JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (38 page)

Yet Boris could never quite unite his constituency party behind him. A particular bone of contention – that led to at least one local resignation – was his changing position on Iraq. Boris set out his reasons for backing intervention cogently in the local paper in 2003 – and was also featured on the
Henley Standard
front page on a fact-finding trip to Baghdad. But he had previously given assurances that he would not be a supporter and there was a group of people who really minded the apparent change of heart.

Although Henley was relatively close to London, his visits put an even greater strain on his family life. Friday nights and some weekends were inevitably spent in the constituency. As yet Boris had rented only a fairly modest cottage in Swyncombe, which was too small for the whole family and he was regularly there without them. So in 2003 he bought a substantial Grade II-listed farmhouse just outside the affluent market town of Thame for £650,000. The Johnsons’ occupancy started out typically chaotically: not all the kids had beds due to a miscalculation on the number needed and so spent the first few nights on mattresses on the floor.

Boris had long since longed for what he called a country schloss with tennis court and swimming pool. The pleasing house he bought is Georgian in period but a rambling T-shaped farmhouse in design rather than a grand, symmetrical ‘gentleman’s residence’. Tucked away at the end of a lane that peters out into a muddy track, it is solidly built of Flemish-bond red brick and backs onto an English vista of velvety green hills. An outhouse has been smartly renovated into guest accommodation and is also useful for changing for the outsize swimming pool the Johnsons have built next to it. There is also a swing in a tree, a trampoline tucked away on a side lawn, table tennis but as yet no tennis court.

Inside, the style is slightly cluttered comfort, with a classical bust standing guard in one window, various Indian artifacts contributed by
Marina and comfy, dark-coloured sofas encamped round an open log fire. Shelves are loaded with improving books such as
Rome: The Age of Augustus
and
The Origins of Freemasonry
. This is not the sort of weekend home where children become umbilically attached to a games console – or spellbound by a plasma TV – but where everyone is encouraged to exercise body and mind in equal measure. Nor is it the territory of Colefax & Fowler or indeed the minimalist brigade but something rather more down-to-earth and homely. Ceilings are low and the bedrooms romantically perched up in the old tiled roof.

Friends say Marina is always having ‘things done’ to the house and clearly, a great deal of effort – and money – have gone into improvements. Boris claimed from the tax payer interest payments of £85,000 in the years when he was an MP, so the taxpayer funded a good proportion of the cost until he resigned his seat in 2008. Mortgage brokers say such a sum would have sustained a loan of up to about £350,000 at the time, so Boris must also have invested some of his own cash. The large swimming pool, which could have easily cost £50,000, was installed before he left Parliament. ‘They were all very excited when they put the pool in,’ recalls journalist and friend Sarah Sands. The house has proved an excellent investment for the family and could be worth well over £1 million or more today.

However, guests at one January lunch at the Thame house found it slightly damp on arrival, with both Boris and Marina failing to get the fire lit for nearly an hour. Even when it finally got going, clouds of smoke chased into the sitting room. Perhaps it is fair to say that the couple do not make natural country folk, but the house provided Marina with a refuge from Boris’s local political life. ‘Marina didn’t take to Henley at all,’ said family friend Anthony Howard.

Marina herself has often talked of her concerns at the yawning political differences between them – a running theme in their marriage. She would even admit to some of Boris’s more sympathetic Henley constituents that she did not always share her husband’s political stance and sometimes found it difficult to defend. ‘Marina didn’t make it a secret that she was left of Boris,’ recalls Maggie Pullen. ‘I told her if you can live with it, Marina, then so can I.’ She rarely accompanied Boris on official visits to the constituency, once
asking Pullen exactly what functions she had to attend, and which she could skip. ‘I don’t think Marina has ever liked being an appendage,’ observed Howard. Right from the start, she insisted on still being known as Marina Wheeler, a point of principle that seems to have annoyed Boris (who of course knew the importance of marital status in conservative Henley). He argued that her intransigence made it look as if he were just ‘squiring some girlfriend around. I make a point, during my speech later on, of explaining her status.’
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Back in Westminster, though, there was real trouble. On 29 October 2003, the requisite 25 Conservative MPs forced a vote of no confidence in the hapless IDS. He lost by 90 votes to 75 and in just over a week, another right-winger, Michael Howard, was confirmed as the unopposed successor. This could have been bad news for Boris as a decade earlier he had written an unusually excoriating piece about the then Home Secretary in the
Spectator
, suggesting Howard’s plans to ‘sniff out illegal workers in the office and factory’ would encourage a malicious Vichy society of curtain-twitchers.
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It was one of his most personal attacks in print – perhaps he was not expecting Howard to rise further in the party – but that ‘blessed sponge of amnesia’ must have worked its magic yet again. As soon as Howard took over, in a brave move he rewarded Boris with his first proper job: vice-chairman of the Conservative party with special responsibility for campaigning.

‘I thought he was a great asset to Parliament and to the Conservative party. We weren’t over-endowed with popular Conservatives at the time – or even ones that everyone knew,’ recalls Howard. ‘The question was always how to channel this huge ability into something constructive and ensure that it was accompanied by a modicum of disciplined effort. Boris was doing all these other things and was distracted.’ Indeed, Howard’s attempts to ‘channel’ Boris were not universally popular with the party hierarchy, who thought them unwise. Many believed him too much of a lone player, a maverick and someone who could not be trusted; they urged Howard to avoid him: ‘Boris was a nightmare for the whips who were against my giving him any job because he always missed votes with these ridiculous excuses that no one believed. They told me it would send a terrible signal to everyone else.’

There were also rumours about Boris’s sex life and a growing resentment at what was perceived as his lack of loyalty or Conservative team spirit. But Howard ploughed on against the advice with, at best, mixed results: ‘Was he good at the vice-chairmanship? It could have been quite a big job. The fact is that he didn’t put much in. With Boris, there is this issue with effort. I’m sure he did something. But if you asked me to identify what it was, I might be pretty pushed. Here was a Conservative who was much more popular than anyone else in the party and much better known. If he had contributed those attributes to campaigning for the Conservative party, you might assume that it would be successful. But he didn’t, so it didn’t really work.’

Howard also tried another tack. He kept on Duncan Smith’s PMQ attack-team comprising Cameron, Osborne – and supposedly Boris. ‘Boris certainly didn’t turn up every week, but the other two did. He occasionally came up with a good idea. But I don’t think his contribution was enormous,’ continues Howard. ‘David and George did most of the work – it was just something we all put up with. He has got great ability, great charm and he’s very amusing. You’d sooner have him around than not, so you put up with things – up to a point.’

Indeed, on this unpromising foundation, Howard decided to promote Boris still further in his reshuffle of May 2004. Even with a new leader, the Conservatives continued to struggle to make inroads into New Labour territory and seemed as far away from returning to government as ever. In an attempt to win the arts vote from Labour – the party had cornered the market in luvvies – the Leader made him shadow arts minister. It was another colossal leap of faith. Howard appears to have been as powerlessly in thrall as Conrad Black, Boris’s other employer. ‘I thought that the job was tailor-made for him,’ explains Howard. ‘The arts community were notoriously unfriendly to the Conservative party. Who better to make friends with them than Boris? I think he did make friends a bit, I think he took it reasonably seriously but it didn’t turn out quite right – he was always inhibited by all his other commitments. I thought that at some point he would have to choose and eventually he did, but it took him a long time and various events.’

It all started off with Boris at his best – or worst, depending on whether you were depending on him. Apparently surprised to be given the job, he told delighted journalists: ‘Look, the point is … er, what is the point? It is a tough job but someone’s got to do it,’
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before launching into his manifesto as if he had not given it a moment’s thought. ‘I haven’t cleared this with anybody, but here is what I think. On coming to power I am going to institute a Windows spell check in English so that schoolchildren in this country no longer feel they have got it wrong when they spell words correctly. The Greeks are going to be given an indistinguishable replica of all the Parthenon marbles, done in the most beautiful marble dust to end this acrimonious dispute between our great nations.

‘I am going to open up the bandwidth, so there is much more freedom on the radio stations, [and] reduce some of the stuff allocated to the Pentagon, so you can get the Rolling Stones in Oxfordshire. I am fed up with just listening to treacly old Magic. Fourth? I can’t remember what point four is. Ah, yes. We are going to convene a summit with Damien Hirst and the rest of the gang, at which they are going to explain to the nation what it all means. Let us have a national “mission to explain” by the Saatchi mob, which will be massively popular.’

Unsurprisingly, Boris captured the public’s imagination with his brilliant off-the-cuff job description, although, like much of his extemporising, it is likely this had been meticulously rehearsed. In what was an artwork in itself, he consolidated his position as the humorous (and human) politician, who appeared to be on the public’s side. ‘Everything he did was laced with this same wry sardonic humour,’ explains Toby Young, who has tracked Boris’s career since Oxford. ‘No one ever gets the impression that they are being talked down to by Boris – it’s not like he’s playing a role and expecting people to be taken in by it. Whenever he tries to fake sincerity, he’s making it obvious that he’s faking. He does it by eye-rolling or metaphorically forgetting the script he’s supposed to be reciting, so he’ll wander off-message or reverse what he started off saying. I don’t think it is a straightforward case of pretending to be more befuddled than he really is in order to curry favour. I think
he is genuinely a rather disorganised person, but he’s made a virtue of that.’

Soon afterwards a marketing company called Superbrands placed Boris on a world ‘cool list’ alongside Johnny Depp, Bose stereos and Audi cars. It was a harmless bit of fun, but it reflected Boris’s appeal even though he was now pushing 40 and neither sleek nor classically good-looking – and that supposed antithesis of cool, a Tory MP. But Boris zigged when everyone else zagged, Superbrands observed, and ‘quite simply, there isn’t anybody else quite like him and he’s funny.’ Boris was daring to be different, to make people laugh – and was loved for it.

While Boris was pronouncing on frock-wearing Turner Prize winners and fiddling at the edges of serious politics, however, David Cameron (who had been Howard’s special adviser at the Home Office in the 1990s) was moving inexorably closer to the centre of Conservative power. In the summer of 2004, Howard made the 37-year-old Cameron head of policy co-ordination in what was clearly a pivotal role in the run-up to the next General Election, with a place in the shadow Cabinet. In September that year, at the age of just 33, George Osborne was parachuted into the key job of shadow chief secretary to the Treasury.

Meanwhile, 40-year-old Boris finally had to prove that he could fulfil his role, however second-tier it may have seemed. Julie Kirkbride had been his junior as a political journalist on the
Telegraph
, but now a Tory MP, she was Boris’s boss during a brief stint as shadow Culture Secretary. She remembers him as very different from his public image, which she says he uses to ‘make himself a more likeable, less feared character.’

‘He organised himself extremely well,’ she observes. ‘He had a very good, assiduous researcher. And whatever needed doing was done. Boris is a very clever, classically educated guy who knows what he wants. While Boris is not quite the antithesis of his shambling appearance, he uses it as a smokescreen to disarm people.’ The public act did not stop, however. ‘When he was culture spokesman he made some minor gaffe and one journalist phoned him up and got the whole buffoon spiel,’ remembers Andy McSmith. ‘He printed it word
for word in his newspaper. What so amused us was that another lobby [political] journalist had also phoned him up and got exactly the same bumbling routine, word for word, and had recorded it. The two routines were identical. Boris put in a very well rehearsed performance, both times – it shows it’s all a construct.’

There was also plenty of clowning around over at the
Spectator
. In July 2004, Rod Liddle, the
Spectator
’s associate editor, was revealed to be having an affair with Alicia Munckton, the 22-year-old blonde on reception. In the laddish atmosphere that prevailed at the
Spectator
at the time, with its phwoaring, crude jokes and persistent ogling, Boris roared with laughter at the news. It was a jolly jape and one that apparently received his enthusiastic approval. Liddle’s wife, whom he had married only six months previously after 12 years and two sons together, did not find it so amusing. Rachel Royce sought to expose not only her philandering husband but what she saw as Boris’s licentious regime at the
Spectator
– one that not only seemed to condone such behaviour but even encouraged it. And she chose the perfect vehicle, the
Daily Mail
. The headline was: ‘MY CHEATING HUSBAND ROD, TEN BAGS OF MANURE AND ME THE BUNNY BOILER. AS FOR THE SLAPPER … SHE’S WELCOME TO HIM.’
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