JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (37 page)

It was nevertheless a disappointing start. Boris had vowed in
Spectator
promotional literature to ‘stir the blood and stiffen the sinews’ of the Tory faithful, but his relationship with IDS was visibly strained. It was not helped by the fact that he barely bothered to disguise his lack of support or respect. Within a year, in September 2002, the
Spectator
was running the line that the Conservative party was in chaos under IDS’s leadership and predicting he could soon be replaced by the sacked party chairman, David Davis. He even commissioned a front cover from Steve Bell depicting Michael Portillo peeing on IDS’s head. Stuart Reid was surprised at how far Boris would push it. ‘I thoroughly approved but I wouldn’t have dared do it myself,’ he admits.

Naturally this was seen as mutiny by IDS’s people, who were quoted anonymously in the press threatening to ‘deal with’ Boris although the chief anti-IDS piece again carried Peter Oborne’s by-line rather than Boris’s – conveniently allowing him to distance himself, if necessary. There was now, however, a real danger of a formal challenge to the leader, who had disastrously dubbed himself the ‘quiet man.’ Yet with bitter irony, the more IDS sunk into the mire, the more he
needed
Boris because he recognised that his tormentor was one of the few stars his party could muster. The
HIGNFY
headliner – who had broken down the barriers of party, class, age and apathy through TV performances now considered popular culture classics – was of far more use onside than cast into the wilderness. Such was his popularity that he could command £25,000 per appearance.

Fan clubs and websites in praise of Boris were springing up all over the place – run by both Home Counties mothers and northern university students. (The Durham University Fan Club was just one that had as its mission ‘the admiration, promotion and discussion of Boris Johnson.’) Plus which other MP, let alone Tory MP, would merit an indulgent interview in
GQ
? It was an opportunity seized by Boris to peddle his ever-clever concoction of jollity and laddishness. ‘I try to cheer people up. Life isn’t all that bad,’ he had said, in a sideswipe at what he considered a particularly joyless Labour regime before
promising a no doubt receptive audience that voting Tory would mean ‘your car will go faster, and your girlfriend will have a bigger bra size.’ The joke went down so well it endured several more outings. Here was a Conservative who actually appeared to be fun. Only later in the interview does he let slip a far more revealing remark: ‘I make what I think is a very cunning calculation. If you clown around, you may be able to creep up on people with your ideas, and spring them on them unexpectedly.’
⁶

It was this lightness of touch, this ability to reach the politics-averse – so rare in politicians – that made him such a valuable commodity. Michael Portillo, the defeated leadership contender, advised Boris to choose between ‘politics and comedy.’ But Boris could not see why. And while Portillo’s career was fading fast, Boris’s star seemed to shine ever more brightly – at least with the public at large. There was even the first mention in print that he might be destined one day to become Prime Minister, as Tories despaired of IDS ever wounding Blair any more than his predecessor, William Hague.
⁷

So Boris’s ‘punishment’ for his disloyalty was nugatory – a summons for a ‘conversation’ about the
Spectator
’s ‘unhelpful’ take. The more significant outcome was that he was to attend IDS every Wednesday morning, ostensibly to work on preparing him for Prime Minister’s Questions but in reality for a much broader purpose. With Boris came the tantalising prospect of some of his stardust rubbing off on his lacklustre leader and he continued to be brought in even when he committed another act of gross party disloyalty in the
Spectator
only a couple of months later.

Boris had gathered eminent political journalists into the magazine’s tiny third-floor dining room, as he did every autumn, to discuss the
Spectator
Parliamentarian of the Year awards. As editor, one of his most important jobs was to conjure up an appropriate list of recipients. In 2002, he arrived haracteristically late but fatally without his own favoured options. This may well be why over a raucous lunch he agreed to back Tony Blair as
Spectator
Parliamentarian of the Year – an astonishing decision, not only because he was a
Labour
Prime Minister who had inflicted two catastrophic defeats on Boris’s party but also because he was widely seen to hold Parliament in contempt.
‘By the time Boris got there, Blair’s name had already come up,’ recalls George Jones, one of those present. ‘He didn’t like it but he didn’t have any ideas of his own. It was certainly something he came to regret.’ At the awards ceremony – which fortunately Blair was unable to attend – Boris went on to heap praise on the man he dubbed ‘the coolest cat in town’: ‘Time after time, the Labour benches threaten to rebel, and he quells them as Zeus quells sea nymphs.’

It was all too much for the Conservative grandees. ‘The Blair award directly clashed with his political career,’ says Jones. ‘It dramatically highlighted once again the problem of having an active politician editing a magazine like the
Spectator
. When he got the raspberry from senior Tories he then tried to offload the blame.’ Indeed, Frank Johnson, the son of an East End pastry cook who was Boris’s predecessor as
Spectator
editor, and who had relentlessly teased Boris in his Parliamentary sketch and elsewhere, was the chosen target. Boris wrote in the
Telegraph
on 12 December: ‘In a fit of madness, a group error for which I principally blame Frank Johnson, the jurors of the
Spectator
parliamentarian awards gave [Blair] not the wooden spoon, not the booby prize, but the Top Gong.’

Such was the desperation of the IDS team, even this latest outrage was overlooked, however. For the next year, until the Leader’s defenestration in autumn 2003, Boris continued to be asked to advise IDS alongside the other two leading young Turks, David Cameron and George Osborne. It confirmed his importance within the party and was in fact a great compliment. But as ever Boris was unable – or unwilling – to work as part of a team and many opportunities were lost. Blair was soon on the retreat over a botched reshuffle, the Hutton inquiry into David Kelly’s death, a row over taxes and another over the Euro – but it was largely the Liberal Democrats who were taking advantage of his woes. Meanwhile, IDS needed all the help he could find but it did not come from Boris.

‘Osborne and Cameron worked hard on finding subjects on which to press Blair and scripting the questions and turned up on time,’ recalls a source close to Duncan Smith. ‘But Wednesday was press day at the
Spectator
so Boris would turn up for five minutes, read the newspaper, do a routine on the lines of “marvellous! This will really
slay Blair” before disappearing. The rest of the team worked for another three or four hours. His contribution was, frankly, negligible.’ What’s more, it appears that the man known for his one-liners failed to deliver any for his chief. It was Osborne who came up with the jokes, such as they were.

‘Iain Duncan Smith told me that he thought neither of us was getting [Boris’s] full attention and what were we going to do about it,’ recalls Conrad Black. ‘I replied that I was satisfied with what I was getting but that it couldn’t go on forever.’ Stuart Reid also seemed to be becoming increasingly unhappy as Boris’s absences became ever longer and more frequent now that he was also an MP. He even wrote a cryptic piece in the
Telegraph
widely interpreted as relating to Boris. ‘Now that Lent is here, one’s thoughts turn to one’s own failings, and, perhaps more keenly, to the failings of others,’ he wrote ‘[I]t is apparently licit to enjoy high-wire acts, provided that part of your enjoyment does not lie in the possibility that one of the acrobats might fall and injure himself, or worse. Ergo: no normal human may watch a high-wire act without sinning. Something to consider when the circus next comes to town.’
⁸

Nor did Boris’s constituents feel at this point that they were getting a ‘fair squeeze of the sauce bottle,’ as Boris himself put it. His early coverage in the
Henley Standard
was minimal, particularly compared to local heroes such as the rowing champion Steve Redgrave. He did finally come to greater prominence in town nine months later, in March 2002, but for someone else’s actions rather than his own: he was hit in the face by a bread roll as he addressed the Mayor of Henley’s annual dinner one Friday evening. More than a hundred local dignitaries at the Henley Town Centre witnessed a Labour councillor, Eleanor Hards, throw a mini-baguette at him from her seat, three places down the table. For a while he was visibly shaken but later rallied with the quip: ‘I am not upset. I’m flattered. It shows the Tories are on a roll!’
⁹
Councillor Hards explained that she had merely taken Boris ‘at his word’ when he had said in his speech: ‘Many people ask me “what policies the Conservatives have to offer?” At the risk of being hit by a bread roll I shall tell you some of my ideas.’ No one thought her joke very funny, though.

Indeed, the incident provided Boris with an opportunity: it attracted publicity, sympathy and admiration for him and marked the start of a new relationship between Henley and its MP. From then on, he courted the local paper and its readers more assiduously, flattering its young political reporter Tom Boyle by dubbing him the ‘Woodward and Bernstein’ of Henley. On another occasion, he ensured ever-greater loyalty from the paper by praising its ‘attention to detail’ and ‘certain gentleness in outlook.’
¹⁰
He took care to refer to the
Henley Standard
supremo as ‘my real editor’ rather than the likes of Charles Moore on the
Telegraph
; he wrote a column for the paper too – although not as often as promised.

Boris learned how best to flatter not just local journalists – if courted correctly, often an MP’s most devoted friends – but also his proud constituents. One of his best lines, confident that the
Telegraph
was perused avidly in Henley, was: ‘If Amsterdam or Leningrad vie for the title of Venice of the North, then Venice – what compliment is high enough? Venice, with all her civilisation and ancient beauty, Venice with her addiction to curious aquatic means of transport, yes, my friends, Venice is the Henley of the South.’
¹¹
The largely elderly Henley ‘set’ (in 2002, the town was dubbed the ‘Costa Geriatrica’ though not by Boris, it must be stressed) could not resist.

Michael Heseltine had not been particularly skilled at working the crowd at Henley’s round of social events – or indeed eager to do so – but now every local socialite would try and lure Boris, the ultimate catch, to her salon. ‘Michael didn’t charm the Henley ladies, he was too much of a politician for them,’ explains one senior Henley Tory. ‘They wanted someone to grace their drinks parties – Boris made more of a fuss of them.’ The schmoozing paid off, as did his relaxed attitude. ‘We used to have a strawberry fair here at our house every summer,’ recalls Peter Sutherland of the Henley Conservatives. ‘Boris would come with his wife and family, and let himself in by the back gate without any fuss. We have a swimming pool, but his children would forget their swimming things. He didn’t mind – he would always let them swim in their pants. He made the whole thing easy.’

Richard Reed, the
Henley Standard
’s news editor, remembers: ‘There was more in the paper about Boris in a year than there ever was about
Heseltine. When people met him, they liked him and he put himself about.’ Indeed, whatever his troubles in Westminster, Boris was proving a great support to local campaigns. Organising them might not have been his forte, but spearheading certainly was. He worked on keeping the local Townlands hospital open (leading a march of 6,000 local people), maintaining access to local courts (raising it in a Parliamentary committee), keeping Brakspear as an independent brewer and saving the air ambulance. It was just his persistent lateness for any meeting that rankled with the organisers. ‘I once really had to tick him off,’ recalls Brian Tiptree, a local activist. ‘He arrived an hour and a half late at one meeting just as everyone was leaving.’ On one occasion, he never turned up at all: a message came through to say that he had been test-driving a Ferrari and it had run out of petrol in the fast lane of the A40 in the rush-hour, causing tailbacks and confusion for miles. Two policemen had to push him out of the way.

When he did turn up to deliver speeches, he would often ostentatiously write a few notes on a serviette just minutes before he was due to stand and deliver (a performance reminiscent of writing his speech on a tree at the Eton debating society). This apparently off-the-cuff style went down brilliantly in an Oxfordshire sports club or Rotary dinner. His jokes were reverentially printed in the paper – one of the best being when bitten by an Alsatian while out canvassing. ‘My thoughts are entirely with him and his family at this time,’ he quipped about the dog. ‘I have all manner of concern and sympathy for him and for anything he might have contracted from me, I apologise in advance.’
¹²

On occasion he would send his
Spectator
colleague Petronella Wyatt – who would make remarkably similar speeches – to represent him. Other times he would turn up to fundraising lunches unprepared, on occasion giving an inappropriate talk such as decrying the trend to ‘cotton wool’ children to an audience of mothers who had paid handsomely to hear him and were not expecting to be lectured. He would also annoy people more than once (just as on
HIGNFY
and in the Commons chamber) by letting his mobile ring mid-flow. But Boris did not ignore his local responsibilities as MP – his constituency surgeries were popular and well regarded. He had hired the super-organised
Wayne Lawley to handle the inevitable inquiries, complaints and pleas for help. Lawley ensured responses were prompt, letters answered and issues were raised. ‘Boris did work his butt off for us while he was here,’ says Brian Tiptree.