbrick Calabria Road in Islington N5, near the grassy play spaces and tennis courts of Highbury Fields. Although a socially mixed street, where yuppy homes jostle with run-down flats, the houses are quite substantial. Boris settled on one after annoying the vendor of a smarter, but smaller house nearby, who had once been
a colleague of Stanley’s. ‘Boris came in, looked round, told me it wasn’t good enough for him and left,’ says the vendor. ‘He was the rudest viewer I’ve ever known.’

Visitors remarked on the warm, liberal and loving atmosphere that Marina soon created in Calabria Road. Her homes have a welcoming, lived-in appearance with no off-bounds areas for children and an appealing assortment of the detritus of family life. Children’s paintings were exhibited proudly alongside Boris’s impressive efforts; colours and fabrics chosen with child-friendliness and a cheerful practicality in mind. Guests inevitably described Calabria Road as a ‘happy’ rather than a smart or ostentatious home. It was noticeable, however, for its lack of pets. Boris believes that cats, in particular, are a ‘sure index of unsatisfied human cravings.’