JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (31 page)

When there was no escape from writing a piece he would typically leave it to the eleventh hour and then dash it off. ‘Because I have no time to do it, I do it in no time – you just whack it out,’ he told the
New York Times
. Or occasionally he would offer to pay someone else to do it for him. It just added to the sense of barely controlled chaos. On one occasion, Boris had interviewed someone in Somerset and had then gone on to Sussex to stay the weekend with Dominic Lawson, a previous
Spectator
editor. Only he had left his notebook in Somerset, so the office had to dispatch a taxi at great expense first to his interviewee and then across half of southern England to Sussex. ‘It was all very Boris-ish,’ recalls Lawson.

Boris’s secretary – the redoubtable, crop-haired Ann Sindall from Batley, West Yorkshire – was another long-serving member of his accident and emergency team. She was accustomed to many a crisis such as this. He had plucked her out of the
Telegraph
, where she was unhappy – although with her crisp Northern humour and ‘socialist’ tendencies she may not be what most would expect of Boris’s secretary. But then Boris likes to avoid the predictable. ‘Ann Sindall is almost a pantomime Northerner,’ observes a former colleague, ‘like Boris is a pantomime toff.’ She is said to have presided over the
Spectator
office, ‘with the implacable demeanour of a headmistress trained by the SAS.’
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Boris remained loyal to her, affectionately nicknaming her ‘be-all and Sindall’ and giving her a special mention in his Christmas address
to the staff. She was also permitted to bring her beloved Jack Russell, Harry, into the office, whom Boris liked to refer to as ‘certainly no smellier than anyone else in the building.’
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Sindall has more than repaid his constancy by putting up with Boris’s demands (although not one request to sew up a rip in his trousers) and enduring his absences. ‘Ann’s tolerance of Boris’s misbehaviour does surprise me,’ notes Parris. ‘I adore Ann, she’s been terrifically helpful to me over the years. But I would have thought she could be rather severe with people – even Boris. But she has never dropped him. You’d have to have a huge sense of humour to work with Boris. But if you appreciate intelligence in a human being, it’s hard not to admire him.’

For over a decade Sindall has been his gatekeeper – fall foul of her and reaching Boris himself becomes impossible – and his organiser-in-chief. Parking tickets, unpaid tax demands, bills, threats from bailiffs, requests for interviews, publishers, irate proprietors, irate colleagues, pleading contributors, members of his family, high society and low society – she has dealt with them all. During the
Spectator
years, Boris was a journalist (he also wrote regular columns for the
Telegraph
and
GQ
), novelist (
Seventy Two Virgins
), media personality (
Have I Got News For You
plus an assortment of other chat shows and TV and radio outings) and, of course, politician (applying for at least two seats and succeeding in one).

Sindall’s job was to help keep all these balls in the air. No one believes it was easy, not least because Boris has a habit of saying ‘yes’ to people without any intention of doing what they ask. With customary skill, Sindall then had to extricate him. She has admitted to, on occasion, wanting to ‘kill Boris’ or ‘hating his guts’ after he had gone AWOL once too often. And she would scream at callers who phoned looking for him: ‘If you want Boris, why the hell are you wasting your time ringing the
Spectator
? You won’t find him here.’ But like many others in his life, she has been won back so often by the fact that he makes her laugh.

Reid, too, jokes that it is the fun of being with Boris that has ensured his survival. The frustration of his casual attitude to deadlines, promises, decisions, his sheer and persistent unreliability,
he says, would otherwise mean ‘that he would be dead by now.’ He also believes that Boris ‘does feel guilty about things, about letting people down. But Charles Moore once said there’s one thing you can rely on Boris for and that’s to let you down – and it’s true. Boris does not like to take things seriously. It’s part of his brand although he does take his own career seriously, of course. But at the same time it’s genuine, too. He sees the absurdity in just about everything, even himself.’

There were also occasional flashes of kindness. Reid remembers Boris taking the time to write a handwritten and sweetly personal letter to the mother of a boy with whom he had been to prep school who had died. The mother was very touched.

With Stuart Reid and Ann Sindall shouldering much of the load, overall Boris admits to having had ‘more fun than is strictly proper’
¹¹
(although not all of it within the confines of the
Spectator
’s offices). He would pop into the magazine’s ramshackle Georgian townhouse with holes in the wall and push past the dog leads, champagne bottles, umbrellas and bicycles parked under a ‘No Bicycles’ sign in the hall to join in the gaiety. But rarely before lunch – which, at least for his guests, was often long and liquid. There always seemed to be a bevy of attractive young women hanging around and games of ping pong in the garden. The door to his spacious, but chaotic first-floor office – presided over by a Pericles bust and a crystal chandelier – would be left open and, recalls Reid, ‘people would wander in and read the papers. If you were having an attack of the vapours, you could lie on his sofa.’

Some of the furniture was quite distinguished, including the striped Chesterfield settee of a perfect length to lie on and a valuable Persian rug, but the rest was ‘distressed’. The editor’s desk was suitably dark and colossal with two phones, one white and one black, and was warmed by a cosy gas fire. The place reeked of prep-school pencil shavings and decaying orange peel – with overtones of comfortable elitism. (Indeed, for all his latterly acquired ‘man of the people’ credentials, Boris unashamedly used the
Spectator
to peddle his Darwinian creed. In 2000, for instance, he ran a leader under the
headline ‘LONG LIVE ELITISM’ saying, ‘without elites and elitism, man would still be in his caves.’
¹²
)

But for all that, Boris also allowed a culture to develop of inspiring creative libertarianism. He prevented the
Spectator
from simply acting as some sort of predictably constipated Tory salon by bringing in a range of ideas and opinions. For his columnists, at least, he was more mascot than master. ‘It was total anarchy, just a feeling of letting a thousand flowers bloom,’ says Parris. ‘I was never steered by Boris in any way; he never asked me to change a word I had written. My line was often different from the others, but there was no censorship. I don’t think that was inattention on Boris’s part. I believe he believes in free speech in a rather intense and profound way.’

There were few pre-conceptions, Reid explains, but rather a healthy general scepticism that few, if any other politically aligned journals achieve. ‘Boris is very attached to a certain journalistic principle. This is that you go along with something until everyone else does, and then you distance yourself.’

The
Spectator
was, for instance, perhaps the sole Conservative outlet regularly to give a platform to those who had doubts about sending the troops into Iraq. Its editorial position was broadly in favour of the war and as an MP, Boris voted for it – although he has since said he regrets doing so. But he hired Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC correspondent at the centre of the ‘September dossier’ row (involving the government’s exaggerated claims over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) and, according to Reid, ‘the man probably most hated by the general hawkish establishment – Tory and Labour. Boris hired him because he liked him and because he could see what Gilligan had said was true. The dossier
had
been sexed up.’ Indeed, in December 2003 the
Spectator
even hosted a ‘Save Andrew Gilligan’ dinner at Luigi’s restaurant in Covent Garden.

Perhaps in part reflecting his Islington home life, Boris liked to take the counter-intuitive position whenever possible. For instance, in September 2001 he commissioned a piece arguing Britons should be grateful and proud that protectionism on the continent made asylum-seekers choose Britain for a fresh start. It was the very antithesis of the abrasive nationalism of the
Daily Mail
, which was commonplace
among right-wingers at the time. And Boris would commission work from talented people, no matter what their political persuasions, such as the
Guardian
cartoonist Steve Bell. ‘Boris was a great admirer of Steve Bell and they don’t come more left wing than he is,’ says Reid. ‘He did some good covers for us.’ Bell was given virtually free rein to poke fun on a total of 17 front covers – including two on Michael Howard, once portrayed as a vampire and the other time as a bat, and William Hague, drawn as Napoleon.

But there was one institution that could not be mocked. In July 2005, Bell was commissioned to illustrate a piece about Etonians being an abused minority. He drew a pig in Eton collar behind barbed wire with the school gateway in the background. Boris took one look and said: ‘No, no, no, I can take a lot but not that!’ He paid Bell, but spiked the drawing, although no lasting resentment rankles between the pair. ‘I do like Boris – even though politically he’s as far from me as I can conceive,’ admits Bell. ‘He’s genuinely enthusiastic for my work.’

Since Boris left, the
Spectator
has become more unilateral in its tastes and Bell has not been asked to work for it again. Nor has Andy McSmith, a writer from the left, who joined the roster because Boris wanted someone who knew the Labour party to write about it. ‘Boris is very intellectually confident so he doesn’t worry about people writing from different viewpoints,’ says McSmith. ‘He’s intellectually curious, so he wants to know what other people are thinking. I find him a very friendly character even now.’

Boris also delighted in pursuing some pretty whacky ideas – which he liked to describe as ‘wheezes.’ Many of the whackiest wheezes he directed at Lloyd Evans, the ‘Stain’ he had known since Oxford. ‘He was always asking me to leave the country on idiotic missions such as an inquiry into Swedish lavatorial habits,’ sighs Evans. ‘He had a strange obsession lasting nearly ten years that men in Sweden weren’t allowed to pee standing up. I refused to do it – and it turned out it was Switzerland anyway, but only in flats, because of the noise for the downstairs neighbours.’

Boris also wanted to take revenge on the tabloids (in what was perhaps the opening salvo of his war with our more salacious
newspapers) for ‘ruining’ the Earl of Hardwicke by ensnaring him with the offer of some Class A drugs. So he also instructed Evans to mount an absurd counter-sting on a
News of the World
reporter. In an exercise doomed to failure, Evans demanded £5,000 for evidence that Boris was not only dealing in cocaine but heavily using it in what had become a hotbed of illicit drug-taking at the
Spectator
. Not surprisingly, Evans was rumbled by the
News of the World
and the wheeze was dropped. But Boris soon came up with more mad schemes for him, from deliberately trying to get himself thrown out of a top-notch restaurant to infiltrating gangs of animal rights terrorists. Few were successful. Evans went to two restaurants – Gary Rhodes in the City and ‘some place full of prostitutes in Shepherd Market’ – ‘but didn’t have the guts to cause a scene’ and so failed to get ejected from either. But Boris’s enthusiasm for such ‘investigations’ suggests that in another life he might have made a fine tabloid editor himself – he was very serious about frivolity.

Evans was also given the job of poetry editor – involving in his own words ‘sifting through a mountain of tosh’ – for which the fee was a twice-yearly crate of cheap plonk. Despite negotiating a good salary for himself, Boris was not known for paying his contributors well. In fact, most were paid no more than £500 for a piece and some, like Evans, considerably less.

Boris once sacked Evans as poetry editor for writing a scathing piece in the
Mail on Sunday
about a private
Spectator
lunch attended by a ‘group of save-the-planet freaks’, whom he described as ‘a threat to civilised conversation.’ The ‘Chatham House rule’ was that guests at these lunches would not be identified afterwards to encourage the free flow of conversation. Keen to ‘out’ these bores, Evans ignored the stricture and wrote a lengthy article naming them. One of the guests, Zac Goldsmith, complained to Boris, who published his letter in the next issue. Soon afterwards, Boris put in a call to Evans, who knew what was coming. ‘Here’s the bad news,’ said Boris. ‘You’re fired as poetry editor.’ And then seconds later: ‘Now the good news – you’re reinstated!’

Evans deduced that Boris would not be able to find another poetry editor quite so cheaply and in any case was an energetic rule-breaker
himself and could hardly punish others for playing the same game. And it
was
a game: Boris despised tedium and those who talked it. Evans was indeed actually promoted and Boris continued to urge his contributors to excite and even incite. ‘He harassed me to write about India,’ recalls David Gardner of the
Financial Times
, whom Boris knew from Brussels. ‘I did a few pieces for him, one of which was on Hindu fundamentalism. “Give us a bit more oomph,” he said, “I want to see newsagents go up in flames!”’

As lord of his manor Boris drew in a whole crowd of people he knew from Brussels, Oxford, Eton, the
Telegraph
and of course, his extended family. In a provocative move, he gave Toby Young from his Oxford days the magazine’s theatre column when Young himself admitted he knew ‘nothing’ about theatre. No doubt Boris enjoyed the furore this prompted in theatre critic circles when he removed the veteran Sheridan Morley, blaming orders from Conrad Black. Young certainly enjoyed his new berth, describing it in the
Evening Standard
as ‘one of the last bastions of cavalier individualism, a chaotic haven of bohemian self-indulgence and aristocratic broad-mindedness.’
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