JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (29 page)

Stanway was also an admirer, for all his irritation. ‘Boris is a superlative writer. It’s seamless – if you take just one word out, it all falls apart.’ In fact, Boris would typically write 50 words under the required length so that no one would actually be able to cut his prose. But Stanway also observed that far from finding it easy, in the early days he ‘had to work very hard at it. It’s wrong to think that he just messes about. There was quite a lot of pacing and shouting too.’ Stanway was grateful for a number of well-timed gestures from Boris that prevented him ever feeling quite so cross again. Not only was he invited to a convivial lunch at the
Spectator
– a popular date in anyone’s diary – but Stanway’s ‘kindness’ was also acknowledged by Boris in one of his books. Boris even let him smoke in his office when he was not there. ‘If he kept me fairly sweet, I probably wouldn’t complain about him quite as much than if he treated me as dirt under his feet,’ Stanway suggests. He was snubbed, however, as soon as he was made redundant in 2010. After 13 years of subbing his copy and enduring his foibles, he never heard from Boris again.

While his copy was late, Boris himself was frequently not there at all. In the autumn of 1995, he was responsible for commissioning copy for the comment pages on the
Telegraph
if Simon Heffer took a day off. On more than one occasion he failed to do so, and a panic-stricken office would have to track down Heffer to ask what to do. One notorious occasion during the Conservative party conference that year, Boris disappeared for longer than usual. He could not be found anywhere, but was needed to write an emergency leader on the death of a prominent politician. He did not answer his mobile phone – a capital offence for most journalists – and had not booked into his
hotel. In the end, he was found at the eleventh hour, but again it went right up to the wire. It transpired that he had spent the weekend staying with the Eurosceptic politician Bill Cash at his house in Shropshire. His lack of team spirit was more than some of his colleagues could endure; he could not claim to be close to any of them. His political sights were perhaps now being put first – and some felt very angry about having to cover for him while he was busy building a Conservative power base.

‘People could never find him and he was always perennially late, even for things he had arranged,’ George Jones remembers. And once again he developed a reputation for forming an army of stooges, people with useful knowledge, contacts, influence or just patience. ‘Boris is friendly with people who are useful to him,’ says Jones, whose familiarity with the ways of the Conservative party was then second to none. ‘I no longer am. But when I was political editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, he used to phone me every Wednesday at four when he was writing his column for the next day. He would expect a total rundown on what was happening. And then I would read his interpretation of exactly what I’d said the next day. He was shameless the way he used people.’

Another colleague, Quentin Letts, who was ‘pummelled’ for information and analysis by Boris, described his antics as ‘grand larceny.’ Yet another former colleague, a very senior man who perhaps understandably wishes to remain anonymous, sums it up: ‘There is an inverse relationship: the greater the proximity to Boris, the less you like him. If you just see him cracking jokes on
Have I Got News For You
, you think he’s a great bloke. If you’ve worked with him or relied on him, it’s a different matter.’

Paul Goodman, his comment editor from late 1995, agrees: ‘Boris has a selfish streak – he’s like the kid in the playground who always goes for the ice cream no matter who else wants it, owns it, or gets hurt in the process.’ But Goodman also noticed that he was far from a gung-ho politician with no consideration of human cost or pain. ‘For instance, he didn’t like the line that Charles Moore, Dean Godson and I took on Northern Ireland. He thought we were glorifying in conflict, whereas he just wanted everyone to sit down and sort it out
peaceably.’ That said, Boris wasn’t always easy to work with. ‘He was capable of switching on great charm, but the off-switch got a certain amount of use too,’ Goodman adds.

Publicly adored, privately indulged, and earning good money, Boris might have been content with his lot but the political bug refused to go away – even during these years of Tory rout. In an ill-fated election for the Conservatives, now was the time for Boris to pay his dues in a hopeless seat before he could lay claim to a winnable one when the political pendulum swung the other way. But when Boris’s plans for a political life finally became public ahead of the 1997 election, there was widespread astonishment. Nick Robinson privately asked Boris why he was intent on entering Parliament – the graveyard of so many hopes and ambitions – when he was making such a splash as a journalist. Boris’s answer was unexpectedly serious and revealing – ‘Look, you don’t change anything as a journalist. The guys in [Parliament] actually change things.’ Robinson came away, thinking: ‘So there is probably a genuine sense of duty and public service there. And there is also an arrogance and ambition that he is capable of these things – and I could see that he’s also easily bored.’

An impressive raft of journalists tried to dissuade him. One concern was Boris’s evident lack of self-discipline but there was also the great, still unanswered question: Could Boris ever be
un homme sérieux
? ‘Not only would [a Parliamentary career] be a waste of his journalistic talents, I have always thought that a penchant for comedy is an almost insuperable obstacle to achieving political office, which seems the only point of becoming a member of the House of Commons,’ Max Hastings wrote in his memoir.
³¹
Douglas Hurd agreed Boris’s clowning tendencies could come in the way of political advance: ‘The problem has always been keeping his sense of humour under control. He wrestles with that day by day.’

Clearly frustrated with the limits of journalism – and perhaps sensing the waning powers of newspapers in the Internet age – Boris’s serious side had made up his mind. Later he explained that while he ‘loves journalism,’ it is not ‘taking responsibility. It’s an extended mid-life crisis really.’
³²
On another occasion, he attributed his ambitions to
the fact that no one erects statues to journalists. Indeed, it’s clear that from quite early on he had been thinking like a politician – by adopting that almost universal political obsession with ‘legacy.’ Only politics would give him the opportunity to create one.

The entreaties were to no avail. Against the backdrop of New Labour’s political tsunami – which many claim he helped to create – Boris was selected to fight the Labour fortress of Clwyd South. Although a largely rural constituency in north Wales, it is also home to communities of redundant miners and steelworkers hostile to Tories in general (and toffs, in particular). This was a classic piece of political mis-casting – an urbane public-school polymath fighting a largely Welsh-speaking Labour stronghold. It is astonishing that he won the selection, not least because his hand-written application letter arrived late, was barely legible and did not even include a CV. Indeed, such a mark of disrespect and disorganisation would have ruled him out had it not been for another stroke of Johnsonian good fortune – an intervention from Conservative Central Office apparently keen to promote (or perhaps more accurately, test) a would-be star. Boris had already been rejected by the London seat of Holborn and St Pancras because of a ‘badly typed’ CV; someone obviously felt the rules would have to be bent, if he was to have his chance.

‘I was absolutely staggered. Boris appeared to take absolutely no real interest in the detail and his letter was a shocker,’ recalled Ian Reynolds, then chairman of Clwyd South Conservative Association. ‘However, I was primed by Central Office that he had applied and that although we’d drawn up our shortlist, if I would consider him they’d be grateful so he was put in to be seen with the other candidates.

‘But the initial impression was rather like Boris is now: everything is haphazard. It isn’t just his hair that’s blowing around in the wind, it’s also that his thoughts don’t seem to be concentrated on the things that count. And so it wasn’t a good first impression. He always looked like a tramp – he was expected as a Conservative candidate to go around in a suit and a tie, and actually he went around in a pair of – well, anything really. For someone who’d been at Oxford and a member of the Bullingdon Club, he wasn’t what people expected.’

What won the day, said Reynolds, was Boris’s undoubted
intelligence, which eventually shone through and secured him the candidacy. ‘He fought a very good election, although some people saw him as being aloof; they didn’t seem to think he was an appropriate person for a North Wales constituency. But I personally was very much in favour of him. I accompanied him on a lot of the meetings he attended and he performed extremely well.’

After his selection, Boris finally began to do his homework. ‘Where I think he excelled here was his mastery of the detail. He knew nothing about farming when he came up here and obviously, a large section of the vote were people who run sheep and cattle farms. But he really read the red book [the Conservative party handbook] on farming and the C.A.P., which was critical. He hadn’t looked at it before but read it when he stayed with us, which he did for quite a lot of his six weeks of campaigning. At home, we’ve got plenty of accommodation as it’s an estate.’

And so Boris was spared the expense or bother of renting a property in the constituency, unlike many of the other candidates. His willingness to learn and his ability to get on with people from all walks of life won him many admirers locally, even among non-Tories. Even so, this was clearly a battle he could not win. ‘It was not easy for him [but] he endeared himself very much to the people up here. But in my mind I felt that he didn’t fit the token image of what a Conservative MP in a country seat should be like,’ added Reynolds.

Boris nevertheless conducted his campaign with some energy and humour. In fact, too much humour on occasion – including the time he addressed a group of farmers about the BSE crisis at the Hanmer Arms in Wrexham Maelor. He allowed his love of
double entendres
– not so much mad cows as bum steers was his line on the media handling of the crisis – to get the better of him. They made clear their displeasure at his treating their pain as a ‘laughing matter.’ It was a lesson in the difference between punditry – the same jokes had gone down a storm in the
Telegraph
– and politics. And it is a distinction he has struggled with ever since.

But Boris was sufficiently astute both to learn enough Welsh to sing the national anthem and order fish and chips; also to visit plenty of other farms and pubs without offending the locals. But even though
this was a newly created constituency, as with Canute and the tide, Boris’s efforts against the political odds were doomed. Despite its sprawling size and rural appearance, many of the constituency’s 70,000 population actually live in urban Wrexham. One in five speaks Welsh; many are tribally Labour. Boris cut an incongruous Conservative figure, a throwback cast into contrast by the fresh-faced, clean-cut, sharp-suited Blair proclaiming the dawning of a ‘new day.’

He drew a mere 9,091 or 23 per cent of the votes (down seven points on the previous election) against Labour’s 22,901 or 58 per cent. Still, it must have been some comfort in the small hours of 2 May at the Plas Madoc sports centre in Acrefair, where the count took place, to compare his performance with that of Michael Portillo, who managed to lose a 15,545 majority in Enfield Southgate. As Boris himself says, it was the worst Tory defeat for 160 years – the party’s version of Cannae. So he took up the returning officer’s invitation to say a few words after the result and proceeded to make what Marina later dubbed ‘the most graceless speech she had ever heard from a defeated candidate.’ Once back in London, though, he allowed himself to jest again, cracking the well-worn politico joke: ‘I fought Clwyd South … and Clwyd South fought back.’

It must have been a relief when it was all over. Shortly afterwards, Boris held a ‘Come What May’ party at home in Furlong Road, Islington. Those who attended the jolly occasion – where Marina’s father Charles Wheeler cooked an enormous lasagne – noted some of the guests crammed into the drawing room and basement kitchen had clearly been invited as a ‘thank you’ gesture for their part in the campaign. ‘But there also seemed to be a celebratory element that it was all over and now he could look forward to something better,’ one guest observed. There was also a recognition that he would have to evolve the Boris brand in line with the change of political landscape.

For someone who branded himself as a ‘Young Man in a Hurry’, the going was proving painfully slow. At Oxford, he had said it was his ambition to be in the Cabinet by the age of 35. Just short of his 33rd birthday, Boris had lost his first stab at a Parliamentary seat. For now, he would have to content himself with journalism until the political weather changed. Fortunately, his career was looking good. On
occasion, he was put in charge of the paper on days when Charles Moore was not around.

‘One week Boris was given the chance to edit the
Telegraph
on a Sunday,’ Don Berry recalls. ‘But he wandered in looking completely baffled. He seemed to have no idea what his role would be – he hadn’t bothered to find out. So everyone helped him. Perhaps he just had enough confidence to take it on without finding out what it entailed. Perhaps he just knew that like the Berlin Philharmonic, the amount of conducting needed was pretty minimal. But anyone else would have boned up. Not Boris. He relied on others.’

And it is his good fortune that throughout his life people have flocked to help. Stephen Robinson, formerly
Telegraph
foreign editor, recalls Boris going off to Kosovo to write a piece. ‘I got an email from a name I’d never heard of saying, “I’ve just been given a memory stick by someone called Boris Johnson and he gave me your email address.”’ It transpired Boris was too busy doing something else to file so he had approached a complete stranger in the airport and said, “Would you mind awfully emailing it to London.” Most people just wouldn’t get away with it. I suppose you just look like someone who good things happen to, and good things do happen to you.’