JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (40 page)

While it was clear that Boris stood by the sentiment of the piece, the factual errors were not only embarrassing for him but even more so for his party leader, Michael Howard. Having cut his political teeth
in the Edge Hill constituency in the 1966 General Election, when he fell in love with cheeky Scouse wit and the Beatles’ music scene, Howard was indelibly linked with the city. The Tories were now also desperately trying to revive their fortunes in the Northwest and this sort of negative publicity could make their political situation there ever more hopeless. But most important of all was that Howard was a devoted supporter of Liverpool FC and, according to his closest aides, ‘was driven by the intense fear that he would be booed at a match.’ ‘It was perceived as the first real Boris gaffe so it rapidly became a cause célèbre,” recalls Guy Black, then Howard’s press secretary. By Saturday, Howard was horrified at the row and publicly described the article as ‘nonsense from beginning to end.’
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‘Michael rang me up on Saturday morning and said this is completely unacceptable, Boris is going to have to go to Liverpool to apologise,’ recalls Black. ‘He had clearly made his mind up, although I did warn him that this will turn into a circus but he was coldly firm. He would not risk being booed.’ Boris was duly ordered up to Liverpool to say sorry in what became widely known as ‘Operation Scouse Grovel’. ‘I don’t think he put up much resistance,’ says Guy Black. Conservative Central Office was put in charge of the trip, which began on Tuesday, with what was supposed to be a late-night flit up the motorway under cover of darkness. Before they set off, the minders even circled the block near Boris’s house a few times to throw any pursuers off the scent.

It may be fair to say that this Hollywood movie approach was just one of a number of mistakes made in an exercise that quickly descended into farce. There were honourable reasons for trying to limit Boris’s exposure to the regional press alone (it was supposed to be an apology to Liverpool, after all), but it was a hopelessly naïve strategy. The national newspapers and broadcasters sent armies of reporters and cameramen up North and they were not going to give up until they got their man. It was, after all, otherwise a slow news day and this story had a lot to offer: it pitched Etonian buffoon against outraged Scousers with the result entirely unpredictable. The fact that the Tories were sending up a team of supposedly beefy minders for Boris in a blacked-out Range Rover just increased the media appeal –
although it annoyed Boris intensely to be ‘handled’ in this way rather than to be allowed to deal with it in his own style. He refused to refer to his leader as Michael, but repeatedly talked about him bitterly as ‘Howard’.

Meanwhile, reporters staked out the stations and airports and as soon as Boris was spotted entering the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, all hell let loose. One of the minders present described the scene as resembling Rorke’s Drift with the Zulu impi pouring over the crest of the hill in the form of dozens of determined journalists and the British, represented by the Tory team, powerless to stop them.

There are not many who would deal with such bedlam; fewer still who would thrive in it. Boris began to enjoy himself and his minders soon realised their best ploy was to allow him to get on with it – even when that meant dictating his next
Spectator
column for him over the phone when the internet connection failed. Chased all over the city by a posse of reporters, his visit had all the anarchy of an Ealing comedy. He gave a dozen interviews to local papers and broadcasters, proffering words of apology to practically all and sundry but while there were plenty of smiles and jokes, there was also clearly underlying indignation. Boris infuriated the Tory handlers watching events unfold on television by insisting that Howard was ‘completely wrong to say that the article was “nonsense from beginning to end.” I don’t think he can have read it properly.’ They hissed back to the minders on the ground orders to get Boris back ‘on message.’ But while Boris admitted that the article presented an ‘outdated stereotype’ and apologised for inaccurate claims that drunken Liverpool fans contributed to the Hillsborough disaster, he said he could not retract ‘the broad thrust of the article’ about sentimentality and acceptance of risk in modern Britain: he was going to do it his way.

There was a sticky moment when Ken Bigley’s brother Paul came on a BBC radio programme to tell Boris: ‘You’re a self-centred, pompous twit – even your body language on TV is wrong. You don’t look right, never mind act right. Get out of public life!’ It was a rare occasion when a member of the public has taken Boris on and for a
moment he looked shaken by it. ‘That was a difficult moment – it stripped a coat off him,’ says Quentin Letts, one of the press pack following Boris. ‘It hasn’t happened much.’

He quickly escaped into the studio car park only to run straight into the clutches of a member of the Hillsborough families group. It was one of those days and by now no doubt Boris must have regretted agreeing to come in the first place. ‘Are you trying to save your political career?’ asked one journalist as he jumped into a car for the next stage of his tour of apology. ‘I haven’t got a political career,’ responded Boris in return.

At the end of his day of repentance, the minders drove Boris back to Liverpool’s Speke airport to fly home to London alone. By this time Boris was ‘very grumpy.’ He was most intent on persuading people that he had not been ‘sent’ up to Liverpool like some ‘whipped cur’ but had taken the decision to set the facts straight himself. ‘He had started in fine form but got more and more frayed as the day went on, in private at least,’ revealed one Tory insider. ‘I am a squeezed lemon on this subject,’ he admitted before climbing into the back of the car, an open packet of headache tablets clearly visible on the seat next to him. Boris told his minders that he had to leave immediately as he had an important event in London that he was speaking at that night and could not be late. His friend Susanna Gross has, however, subsequently said that he joined her and some other friends for dinner to ‘unwind.’

Journalist, politician, celebrity, husband, father and apparently fall-guy too, it was now clear that Boris had much on his mind – and more than almost anyone else knew. For now he had saved his career. He had also made an initially unfortunate but ultimately definitive entrance on the national stage; his charm and apparent bonhomie defusing the immediate public row as it had so many times in private. ‘Boris came out tops as he got publicity,’ concludes Quentin Letts. ‘Howard kept him on because he liked him and thought the trip had been both necessary and relatively successful.’

‘Very few things in relation to Boris turn out exactly the way you expect and that is the nature of him,’ observes Howard. ‘Given that
the article had appeared, I think that he and we came out of it as best we could. Bridges were repaired – sort of. We’d shown that we took it seriously, and that we very much regretted it.’

But the fact that Boris had once again ‘got away with it’ intensified the jealousies and resentments among his Parliamentary colleagues and there were now even louder questions about his ability to continue as both the editor of the
Spectator
and an MP. As Guy Black puts it: ‘There was no question of sacking him over this as Michael wanted to keep him as part of the team but it stretched the string, as it were, and it was clear that if there were another incident, it would be more difficult.’

Boris was now instantly recognisable on any high street in Britain and his new notoriety in Liverpool actually increased
Spectator
sales in the city. The saga also rendered him a hero in parts of Liverpool’s great rival, Manchester, where United football fans started chanting, ‘There’s only one Boris Johnson’ to their Merseyside opponents and, ‘You’re just a self-pity city!’ Michael Crick of BBC
Newsnight
, a lifelong United supporter, says he has attended at least 1,500 football matches and, ‘this was the first and only time a politician has been celebrated in song – there were even Boris badges and leaflets at the ground.’

But while the kerfuffle might help sell copies of an irreverent magazine, the effect on his political career was not quite so benign: what he needed now was a period of reflective calm away from the headlines. But with Boris, was that actually possible?

‘She poured me out a glass of wine, went over to the chaise longue, kicked off her high heels and tucked her feet in under her bottom,’ recalls Lloyd Evans, who was surprised to find Petronella Wyatt so comfortably ensconced in Boris’s office at the
Spectator
. ‘It was rather a
domestic
arrangement and it stuck in my mind. I should have twigged what was going on, but I didn’t. I just remember thinking that she’s a classic bit of fluff.’

Petronella, daughter of the much-married Labour MP turned royalist and columnist Woodrow Wyatt, is one of London society’s better-known femmes fatales. She has written on gossip columns, such as the
Peterborough
diary on the
Telegraph
(where she was known for arriving spectacularly late and, on one memorable occasion, not at all because it was ‘too windy.’) However, she herself has just as often been a favoured subject of diarists. Some time after Evans witnessed Petronella acting the glamorous châtelaine in the early days of Boris’s editorship, the
Daily Mail
started to drop heavy hints about a relationship between the two, whom, it observed: ‘work closely together.’ ‘Boris,’ it said, ‘may be influenced unduly in his libertarian attitudes to sex by freethinking Petronella Wyatt.’ On another occasion, the
Mail
ran a suggestive item noting, ‘colleagues say Mr Johnson sometimes goes missing during the day to have one-to-one discussions about geopolitical matters with his colleague Petronella Wyatt.’ Meanwhile, Boris dismissed the rumours as baseless – and he was believed. ‘Dip [Marina’s mother] was very loyal for a long time,
saying this stuff being put about by Petronella is all lies,’ recalled Anthony Howard. ‘She tried to defend Boris.’

Wealthy Petronella owned her first Dior dressing gown at the age of three and had a good figure, which she habitually dressed to full advantage. On one occasion she posed for
Tatler
in satin baby-dolls and ostrich-feather mules. She was also impossibly well connected with the powerful and Conservative, once singing ‘Lili Marlene’ in husky Marlene Dietrich tones at the 50th birthday party of Norman Lamont when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lamont’s then wife Rosemary tried to match her up with David Cameron, who was at the time working for Lamont at the Treasury, although ‘unaccountably’ he chose to go out with Samantha Sheffield, now his wife. Petronella nevertheless exercised considerable power over men – and she knew it. One fellow journalist, Stephen Robinson, recalls her playfulness when he lent her his laptop in the US in the mid-1990s at a Republican convention in San Diego. He called her after breakfast to say he would be coming round to her hotel room to pick it up, giving her half an hour’s notice. ‘When I got there, she answered the door in a transparent negligee. It was a case of “take a look at this, mate”. It was peculiar, a naked exercise of power – she was playing with me. Oh, and she’d broken the computer, not disastrously, but the screen was shattered.’

Petronella (widely known as ‘Petsy’) even had a brother called Pericles – after Boris’s favourite historical figure – a fact that amused them both. That is not their only common reference point – in some ways Petronella is like a female Boris, but with only a fraction of his luck and resilience. Former colleagues say they share a similar sense of entitlement – and timekeeping. Like Boris, Petronella often drew on sex and her own private life in her work, even when interviewing politicians. One such interview with Denis Healey ended with the former chancellor complaining, ‘Pity we’ve left no time for rumpy-pumpy.’

After an audience in November 2001 with Iain Duncan Smith, when he was Boris’s political boss, Petronella gave him seven out of ten for sex appeal and mused on how ‘these days’ sexiness was a valuable attribute in a politician. She had been brought up with views on
fidelity similarly continental to Boris’s in their flexibility. Also in common with Boris she appears to have had problems in remembering to pay her bills – once being sent a summons by Westminster Council for non-payment of council tax. Talented and witty, she had risen at an early age to become deputy editor of the
Spectator
under Boris’s predecessor Frank Johnson, but was removed from office when Boris came in. He gave her a column instead.

Over time, the fact that Boris was more than Petronella’s editor became an open secret in journalistic circles. The pair liked to circle St John’s Wood (where Petronella lived) in taxis, asking the driver to play a tape of her singing Puccini as they snogged away furiously on the back seat. As more than one wag has noted, it was hard luck on the driver as ‘Boris doesn’t tip much.’

What seems clear is that she wanted – and expected – Boris to leave Marina and marry her. And she was not averse to using her
Spectator
column ‘Singular Life’ to pursue this ambition. It may have been only Boris who realised the significance of her words, but in conjunction they read much like one side of an emotional, sometimes tender, often explicit and occasionally angry conversation between lovers. Early in 2000 she kicks off with word that she is setting up an erotic chocolate company and asks provocatively: ‘Who is the greatest lover in England today?’ It seems likely that it was Boris she was praising when she wrote that really nice people are ‘without moral indignation but in possession of an all-embracing tolerance unlike those who put on niceness like a new frock.’ No doubt she would also be aware of the likely impact on his sense of proprietorship by writing about receiving three marriage proposals in one day and of an ‘irresistible urge’ to go to bed. But then there is an intriguing mention in her column of February 2002, when she returns after an absence. She explains that she has spent the time in Florida ‘recuperating after an illness.’ We are not informed as to the nature of the condition, although it later becomes pretty clear.