JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (30 page)

Another good thing was to happen to Boris. In July 1999, just after his 35th birthday, he was appointed editor of the weekly political magazine, the
Spectator
. The proprietor Conrad Black, who also owned the
Telegraph
, gave him the much-prized job on the explicit understanding that he had given up on chasing a Parliamentary seat. One of the most desirable jobs in journalism had at last cured him of a passion for political office – or had it?

In a pub car park in Henley-on-Thames, the cloud of 40 blue ‘Vote Conservative’ balloons had become hopelessly entangled. A hapless but devoted party worker was valiantly trying to separate the strings with the only method available to him – his cigarette lighter – leading to a round of mini explosions reminiscent of the ‘gunfight at the OK Corral.’ Sparks then set off a small fire in a pile of Tory leaflets and several onlookers turned purple with laughter. It was a suitably comic opening, recorded in his political memoirs,
Friends, Voters, Countrymen
,
¹
to Boris’s successful bid in the May 2001 general election to become a Conservative MP.

Yes, less than two years after he had promised Conrad Black that he would drop his political ambitions if he became editor of the
Spectator
, Boris had been elected to Parliament. It was the most spectacular deception from the start. ‘We found out within a couple of months [of appointing him in July 1999] that he had sought selection as a Conservative MP in two different constituencies,’ sighs Black. ‘We thought that it was Boris being Boris – doing whatever he wanted and assuming that his disarming personality would carry him through any consequences.’

And it was. No doubt Boris had calculated that the likelihood of being allowed to keep his cake while eating it was very high. And he was right. A furious Black branded him ‘ineffably duplicitous.’ Yet he still indulged his young editor and so Boris got away with it with his well-rehearsed routine of grovelling apology, super-abundant
charm and humour. He introduced a new, but soon well-used, element of inviting his boss to dismiss him – on the basis that this would massively reduce the chances of him doing so. It did, and he didn’t. But to any outsider, it looked increasingly as if Boris was pursuing a career by death wish.

‘We had him in and invited him to explain what he had done,’ recalls Black. ‘He said that it was outrageous and that we would be quite within our rights to sack him, that the opportunities had arisen after his promise had been given, that he really wanted to be an MP more than anything else and that he was going to tell us when he was more confident of being chosen as a candidate. His plan was to argue that he could do both. He cited Iain Macleod as his evidence of this, as he had been an MP while editor of the
Spectator
. He explained how he would make a success of both jobs and we said we would give him a try.’

In the end, Black thought it worth taking a gamble: ‘Boris was, and is a talent, as well as a likeable man and the last thing we wanted to do was to get rid of him. He was a capable editor, kept morale up, raised back the quality of the magazine, recruited good writers for imaginative stories and helped promote the magazine and raise its circulation.’

Dan Colson, Black’s chief executive, eventually came to the same conclusion but could not disguise his anger at this personal betrayal. Boris had continued to deny the rumours about his seeking another seat, even when Colson interrogated him about them over a good lunch – and paid for it. Finally, when it officially came out that he was seeking selection in Henley, Colson was furious and left a series of messages for the ever-absent Boris about his displeasure. He raged at his editor, reminding him that the
Spectator
was ‘not some magazine on pig-farming in Wales’ but a highly influential political journal that required his full attention. ‘You gave us your assurance,’ he roared. But then Colson too recalibrated his opinion and decided that Boris’s
Spectator
role could indeed be carried out on a part-time basis. In fact, this was already the case.

‘Boris wasn’t exactly working 18-hour days but he was on radio, on TV, in the papers talking about the magazine,’ he says, shrugging his
shoulders. ‘We recognised that Boris’s rise in the Tory party would give us even more exposure.’ It is testament to Boris’s extraordinary sense of self-worth that he stood up to Black and Colson – two formidable characters who would have been within their rights to cast him adrift. He almost seemed to enjoy the danger. But by now, thanks to his fame and popularity, Boris was such a figure in his own right he no doubt deduced that the normal rules no longer applied to him: he was a brand that sold the magazine.

He had been summoned by the Prime Minister Tony Blair to the famous Downing Street sofa room to be congratulated on his appointment in person. By the time he could no longer deny the rumours that he was seeking a Parliamentary seat, he had raised circulation by 10 per cent to around 62,000 (and later it reached nearly 70,000.)
²
He had achieved the Holy Grail for any editor – a profit – and taking the magazine into the black allowed him to take liberties. But Black and Colson also seemed powerless to stop him, as if in awe of their young editor and his growing fame and popularity. Once again Boris had survived through the extraordinary indulgence of others.

In any case, Black and Colson had long since brought in a formidable duo to ‘mind’ Boris. ‘Stuart Reid made sure the magazine came out on time and Kimberly Fortier sold advertising,’ says Colson. With Boris not so much at the helm as a pennant from the mast, the magazine was making waves. It was witty, often surprising, eclectic, capricious and occasionally scored a dramatic hit. Reid, a languid, considered figure, with a couple of decades on Boris and a distinguished career at the
Sunday Telegraph
, was an inspired choice. ‘They said they needed a mature, responsible chap to keep an eye on Boris,’ he recalls. ‘So it seemed an ideal job for me, really. We ended up egging each other on – but Boris is braver than me.’

One of Boris’s first acts as editor was to go on two weeks’ leave (his fourth child, Theodore Apollo had just been born), leaving Reid to edit from the Monday he started. For the next six years, the pair worked together and Boris’s regime continued to be unorthodox. There were few conventional editorial meetings. ‘Boris was his own man and didn’t operate as a conscientious, form-filling, tradition-observing
editor with lots of conferences, notes and brainstorming,’ recalls Reid, ‘And thank God for that!’

Only once a week on Thursdays, the beginning of the
Spectator
editorial week, would there be a meeting of all the key characters – Boris and Reid, of course, but at various times the cast also included Rod Liddle, the political editor Peter Oborne and Petronella Wyatt. Sometimes visitors would drop in, too. ‘It was always a lot of laughs, but we didn’t very often settle on anything and then we’d go to lunch,’ recalls Reid. ‘In an ideal world, we would have known what was going in the magazine by Friday night but often, it wasn’t until Sunday evening that Boris would call me and say, “What can we cook up, Stuart? What’s going on?” We didn’t allow ourselves to get too alarmed until Tuesday afternoon. The ultimate deadline was, of course, Wednesday morning.’

Leaving everything to the last minute was no way to run a magazine and there were plenty who tutted over Boris’s management style – or ‘no-management style,’ as his critics put it. But the talented and tolerant Reid appears to have enjoyed the challenge, and certainly rose to it. Behind the heavy black door and brass plaque at 56 Doughty Street, Holborn, the
Spectator
was a fun, even thrilling, place to work. ‘Boris was great company and a popular editor,’ says Reid. ‘He was sweet to the staff – but that was because he couldn’t really be a bastard if he wasn’t around the office. He was an absentee editor because he had other interests; he certainly wasn’t nine to five. I used to get frustrated from time to time. Sometimes when I wanted to talk to Boris, I wasn’t able to. He just wouldn’t answer his phone.’

In fact, many contributors – even the stars such as Matthew Parris – dealt almost exclusively with Reid. ‘There were long stretches of time when Stuart was the editor,’ recalls Parris. ‘If Stuart was the workhorse, then Boris was the plumed horse: the dressage. Boris usually has a team of intensely loyal people around him who are carrying the can for him, whose importance is only half-recognised and who appear to be content that Boris continues to get the credit for things. The general public just don’t know about them. He must inspire in people this strange loyalty.’

To this day Reid insists, ‘It was absolutely Boris’s magazine. Boris
has helped create the myth that I did all the work at the
Spectator
and he had all the fun. But the myth has no basis in fact: Boris did a lot of the work and I had a lot of fun.’ However, the consensus is that Reid curbed some of Boris’s wilder excesses, just as Conrad Black had hoped, and doggedly kept the show on the road. Certainly, Colson is in no doubt where credit is due, knowing Boris was not up to it on his own. ‘Stuart Reid has consistently undersold himself. I don’t believe the success of the
Spectator
was all down to Boris for one minute. Stuart made the train run on time, a job Boris couldn’t have done in a hundred years. Stuart had no desire for the limelight, but was methodical, reliable and tolerant. We always had grave reservations on Boris’s ability to see things through but he was clever enough to realise his strong and not so strong points. So he enthusiastically welcomed Stuart Reid and they made a brilliant team.’

Boris’s persistent absences meant that mistakes were made that a more meticulous editor might have avoided. It was Reid rather than Boris who removed offensive references in a column by Taki to the skin colour of the ‘stink pot crowd’ who moored their ‘gin palace’ next to his boat. On another occasion in 2003 Taki’s comments on ‘black hoodlums’ as the root of Britain’s social ills
³
were not excised. Still Boris would not shoulder the blame.

‘He has form on blaming others,’ says one otherwise admiring former colleague. ‘Very embarrassing,’ Boris said at the time. ‘I was on holiday, of course. It should never have gone in. It was a terrible thing. But what can you do?’
⁴
Well, Boris could have taken responsibility. He could have dispensed with Taki – who frequently courted controversy on race and religion – but consistently chose not to, despite entreaties from many critics, including his own father-in-law Charles Wheeler. It is down to Boris that Taki was able to run columns on ‘bongo-bongo land,’
⁵
West Indians ‘multiplying like flies,’
⁶
and one on the world Jewish conspiracy, in which he described himself as a ‘soi-disant anti-semite,’
⁷
that prompted even Taki’s friend, proprietor Conrad Black, to protest.

It was Boris who chose to celebrate Taki’s ‘25 glorious years’ as a
Spectator
columnist in October 2000. (Boris got into even more trouble on race when his columnist Rod Liddle recalled a tour of Unicef work
in Uganda, where Boris boomed to the Swedish workers and their black driver: ‘Right, let’s go and look at some more piccaninnies!’
⁸
)

Boris also had a habit of making promises to contributors that he could not keep. It is more than likely that Reid would then have to deal with a disappointed writer when the story did not merit the prominence promised. On one occasion, Boris commissioned 2,000 words from a journalist on an aspect of the Victoria Climbie story and insisted it would be trailed on the front cover. He was overheard saying to another guest at the party where the commitment was made: ‘It’s quite easy, this magazine editing lark!’ Only the story never made the front, nor did it run to anything like 2,000 words.

Reid, although obsessively modest about his own role, remembers one occasion when Boris disappeared during the biggest news story in living memory. ‘He didn’t turn up till pretty late on 9/11. We’d all been sitting there in his office watching television and he came in and said, “Crikey, why’s everyone sitting in my bloody office?” We said, “Don’t you know?” and he said, “Crikey, I think we’ve got a cover here. Spike that piece on school vouchers!”’

His absences were thus regularly nail-biting and infuriating for the magazine’s staff. He would habitually not answer his phone, commission articles, turn up to lunches, or meet dignitaries, important advertisers or even his own deadlines. ‘Any
Spectator
columnist will tell you about the difficulties of being Boris’s accident and emergency service,’ says Parris. ‘You’d receive the sudden phone call with Boris saying, “Oh my God, we’ve got a page to fill and I promised to ask someone to do it. I can’t find anybody, could you do it?” There were dozens of stories like that of Boris presuming on other people’s goodwill.’

On two occasions, Parris was a last-minute stand in for Boris at major
Spectator
dinners but disliked seeing the disappointment of guests when the editor failed to show. Andy McSmith, another contributor, remembers rescuing Boris when he failed to arrange a promised interview with the TUC general secretary John Monks. ‘Boris had phoned Monks and left a message on the answerphone, which he had played to everyone at the TUC because he thought Boris came over as this blithering idiot. Then I got a message on my mobile,
which made me fall about laughing. Boris was saying, “Oh my God, I’ve messed up. Go down and sort it out. You know how to talk to these people!” What he wanted was for me to cover for the fact that he had failed to nail down an appointment, do a Monks’ interview myself and then smooth over relations between the
Spectator
and the TUC. He appeared to have completely lost control of events, and so of course you end up doing it. Monks was amused by it all but scathing. His view was: “These people with their expensive education who can’t hold it together!” Boris was playing up to what they wanted to hear and it made them feel better about him.’ Indeed, far from resenting Boris’s apparent bumbling, it rendered him more likeable to McSmith and somehow less of an unwavering enemy to the TUC.