JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (26 page)

Bloodied by those relentless internecine battles over Europe, he blamed Boris for recklessly fanning the Eurosceptic insurgency in the
Telegraph
. A then senior Whitehall official describes the Major government’s private view of Boris as an electoral assassin: ‘He caused a great deal of teeth-grinding amongst Major and his ministers and created enemies in the Tory party. He was both denouncing government policy in a persuasive way and also indirectly picking holes in its majority, making it more difficult to govern. Boris gave evident support, succour and ammunition to the anti-European [anti-Major] tendency of the Tory party. And reflective ministers thought that his line of attack was making them ultimately unelectable. It is
certain
that Boris had a long-term strategic effect on Tory fortunes – even if no one can exactly quantify the damage he caused.’

Douglas Hurd, who still harbours some affection for his fellow Eton Scholar, argues that Boris was simply the most
effective
of the many Eurosceptic journalists of the time whose EU output damaged the government. ‘The
Mail, Express, Telegraph
, the
Sun
were all part of one’s daily penance. They were all anti-British membership of the EU and they all employed people who overflowed on this subject, of whom Boris was the best informed. Boris was handed out with the rations; he was part of the problem.’

But Major shared little of Hurd’s fellow Old Etonian indulgence and saw Boris as a uniquely damaging figure for the Tories. Downing Street was aghast at the thought that Boris would continue his campaign as a Conservative MP. Although the ex-Prime Minister says he has no recollection of the incident, others recall him actually prepared to take the extraordinary step of banning Boris from the candidates’ list. ‘John Major complained about Boris and he could be outspoken about him,’ recalls (Lord) Norman Fowler, then chairman
of the party. ‘[The Prime Minister] didn’t much care for Boris or his views on Europe. Major thought the best way to explain his views on this was head-on. He was not, shall we say, over the moon about Boris standing.’

Major was not alone in his distaste for Boris’s ambitions. The Boris back lash began at a Parliamentary selection board held over one weekend in 1993 at an unremarkable hotel near Heathrow airport attended by some sixty people. Andrew Mitchell, then vice-chairman of the party in charge of candidates and also a government whip, was in the chair. Likened by many to an Army’s officers’ recruitment board – but without the assault course – the occasion cannot have been a comfortable experience for Boris. A number of MEPs who violently disagreed with his approach on Europe were there as assessors and officials. The thought of Boris, the notorious scourge of federalists and Europhiles everywhere, staking rightful claim to the Parliamentary palaces of Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg was, for some, too much to bear.

Although he was not one of the protestors, James Elles, a Conservative MEP, viewed Boris as an ‘
enfant terrible
always looking for the headline.’ Like many of his colleagues, he had known Stanley Johnson when he was an official at the European Commission and an MEP, which intensified the feelings of betrayal. It is clear that Mitchell came under great pressure to refuse Boris a place on the candidates’ list but he stood his ground, insisting the professional assessors should be allowed to get on with their job of selecting good-quality candidates from across the whole spectrum of Conservative political views. And so Boris’s name went through but his troubles were far from over.

After the meeting, Mitchell recalls a group of MEPs led by their chief whip in Europe, Richard Simmonds, raised the temperature by protesting about Boris in writing, both to Fowler and even the man credited with inspiring Boris to become an MEP: Douglas Hurd. The next night, Fowler took Mitchell aside in the Lobby of the House of Commons to warn that the Prime Minister was also seething at any suggestion Boris should become a candidate and that he was to see Major in person immediately.

Mitchell duly made his way to Major’s Commons office behind the Speaker’s Chair. The Prime Minister was indeed very angry but Mitchell warned that if he excluded Boris from the list, there was a danger the whole selection process would be brought into disrepute. He argued the list had to be seen to be a ‘broad church of Conservatism’ from which local associations could then choose. Mitchell’s arguments won the day: undesirous of yet another row over Europe, Major eventually agreed to back down. ‘It is to his credit that he did not exercise a Prime Ministerial veto,’ says Mitchell. ‘After all, Boris had been persistently beastly to him and repeatedly taken the mickey out of his European policy in the
Telegraph
.’

Fowler agrees that Major was never a vengeful man and in that, Boris was indeed lucky to escape the consequences of his wrath. Those ‘big beast’ politicians, such as Major, Hurd or Michael Heseltine, worst affected by his antics, have all now departed the stage. Pragmatism has replaced attrition in the Conservative party and Boris, whatever his past, has earned his electoral spurs. ‘I don’t think Boris made the rifts over Europe worse – if he hadn’t written this stuff from Brussels, someone else would have done but he wrote it rather more elegantly,’ Mitchell concludes before acknowledging, ‘The whole era was a dark night of the soul for the Tory party. We paid a terrible electoral price for what happened.’

The MEPs thought differently at the time, however, and continued their fight against Boris right up to the final decision-making stage, which was then presided over by the candidates’ advisory committee, chaired by Lord [Basil] Feldman. But Feldman backed Mitchell’s view and Boris finally officially joined the candidates’ list that summer. Even at that late stage his success was far from a foregone conclusion – it was widely understood that Mitchell would have resigned as Conservative vice-chairman, had the selection board’s decision been overturned.

What the episode does make clear is how sharply Boris divided the Tory party. Some, such as Mitchell, were prepared to take extraordinary steps to back someone they saw as uniquely gifted. Others sought to take similarly vigorous action to prevent his advance. Boris recalls one ‘normally genial minister’ going red with anger upon
seeing him and shrieking profanities at him over his writings that turned heads twenty yards away. His supporters, though, are not always rewarded with equal loyalty on Boris’s part.

Mindful of the row, Mitchell – ever the government whip – had extracted a promise from Boris that he would not seek a safe seat in the forthcoming Euro-elections of 1994. Boris duly agreed to put his name down for a ‘hopeless’ constituency, that time round. Naturally Mitchell was surprised to spot Boris’s name on a list of names applying for a plum Conservative seat and rang to suggest there must have been some sort of ‘mistake.’ Boris’s response consisted of a volley of exclamations and splutters then finally an agreement of withdrawal. In the event, he never did stand as an MEP and after returning to London from Brussels in 1994, quickly translated his name to the Westminster candidates’ list. Years later, he did take the time to send an effusive letter of thanks to Mitchell when he won the selection for the safe Westminster seat of Henley in 2000. It was a well-judged gesture that has stood him in good stead with a man who has since entered the Cabinet.

While Boris was battling against Europhiles for a seat in the Conservative party, he was also determined to find a new niche in journalism but one – or more than one – that suited him more than his employers. His intransigence angered the man who had done so much for him and would continue to be his editor until autumn 1995. ‘Max Hastings thought there was a very good journalist inside Boris that was trying to get out,’ recalls George Jones, one of Hastings’ trusted lieutenants and the
Telegraph
’s then political editor. ‘Max used to row with Boris because he was trying to turn him from a wild Brussels correspondent into a serious political commentator. But Boris wasn’t – and isn’t – the sort of person to take instruction or guidance. And Max has a very short attention span. If you don’t answer his question immediately, he loses interest. He couldn’t take Boris’s shambolic and rambling delivery, and his unwillingness to conform; he couldn’t wait. And Boris wouldn’t listen. There was simply no meeting of minds.’

Boris was notorious for letting his mind wander in what were
typically rather earnest gatherings of the ‘thinkers’ on the paper. He would make little pen-sketches of the people in the room rather than listen to what they were saying. There was one odd occasion when he seemed unfamiliar with the existence of President Clinton. Asked what he thought of Clinton’s latest escapade, ‘Boris just looked up and replied: “Who? Aaaarrrgh, who? Who?” remembers ex-
Telegraph
man and former MP Paul Goodman, ‘He seemed to be somewhere else entirely, a place a long way away.’

Goodman, comment editor on the paper at the time, remembers another illustrative conversation: ‘What are you going to write about today, Boris?’

‘Aaaarrrrgggghhh! Cripes! Erm. …’

‘Well?’

‘I thought … sort of … eeerrrhhhmmm.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean … um … Blair.’

‘What about him?’

‘Sort of … gosh! … Europe … and …’

‘And?’

‘Hague … I mean, Hague! … er … sort of …’

‘So, I’m to tell the Editor that you’re writing about sort of Blair, Europe and Hague, sort of?’

‘No … well … um … Yah! … er … That’s it!’

And seven hours or so later, an immaculately composed and piratically arresting essay would appear.’
⁶

But it was not just Hastings who Johnson annoyed with his bumbling buffoon routine. At one point Boris – now a senior
Telegraph
executive – was sent over to Belfast to cover a landmark in the Northern Irish peace process. David Trimble, the Unionist leader, emerged from the talks to give waiting journalists a briefing on progress. ‘Boris goes, “Er, David, you want to stay, you know, in the United Kingdom, and er, that other chappie over there wants to go with Ireland,” recalls Nick Robinson, one of the other journalists present. ‘And David Trimble just says: “Fuck off Boris.”’

‘That was Boris’s old trick, you see but one at which women are much better than men. Men generally want to show off how clever
they are; clever women are rather good in my experience at fluttering their eyelashes a bit and going, “Oh well, I don’t really understand this” and then getting amazing stories. I think Boris was playing the dumb blond trick in the hope of getting something but Trimble spotted it and refused to play along.’

In the circumstances, Boris was once again lucky to be offered a column on the
Telegraph
’s sister publication, the
Spectator
. ‘Max brought Boris back from Brussels, but had not yet really reassigned him,’ Dominic Lawson, the
Spectator
’s then editor, recalls. ‘There was a strange hiatus and I was looking for someone to write a political column. Of course Boris seemed ideal – he was a fantastic writer. So I gave him his first column, under a formal weekly arrangement. He got paid extra for it, and Max was fine with that.’

The column drew mixed reviews, with some claiming it read as if it had been rushed. Loyally, Lawson thought Boris’s work was ‘absolutely fantastic’ and Boris made sure he was equally flattering in return. ‘He said in some piece that “Dominic was the best copy-editor I’ve ever had to work with,”’ Lawson recalls. ‘But I don’t remember ever having to do much copy-editing because it always worked, it hung together perfectly.’

Soon Boris was also building up his profile in the
Telegraph
itself. He set to work on developing a persona as a political columnist – although as yet without the worldview ideology or convictions on a whole range of subjects that informed many of his rivals. In some ways this was his greatest asset: his pieces were eclectic, often humorous and with a conversational style all of his own. Within three years, he had been named Commentator of the Year at the What the Papers Say awards. But it was also during these years that Boris wrote many of the pieces that have since come back to haunt him – and which provided his metropolitan critics with the brush to paint him as an extreme right-winger and closet racist.

He had not yet developed the political antennae to detect words or phrases that were mad, bad or just plain dangerous to use outside ‘Tory boy’ circles. It is worth looking at what he wrote then – to marvel at the success of the personal rebranding since. Had he continued to expound these views in the way that he did, it is hard to
imagine him clasped to London’s bosom as Mayor (or indeed, being received into the Islington dinner party circuit). So, on the Scott report on arms-to-Iraq, he wrote in 1996 that MPs in the Chamber were ‘toting Sir Richard’s oeuvre like puffing coolies,’ an offensive term from the vocabulary of Britain’s imperialist past used to describe Chinese workers.
⁷
Worse still was his repeated use of the word ‘piccaninny’ – a racist term for black children previously most famous for being used by Enoch Powell in his Rivers of Blood speech against immigration.

On the fall of Jonathan Aitken, he wrote in the
Telegraph
on 25 June 1997, ‘news reaches us, perhaps brought into a cleft stick by some piccaninny from the steaming Mato Grosso’ that the disgraced MP had resigned from the Privy Council. Some time later, he compounded the offence by supposing ‘that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.’ The piece continued: ‘One can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.’
⁸

No one can doubt the sheer chutzpah of his writing – or the probability that he was using such language in irony – but the judgment is still open to question. In another article entitled ‘Cancel the guilt trip. Africa is a mess, but it is simply not credible to blame colonialism,’ Boris appeared to be advocating a new imperialism – ‘The Continent may be a blot but it is not a blot on our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.’
⁹