JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (23 page)

While he embarked on his new career back in London, Marina rejoined the English bar, but was soon pregnant again. Their first son, Milo Arthur, was born the following year in 1995, Cassia Peaches arrived a couple of years later and Theodore Apollo, known as Theo, in 1999. The youngest narrowly escaped also being called Washington, which had seemed a good idea for a while following a glass of bedside celebratory champagne. One or two of the middle names reflected Boris’s exotic tastes, but the first names were perfectly serviceable for most school playgrounds, as Marina had intended. Although routinely known as Johnson, Marina ensured that her children, at least on formal occasions such as her father’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey, are known as Johnson-Wheeler; she also kept her maiden name for herself.

Of course, she has been able to do nothing about the fact that her offspring resemble their father far more than they do her. Cassia and Theo have the trademark white-blond Johnson hair, with Cassia taking so much after her father that she is frequently recognised as his daughter in a crowd. ‘She showed me round her school on an open day,’ said one parent, who had not previously met the Johnsons. ‘I had no idea Boris sent his kids to that school, but I knew immediately she must be related to him – the similarity was uncanny.’ Lara and Milo are a little darker, with honey-coloured hair, but also share their face-shape and stature with Boris. The similarities are so intense that the
half-Indian Marina is fond of protesting: ‘I’ve been genetically removed from my children’s life!’ Boris’s mother Charlotte also agrees that the blond hair gene is so strong in the Johnson family, ‘it defies attack from anyone else.’

Largely through their tribe of children, the couple put down extensive roots in an area dominated by scions of the liberal intelligentsia – people who mostly shared Marina’s political views on education, in particular, but racial and sexual discrimination, too. She had been brought up in an intellectual family with a long track record of Labour voting and support for liberal causes. Her father, Charles Wheeler, was an avid campaigner against capital punishment in America right up to his death from lung cancer at the age of 85 in 2008. Her mother, Dip, worked for Amnesty International and comes from a top-drawer Sikh family of highbrow liberals and knights of the British Empire from the Punjab, who were accustomed to a grand life with servants.

While her parents lived in Brussels, Marina was sent over the Channel to board at a public school in England with the motto of ‘Work of Each for the Wealth of all’. Bedales, now charging similar fees to Eton of up to £30,000 a year, has been renowned over the years for turning out upper-class bohemians. Hollywood actor Daniel Day-Lewis, model Sophie Dahl and singer Lily Allen are all alumnae. Co-educational and laid-back, it’s about as far removed from Eton in terms of public schools as it is possible to be. The informal ethos is one of collaboration over competition and a determination to be ‘different’. Marina earned a reputation for being a slightly intense, cerebral girl, who won a place to read Law at Fitzwilliam, one of the more modern, low-key colleges at Cambridge and some distance from the main university quarter.

At ‘Fitz’ she was awarded a lowly third in her first year of studies, but raised her game to 2:1 level in her second year and graduated in 1986 with an overall upper second degree. Another Cambridge law contemporary observes Marina was already accustomed to being linked with a famous alpha male through her father Charles, but that seemed to make her only the more formidable. ‘A lot of people at Cambridge knew who her father was,’
he says. ‘She already seemed so determined, someone who would surely not take any shit.’

In those early days, Boris had little time for Marina’s very different political heritage. When asked by the journalist Adam Raphael – an old Wheeler friend – how he had formulated his right-wing views, Boris replied, only half-jokingly, that he studied what Marina’s family thought on any particular subject and took a position exactly 180 degrees opposite. ‘I can’t go wrong,’ he exclaimed.

Their next move – to a cream-stucco mid-Victorian semi-detached villa in Furlong Road – was even further into what Boris calls the great north London ‘media gulch’ inhabited by newspaper editors and TV producers. But the house, which they bought in March 1999 for £470,000, was still not the grandiose residence inhabited by many of his far wealthier Old Etonian friends. Beyond the jungle of a front garden and crimson-painted front door was an obstacle course of ageing bicycles, musical instruments and piles of books, newspapers and coats. To the left, on the raised ground floor, was the sitting room, with its collection of ‘unplotted’ furniture and stripped pine floors. Downstairs was a fairly cluttered, well-used kitchen playroom. Upstairs, five bedrooms arranged over two floors. ‘The whole place was a domestic version of Boris’s desk at work,’ recalls Mark Law fondly.

A leading American journalist from
Vanity Fair
was sent over to interview Boris as a rising social and political British phenomenon. He arrived at Furlong Road at the appointed hour of 8 a.m. to find the house in disarray and Boris apparently still in bed. Michael Wolff saw through what he considered to be an ‘artful presentation’ that included Boris ostentatiously looking for yesterday’s discarded trousers on the sitting-room floor while dressed in not much more than a pair of boxers. In what was mainly a panegyric introduction to the American public, Wolff judged that ‘he quite clearly invites underestimation.’
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Indeed, Boris habitually rises early, often at 5 a.m., pacing his kitchen with a newspaper in one hand while munching a slice of toast in the other, or sometimes last night’s leftover chops. As with the early bird and the worm, this way Boris has read the papers and plotted the
day before most people are even awake. Like Margaret Thatcher, he needs less sleep than most of us.

Although Furlong Road is one of the prettiest in the area, it also suffered from its proximity to what one local described as the ‘Holloway badlands.’ Crime – and fear of crime – was an ever-present issue, with one close neighbour coming home to find a burglar still at work in her kitchen. This again would shape his political views. But Boris also now found himself physically at the centre of a group of cerebral liberal thinkers who would dominate the couple’s social lives. Ian Katz, for one, a senior editor at the
Guardian
, occupied the other half of their Victorian villa. There were moments of tension when the paper ran critical pieces on Boris, who would register a protest by leaving his copy on Katz’s doorstep. But Katz has also been a loyal friend on the paper. Opposite lived Marina’s close friend Lucy Kellaway, author and columnist on the
Financial Times
, and married with four children to the liberal commentator David Goodhart.

(Lord) Andrew Adonis, who was later to become a highly influential Labour schools minister and driving force behind its academy programme, lived just around the corner with his wife Kathryn. (The Adonis link came in very useful – Boris was able to seek advice from him on specialist education for the disabled son of a former Brussels colleague, who was returning to Britain. This gesture earned Boris credit among the now-dissipated Brussels press corps.) Tim Allan, one of Tony Blair’s spin doctors for most of the 1990s, also lived close by and was another member of what evolved into a high-powered, Left-leaning dinner party set.

Marina became a prominent ‘Islington mum’ through the state-run Canonbury Primary, where the local media and political types sent their children. This was no typical inner-city primary, however. In 2006, Boris acted as the celebrity auctioneer at a school fundraising evening. Coldplay’s business manager Paul Makin was a fellow parent and had offered the star lot: a promise that Chris Martin would play in the living room of the highest bidder. One parent put up £5,000 to secure the prize, while Boris is said to have offered another £5,000 to be shown around the House of Lords by Adonis. The evening raised tens of thousands.

Yet despite the glitz, the truth was that the school was struggling. It could not have been much more removed from the style of education that Boris – and Marina – had enjoyed. Pupils called staff by their first names and Boris himself remarked in 2002 on how ‘teachers have no power whatsoever to discipline [the children].’
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Although it had enjoyed a reputation for friendliness, extra-curricular clubs and good Year Six results, within a few years Canonbury was in crisis, with a headteacher of four years, Jay Henderson, suspended from the school in October 2008 while investigations into his conduct were carried out. He had been praised by Ofsted for ‘providing clear direction’ but was later sacked in May 2009 for gross misconduct after allegations that he had been accessing pornography on school premises.

The whole tawdry experience no doubt confirmed Boris in his desire to move his own children into the private sector. He is unrepentent in his choice of independent secondaries, stating in an interview that, ‘because we live in Islington, I extracted them. I have no embarrassment about it whatever.’ But at the same time he has talked increasingly passionately about the problems caused by middle-class flight from state education. ‘It becomes a self-fulfilling problem, self-generating, because the middle classes not having confidence in the schools perpetuates the trouble they experience.’
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Indeed, many evenings with the Islington set were spent discussing education – specifically state schools – with Marina railing about the poor provision locally at secondary level, in particular. At first, Boris wanted to part-solve the problem by sending his sons to Eton. ‘Marina put her foot down,’ says one local friend. ‘She did not want another Old Etonian in the house. And of course, like so many other battles, she won that one, too.’ Indeed, although the Johnson children are now all privately educated, Marina’s choice of schools are popular with the higher-earning, London-based liberal professional and media classes rather than Eton’s international plutocrats or landed gentry.

But the whole, if relatively brief experience of state education – and the problems it faces – was undoubtedly a sobering one for Boris and one that certainly, under Marina’s influence, shaped his views. For him too now, improving state provision became a political priority
that he reflected in his writing. He called for more male teachers in the primary sector, synthetic phonics to teach reading, learning multiplication tables by heart, academic competition including grammar schools, a ‘grand smashing of PlayStations’ and making all children learn two poems a term.

Marina – and her local set – also influenced his thinking on other issues such as race, homosexuality and, to some extent, global warming during those Islington years. ‘Like the other Left-wing women who have married Johnson men, Marina provides humanity,’ notes journalist Sarah Sands. But she does far more than that: Marina Claire Wheeler, with her Indian mother and different outlook, is a large part of what makes Boris such a fascinating figure. A Boris married to a ‘central casting’ Tory wife plying the boutiques of Notting Hill would still be a formidable politician, but it is Marina who provided him with the alternative Islington world-view without which he might just have been too strong meat for a mainstream electorate. So, when in 1999, Lord Macpherson of Cluny’s inquiry into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence uncovered ‘institutional racism’ at the heart of the Metropolitan Police, Boris’s reaction had been predictable in its contempt, dismissing the findings as ‘Orwellian,’ ‘weird’ and ‘crazy.’ But, by January 2001 he revealed: ‘I have had savage arguments with my nearest and dearest, and, slowly, I have begun to see things (Macpherson’s) way. The Laird of Cluny is no loony.’
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He also softened his views on homosexuality and climate change during these years, gradually moving away from his Tory shire-ish traditions to a far more metropolitan outlook. It is as if Marina, whom Boris used to refer to as ‘M’learned wife’, took on ‘educating’ Boris in liberal thinking where his mother had once laid off.

Robert Seabrook QC, her head of chambers, notes that Marina has a ‘steely core’ in her beliefs on issues such as justice and race. ‘It’s not a protective steeliness, but a principled one,’ he says. ‘She will stick up for her core values and stand up for those who deserve to be stood up for.’ Indeed, she has travelled to China with Seabrook to deliver lectures on administrative law there – ‘in the hope that we might in some way advance benign reform.’ She was paid expenses but donated the lectures as part of an ‘outreach’ project.

But while she was not only challenging Boris intellectually, Marina impressed friends and neighbours with her devotion to her children. ‘Marina is the sort of mother who will paint with them, swim with them, read, build things, just generally get down on the floor and get stuck in,’ says one admirer. She has also over the years manned the odd stall at a school fête. But giving so much of herself – while holding down a full-time job in the law and coping with Boris’s frenetic work rate – resulted in a certain degree of chaos when the kids were still little and over the years, a great deal of strain.

‘We were all going out to Chequers for lunch with Tony Blair,’ recalls George Jones, a former colleague at the
Telegraph
. ‘So we were going round to Boris’s house to pick him up on the way. It was absolutely full of young children, they were all over the place. Boris was late, his life is chaotic. There were books and toys everywhere and Marina was trying to keep order. One toddler was crying, but Boris didn’t seem to be doing anything to help.’

Dominic Lawson, the former editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
, once invited Boris and his family to stay at his house in Sussex for the weekend but says he barely remembers Marina. She was clearly kept busy parenting and consequently had virtually no time to socialise with the other adults. ‘I didn’t have great conversations with her, there were several children flying all over the place and I think she was trying to keep them under control,’ he says. Chris McLaughlin, now editor of
Tribune
, recalls bumping into Boris and Marina in a news-agent’s one Sunday morning when Lara was very small. ‘He had a baby under one arm and a stack of papers under another, and was busy handing over the baby as quickly as possible.’