JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (24 page)

A friend of Marina’s elder sister Shirin, who has two children, said that Marina’s frantic life during these years when they were young was a matter of concern for her family. ‘She has brought up the children singlehandedly, according to Shirin. In fact, Shirin once told me that she didn’t want more children precisely because she had seen Marina run ragged with hers.’

It seems universally acknowledged that while Boris is inordinately fond of his children – and they of him – most of the burden of childcare or domestic duties has fallen to Marina, whatever his
professions to be a multi-tasking ‘careerist, nappy-changing MP-cum-journalist-cum-house-husband,’ father.
⁵
She has made sacrifices to leave him free to pursue his career – or rather, careers. Boris is not one to discuss domestic matters and Marina is the one to cook. ‘I’ve only ever seen him fry an onion,’ says one dinner party guest, ‘and I don’t think he enjoyed that much.’ Boris was also spotted at least once happily reading the magazines on sale at the local Waitrose branch in Holloway Road while Marina single-handedly pushed the trolley round the aisles.

Marina’s keypin role at home may well explain the fact that she has not taken silk despite her obvious talents and intelligence. She had still not put her name forward for consideration by the time she reached her mid-forties whereas real frontrunners are typically elevated at, or even before the age of 40. Her head of chambers, Robert Seabrook, says it has been entirely her decision: ‘She would get it, if she applied. I am a great fan of Marina’s – she must just be biding her time.’

Boris may also be in no rush for Marina to be elevated. While he has changed dramatically on other issues such as race, he continues to hold jurassic views on the higher education of women, blaming the prevalence of hoodies and NEETS ready to ‘mug you on the street corner’ on ‘the colossal expansion in the numbers of female graduates.’ The fact that they marry other graduates, his argument runs, means the wealth gap forces women from lower-income families to work ‘often with adverse consequences for family life and society as a whole’ as their ‘unloved and undisciplined children’ go on to terrorise everyone else.
⁶
It is certainly fair to say that Boris is really quite a traditionalist on gender and he confesses that ‘a Neanderthal corner of my heart worries about some aspects of the coming feminisation. Will we all become even more namby-pamby, elf-n-safety-conscious regulation-prone and generally incapable of beating the Australians at anything than we already are?’
⁷
He has also raged about ‘that ridiculous, compulsorily paid paternity leave’
⁸
and been overheard complaining that the fact Marina was working was to blame for his shortage of matching socks.

Marina’s ability to cope is nevertheless much admired. She deals
virtually solely with the challenges of domestic life, such as paying bills, dealing with the taxman or negotiating with estate agents. Her joint income with Boris – which during the Islington years rose rapidly to around £600,000 or £700,000 – soon provided the wherewithal. ‘I do remember thinking how does Marina do it,’ says a friend of Rachel’s. ‘She had four kids and worked full-time as a lawyer, with Boris never there. But the answer is staff. Over the years, they had a housekeeper, someone to help with cleaning, maybe even a weekend housekeeper plus a nanny or au pair.’

Bar the odd blip, the Johnson children seem to have inherited the resilient gene from both parents and have coped well. They are confident but not overly so. ‘All the children are physically and emotionally stocky and robust,’ says a close friend of Marina’s. ‘They are very grounded, very well balanced, despite everything. That’s down to Marina and I feel quite jealous of it.’ Another Islingtonian accused Boris of ‘only turning up for the jolly bits of parenting.’ But she also concedes that when he is around, his children adore being with him and largely enjoy a good life. ‘The children may not see Boris very much, but I got the impression they really enjoy his company when they do,’ says an old friend of Marina’s.

As they have grown older, he appears to love the fun as much as they do – which sometimes gets him into trouble, such as in August 2006 when he squeezed both Milo and Theo onto the front seat of a two-seater Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder that he was test-driving in the fast lane of the M6. They were photographed by another motorist and the safety lobby condemned his actions as ‘stupid’. But Boris insisted they were in no danger as they were wearing a seatbelt – the same one, as it happens – and the boys looked as if they were having the time of their lives. There is no doubt they enjoy quite a few of Boris’s professional perks – he had a motoring column at the time, which gave him access to some of the world’s fastest and most glamorous cars – and he has taken rugby-mad Milo on corporate jollies to Twickenham. He is also prepared to shell out, where his children are concerned. A family trip to Athens in June 2007 was nearly ruined when it turned out once they arrived at Luton airport that there was not enough room on the plane for all of his children.
He stood on a chair and theatrically offered fellow passengers £2,000 in return for two low-cost tickets – and crisis was averted when a couple took up his offer.

But one significant (male) political figure, whose approval Boris would be keen to court, notes that it’s not all about ‘flash and cash’. ‘I see Boris playing tennis with his son sometimes on Sunday mornings – in very odd shorts. I’m always struck that he seems to pass the good dad test, as his son seems to be having a good time. And although he says “hi” to me, there are some politicians who would forget their children entirely to have a half-hour gossip. He says hello, has a quick exchange, then gets back to the tennis.’

When the children were smaller, Boris had that gift of seemingly being able to forget the rest of the world for the short spaces of time he could devote to them. At a wedding in Ireland, Peter Guilford – who did not have children at the time – was struck by Boris’s behaviour. He remembers: ‘Boris turned up for a walk with his kids. As he walked along the pebbles on the beach with them, he was a different guy. He was holding one by the hand and had the other on his shoulders. He looked like a hands-on parent, but was he play-acting or simply throwing himself in for the moment? He was very convincing when he told me that this was what it was all about, but then immediately after that he spent the whole evening interviewing people at the wedding and writing his column.’

For all his ambition and his absences, Boris is a devoted and emotional father and family man. Like almost every parent, he suffers the odd twinge of doubt about his relationship with his children. ‘A propos of nothing, he once just started talking about his relationship with his children,’ recalls Lloyd Evans, who remembers him sounding anxious. ‘Boris said he didn’t feel that his kids respected him.’ And later, on another occasion, when asked by a journalist whether he had always possessed natural authority, he replied: ‘The sad truth is that my children would find that question satirical.’
⁹

While Boris’s childhood was sometimes lonely, and certainly hard-working, his own children have a sociable existence. Parents of Lara’s friends say she is very talkative and ‘really is the life and soul of any
party.’ And of course, like any parent Boris has been greatly influenced by having children and listening to what they have to say. He is not by nature a strict disciplinarian and far from being kept away during adult gatherings, his children are encouraged to join in. Anthony Howard recalled driving Boris’s mother Charlotte over to a dinner party at Furlong Road, to be joined by Marina’s parents and her friends and neighbours, Goodhart and Kellaway. ‘Marina had cooked and there were a good deal of interruptions, with children coming down and this kind of thing. It was all very amiable, very nice,’ he said. Boris is undoubtedly proud of his children – and indeed the fact he has so many seems in his eyes to be a badge of pride, even political virility. He has often made it clear that he would like even more.

Yet Boris has on occasion been attacked by fellow parents – often Islingtonians – who have accused him of being ‘eccentrically liberal’, particularly in regard to what he has allowed them to view on television. He sees nothing wrong in 11-year olds watching Roger Moore in old James Bond movies. Indeed their tame sex scenes, usually involving Moore’s wrinkly knees, parodic violence and complete lack of swearing, made them in his view ‘wholesome family viewing.’ The fairly violent cult films,
Hot Fuzz
and
Shaun of the Dead
, were similarly suitably entertaining for all the family despite their 15 certificates, because, ‘like families across Britain, our family has been richly entertained by the bit where they bludgeon the zombies with cricket bats, and the bit in
Hot Fuzz
where the spire falls from the church and skewers someone.’

Perhaps realising that his views – particularly on the latter two films – were a little controversial, he drew on his own childhood in support: ‘I have been racking my brains for a defence, and the first point to make is that we are always slightly stunned to discover what the younger generation is reading or watching. I remember my grand-mother being amazed that I was reading David Niven’s risqué memoir,
The Moon’s a Balloon
; and no one stopped me picking up
Flashman
, at the age of eleven, and discovering that the hero gets off to a cracking start in life by being expelled from school and raping his father’s mistress.’

He then concludes: ‘Sometimes I think our censoriousness is not so
much about protecting children as it is about preventing them from seeing the embarrassing silliness of adult behaviour.’
¹⁰

But there is one embarrassing aspect of adult – or semi-adult – behaviour that Boris seems particularly eager for his children to avoid. It’s an area in which he himself exercises an iron self-discipline: he has frequently lambasted the binge-drinking culture, its protagonists of bladdered lads and ladettes and the accompanying trophy of an illwon hangover. Neither Boris nor Marina is a big drinker – although both enjoy the odd glass of champagne or decent red wine: he abhors the loss of control – and dignity – inherent in drunkenness and the British tolerance, even admiration, of inebriation. He takes a more Continental view of savouring a drink rather than downing it. In quieter moments he admits to being able to handle only a couple of glasses at a time – and in the course of hundreds of interviews for this book relating to all stages of his life, only one person claimed to recall Boris being ‘hammered.’ Stanley’s father drank, as we saw in an earlier chapter, and that may well have had its effect on the habits of future Johnson generations, making them far more careful.

What is curious is that during the Islington years, Boris developed a habit of attributing his lateness, inability to answer awkward questions, ill-temper or apparent lack of preparedness in interviews to a debiliating hangover. Yet a real hangover seems unlikely in the extreme, as those who know him best will testify. Perhaps it’s just a convenient ruse – giving an impression of conviviality and ‘normalness’ to put interviewers off their guard while Boris’s razor mind is, in fact, as sharp as ever. If so, it is certainly an effective act and many have been taken in by it. Whether his children, with all the pressures they endure, can be equally controlled remains to be seen; they also have to contend with being in his shadow.

Despite their own achievements through hard graft and talent, Marina and Boris are not seen as obsessively pushy parents, although inevitably they must be ambitious for their children. In print, Boris has frequently referred to his distaste for parents who fight their own battles or inadequacies through the auspices of their offspring. One couple they are close to are habitually called the ‘pushiest parents in North London.’ In what is perhaps also a token rebellion against the
ultra-competitiveness of his own upbringing, when TV was largely banned and coming second not acceptable, he wrote and illustrated a little-noticed book of verse entitled
Perils of the Pushy Parents – A Cautionary Tale
. It contains the following revealing passages:

And then on the folly of preventing your offspring from watching television, he writes:

Rather unkindly, the
Guardian
reviewed it as ‘the most cringe-making book ever published’
¹¹
. No doubt Boris deposited his copy of that morning’s edition on Katz’s doorstep. Fortunately, early evidence suggests his children are bright and energetic enough themselves to succeed without the need for too much sharp-elbowed parenting.

Boris is pushy in one way, however, in expecting his offspring to show independence and initiative from an early age. He allowed them to travel unaccompanied by an adult on public transport from the age of eight (to the horror of some of Marina’s friends); he has instructed them ‘to look after themselves’ and walk away from any trouble rather than attempt to get involved.
¹²
But there are limits to his laissez-faire regime, and in one area he is far stricter than most parents: he is fanatically against games consoles, whose addictive powers he
compares to the highest grade of narcotics. There are few subjects on which he writes in such vehement and emotional language and on which the outrage seems entirely real rather than column- or headline-driven. It’s not a stance likely to curry the youth vote (and has not recently been re-aired).