JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (25 page)

‘Millions of seven- to 15-year-olds are hooked, especially boys, and it is time someone had the guts to stand up, cross the room and just say no to Nintendo. It is time to garrotte the Game Boy and paralyse the PlayStation, and it is about time, as a society, that we admitted the catastrophic effect these blasted gizmos are having on the literacy and the prospects of young males,’ he opined in one column.
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Boris issued a call to action to other parents to deal with what he calls this ‘electronic opiate’ and ‘cause of ignorance and under-achievement and poverty.’ ‘Summon up all your strength, all your courage. Steel yourself for the screams and yank out that plug. And if they still kick up a fuss, then get out the sledgehammer and strike a blow for literacy.’

It gave all the impression of a compelling
cri de coeur
– and demonstrates only too well how brilliant Boris can be when he has real conviction. Readers could not help feeling that they were hearing from the real man. But the intimacy that Boris sometimes offers in print he often appears to be incapable of in the flesh. Indeed, while Marina arranged an active social life in Islington – with all the access it gave Boris to an alternative way of thinking – he retained a certain distance even while he was busy observing. Many people from Islington – and other spheres of his life – might describe themselves as Boris’s friends but while he is friendly to them, they are almost all mistaken about the friendship. As one of his fiercest critics acidly observes: ‘Like Lord Palmerston, Boris does not have friends, merely interests.’ One of his closest former aides puts it another way: ‘He is a detached person. A lot of people think that he’s their friend, but it’s funny because I’ve noticed that he never mentions them.’ It is as if he fears intimacy with people in case they find out what he really thinks, or perhaps that they might discover that he is not sure what he really thinks at all. Boris is unusually, almost uniquely, determined to keep people at arm’s length, it seems.

The few exceptions tend to be women, such as Nell Butler, wife of his Oxford friend Justin Rushbrooke (who has been unfailingly supportive of him and has grown in importance since university). With almost all other men, Boris rarely if ever relaxes. His former neighbour David Goodhart, whose wife Lucy Kellaway is very close to Marina, found the difficulty of getting behind the Boris public persona frustrating. The two couples spent many Islington evenings together and their respective children are also friendly, particularly the eldest daughters. However, Goodhart believes that genuine two-way conversations with Boris where there is a real mutual confidence are near impossible.

‘You never really get to know him,’ she says. ‘He never lets his hair down, even in these circumstances. We had very drunken evenings round at their house in Furlong Road but not one was memorable. They, and he, were always the same. He always speaks at the same pitch. He mocks everything, particularly ideas and thoughts that he calls –isms. He is fanatically anti-intellectual. I would never go for a pint to the pub with him, as you might expect with a neighbour or the husband of one of your wife’s greatest friends – there is no point unless there is likely to be some level of intimacy with someone. That is never the case with Boris.’

Lloyd Evans, who has known him since Oxford, makes the point that Boris rarely stops moving long enough for a proper chat. ‘People grumble that he won’t have a conversation with anyone – he’s always thinking about the next thing. At a party he’s always introducing you to someone else.’ Evans does not presume to call Boris a friend but as he is not seen as a potential rival, he has perhaps got a little closer then most. ‘What I’ve found when you do occasionally have conversations with him is that you get this sense that you are in his confidence. That is a particularly warm or pleasing place to be. Are the conversations two-way, is he interested in you and your relationships? No, no, I don’t think he is. Maybe it is a bit of a monologue. You can list his vices endlessly – the egomania, the vanity, the ruthless ambition, and probably, you don’t detect that there would be any great loyalty coming from him. But all those failings make him seem all the more lovable. It’s just the way he is, some sort of exotic species.’ ‘It’s partly
a competitive thing, alpha-man stuff but he’s not into other men at all,’ confirms Michael Binyon, who has known him for more than twenty years.

Boris’s wariness has another bizarre manifestation. For all his quick-fire wit, he does not really laugh. He looks amused – particularly at the reaction to his own jokes – and occasionally his shoulders move a little and his eyes crease. But few can recall a full-throttle Boris chuck le, let alone an abandoned guffaw. Attempts at laughter can sound a little forced. To laugh – as to cry – involves a loss of control, almost an admission of vulnerability and that is something he is unwilling to allow. ‘Who really knows Boris as a person?’ says a friend of Marina’s. ‘You never get to see his vulnerabilities. Perhaps Marina is the only one who does.’

What is certain is that the Islington years with Marina and the children have given Boris a sense of secure and consistent home life that he has probably never experienced before. They gave him an insight into another, more liberal world-view and an experience of the lives led by people outside the charmed circles of Eton and Oxford. What’s more, they underlined the great value to his life of his second wife, who not only indulged but also ‘educated’ him and who over those years, would on occasion refer to Boris as her ‘fifth child’. It was this tried-and-tested bedrock that allowed him to launch the next phase of his claim, if not to be ‘world king’ then surely the next best thing.

On his return to London in early 1994, Boris was recognised as having fought a good war in Brussels. For the Eurosceptic forces in the Tory party he had proved a valiant Fleet Street ally in the face of a bitter and interminable battle over national sovereignty. The pro-European Conservatives were left a reduced and ragged group who did not enjoy the benefit of a charismatic journalistic champion. Boris revelled in the glory. In what he himself conceded was a ‘babyish way,’ he appeared to be proud that his dispatches from Brussels might be at ‘the root’ of the Conservative Government’s misfortunes. He liked to recite the verdicts of others who thought they were, before trailing off with an unconvincing, ‘It’s all nonsense, of course.’
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But not everyone enjoyed the chaos. The bitterness of the Conservative civil war between pro- and anti-Europeans bewildered and bored the voters: the Prime Minister John Major annoyed or alienated both camps in turn by not conclusively aligning himself with either stance. He had famously called the awkward squad on the Right of the party the ‘Bastards’ – a label they appeared to relish but which betrayed the extent of his frustration. Meanwhile, the Cabinet pro-Europeans led by Kenneth Clarke and Douglas Hurd bridled at Major’s anti-Brussels rhetoric – which would raise exultant cheers in the House of Commons before the inevitable retreat once his isolated ministers entered
mano à mano
combat with their EU counterparts.

Major had never really recovered from the trauma of Black Wednesday, when the pound crashed out of the Exchange Rate
Mechanism (which tied European currencies to an agreed exchange rate band as a precursor to the single currency). Interest rates flickered briefly at 15 per cent, and the Treasury had thrown away £27 billion in trying to prop up sterling against the deutschmark; both were devastating failures. Major could not beat the markets, the pound was devalued anyway, while the American speculator George Soros walked away with a $1 billion profit at the taxpayers’ expense.

Major had eventually sacked his Chancellor, Norman Lamont, in a desperate bid for self-preservation and then in late 1993 launched a new political campaign that would ultimately render his government a laughing stock. The ‘Back to Basics’ theme was a well-meaning attempt to shift the emphasis away from the toxic subject of Europe to the more certain ground of law and order, education and public probity. But as Lamont, who went on to become one of Major’s fiercest critics, pointed out, it was: ‘extremely ill thought-out, and an example of [Major’s] tendency to think he had found a policy when he had merely found a phrase.’
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It also gave the press the green light to highlight Tory sleaze – of which there was plenty.

By the time Boris was settling into domestic life in Islington, his party was well on the road to electoral self-immolation. In February that year, the Tory MP Stephen Milligan had been found dead with an orange in his mouth as an apparent victim of erotic asphyxiation. The cash-for-questions scandal followed a few months later, in which Tory MPs were accused of accepting money in brown paper envelopes from Mohammed Fayed to table helpful Parliamentary questions. Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was later immersed in a complex scandal involving free stays at the Paris Ritz, Arab businessmen and arms dealers – which ended in his imprisonment for perjury. (Lord) Jeffrey Archer, a one-time deputy party chairman, who would also later go to jail for perjury, was being investigated by the Government for alleged insider dealing. It seemed that every other week another middle-aged Tory MP would be exposed as having an affair or fathering love children – to the point where political commentators observed Conservative sleaze had become Britain’s most productive industry.

Appalled by this display of ineptitude and then moral decay, voters
took any opportunity to punish John Major’s government – first, in the local elections of May 1994, when the Conservatives lost 429 seats and 18 councils. Then the following month, the party suffered its worst results of the twentieth century, winning only 18 out of 87 seats in the European Parliament compared to Labour’s 62. To cap it all, the young and presentable Tony Blair was elected Labour leader in July and after months of revelations of Tory sleaze, by December his party was 39 points ahead in the polls.

It was not a pretty picture for a young man no longer just ‘conscious of Tory feelings,’ but who had firmly, if secretly, decided to become an active Conservative politician. Perhaps for the first – but certainly not the last – time, the conflicting interests of the journalist and politician came into play. No longer could he just enjoy the sensation of throwing the rocks over the wall and hearing the greenhouse glass shatter; he himself was in danger of being cut by a flying shard.

However bad the political timing, it suited Boris to return to London to pursue his dream of a political career but he was actually given no choice by the
Telegraph
. Max Hastings wanted a different approach to the Brussels story, one less frightening to the horses. It was suggested that Boris’s editor, a moderate Euro-realist by instinct, was tired of the explosive line on Europe that his young correspondent had adopted. As Hastings himself puts it: ‘I fear it was the Brussels posting [that made] Boris the rabid Eurosceptic he later became.’
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‘The decision was taken to move Boris on,’ confirms Frank Taylor, foreign editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
, who had been one of Boris’s greatest supporters. ‘There was nothing wrong in terms of the coverage. I wouldn’t have been instrumental in the move but they did like to make changes. I don’t think any fault lay with him.’ Indeed his star was still in the ascendant and Hastings took another gamble on his celebrated young protégé. At the age of just 30, Boris was crowned assistant editor and chief political columnist. They were grand titles, and challenging ones: he had never managed a staff or worked with a team, and he had been out of the country for the previous five years. In the meantime, much had changed socially – the brash, flash Eighties had given way to the arguably Nicer Nineties, but the City
boom had also withered into recession and record numbers of repossessions. Domestic politics moved on accordingly.

Having been subsumed in the relatively one-track world of European affairs, Boris told an astonished colleague that he was a ‘bit worried [as] I haven’t got any political opinions.’
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When pushed, all he could come up with was that he was anti-Europe and anti-capital punishment. Boris – and his editor – must have sensed he was in danger of becoming branded a one-trick pony, confined to the EU corral; he continued to return frequently to Brussels to write sketches or commentaries on summits. Certainly, his knowledge of the people and processes of Europe made him a formidable opponent for Labour when it came into power in 1997, including Tony Blair and his pugilistic spin doctor Alastair Campbell .

‘Campbell had run-ins with Boris, and so did Blair over Brussels,’ recalls Toby Helm, who was the next-but-one EU correspondent for the
Telegraph
after Boris. ‘They had been warned about Boris because he knew his stuff so well but they fell into the usual trap and came out unprepared. Boris asked detailed questions, which Campbell just couldn’t handle so they realised they had to sharpen up – and they did. Six months later at the next summit, Campbell came back very knowledgeable and sharp. He must have learned practically every treaty by heart – that was partly down to Boris.’

Unbeknown to his colleagues, though, Boris had been busy working on his next move for some time. Most people assume that his political career began comparatively late in life when, as he turned 33, he fought a no-hope Parliamentary seat in the 1997 general election. In fact, he had been applying to become a candidate since 1993, when he was still in Brussels. It just took him a long and frustrating seven years to land a winnable one, and so he kept his efforts under wraps for as long as he could.

Although he did not act immediately, Boris likes to date the birth of his Parliamentary ambitions at least as far back as 1990. The then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd gave a speech in which, says Boris, he drew a ‘cunning distinction between achievers and commentators.’ Hurd argued that journalists should be seen, in Boris’s words, as ‘people living like parasites in Grub Street’ as distinct from those
‘clean-limbed, honourable fellows trying to improve the world’ and known as politicians.
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But Boris’s political dreams were not universally shared: the creatively polemical style of his Brussels’ reporting meant that not everyone in the Conservative party saw him as either honourable or trying to improve the world, or even possibly clean-limbed. And, crucially, that included the then Prime Minister John Major.