JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (42 page)

By six that evening, the
Mail on Sunday
and
News of the World
were both requesting official statements. But however hard Guy Black argued, Boris refused to quit, insisting it was
acceptable
to lie. He had after all backed President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing then that it was not only sometimes justifiable but on occasion actually desirable to tell untruths about sex; he even took the view that Clinton had been Lewinsky’s victim because she had hung around the outside of the Oval Office in a low-cut dress, ‘transpiring at every pore with lust.’
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Clinton continued to lead the Free World while conducting his fling, so Boris was unable to see why he should not continue as the Conservatives’ man of the arts. Indeed, he argued whom he slept with had no bearing on his fitness for political office and he believed that revelations of his philandering, just as with Clinton, were motivated by ‘snivelling and short-sighted’ attitudes and jealousy. Perhaps the very fact that he appears to consider monogamy and constancy as pathetically suburban and bourgeois, contributes to his anarchic appeal. Many who know him expound the idea that Boris is the ‘opposite of a little Englander’ and that he despises anything bourgeois or petty-minded. Of course, such a lover of the ancient Greeks might well consider extra-marital sex as nothing more than a harmless pleasure. Boris does not preach to others, and certainly does not care to be preached at in turn. There was, in short, no persuading him to go.

With Howard’s beloved Liverpool scraping a narrow 3–2 victory over comparative minnows Crystal Palace, Guy Black contacted him with the news that Boris was digging in his heels. Howard duly delivered the bullet himself by phone at 6.30 during a ‘terse’ conversation described at the time as one of the fastest political
sackings in history. Boris’s reaction was delivered through the letterbox of his friends’ front door: ‘I am sorry this decision has been taken in response to stories about my private life. I am looking forward to helping promote a new Conservative policy on the arts, and I will continue to do my utmost to serve the people of Henley and south Oxfordshire. I am now going to have a stiff drink.’

The next day the tabloids were awash with headlines. The
News of the World
’s front page screamed ‘BONKING BORIS MADE ME PREGNANT’ over pictures of ‘mistress’ Petronella opposite ‘liar’ and ‘love cheat’ Boris. A ‘friend’ was quoted in the paper as saying that Boris had agreed with Petronella’s decision to terminate his child: ‘and his raction was of immense relief – just like any married man caught out by his infidelity.’ The
Mail on Sunday
’s ‘BORIS SACKED FOR LYING OVER AFFAIR’ went on to reveal that Petronella had lost two babies, although one reportedly through a miscarriage (which appears to explain the recuperation in Florida).

Far from keeping it quiet, Boris’s lies had ensured that details of his sex life were now plastered everywhere. He had made his party’s top brass look like dupes. But while Howard – and perhaps Guy Black even more – were furious, Boris had in the interim managed to save his marriage. Marina’s friends say the ferocity of the press coverage and Howard’s decision to fire Boris actually helped him in his cause. Indeed, Boris put it about that he had asked to be dismissed. ‘I’d recommend getting ignominiously sacked – and I want you to know that I insisted on my right to be sacked: “Sack me,” I said, by way of an ultimatum because it is only by being sacked that you can truly engender sympathy. Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under.’
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High risk maybe, this strategy certainly seems to have been effective. After a week in the doghouse, he was allowed back into the marital home, at first into a spare room but then eventually into his full conjugal status.

He celebrated with an early jog, leaving home at 7.30 on Monday, 15 November, just 24 hours after being dubbed the ‘love rat’ by the Sundays. Once again he used clothing to convey a message, in this case an outlandish get-up of floral board shorts and a skull and
crossbones ski-hat belonging to one of his sons. It all spoke of a certain triumph and joy. He advised the astonished reporters waiting to interview to him to enjoy a ‘beautiful day.’ The jolly mood was rather deflated, however, when he returned home to find his front door locked. He had to wait to be allowed in (and later confessed to fantasies of ‘mowing down’ the journalists watching his discomfort ‘like a scene in an old Sylvester Stallone film’.
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) It was perhaps merely a defiant gesture, but as the seconds passed before he was admitted, Boris gave the press pack the Panglossian observation, ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’

This gnomic reference to Voltaire’s famously optimistic character left most of those present baffled. Only with hindsight does it seem to imply that Boris may actually have been relieved at the outcome. His relationship with Howard was always going to be strained after Operation Scouse Grovel – and there were suggestions that he had planned to leave the front bench anyway of his own volition. The revelations about Petronella also forced him into making a once-and-for-all decision that by nature he was reluctant to take. But there was also a manic need for optimism in the face of adversity and he continued in the same relentlessly upbeat theme in the
Telegraph
with the comment: ‘My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’

Marina’s decision to take Boris back after such a public betrayal has puzzled many – and particularly women – ever since. Margaret Cook, whose husband Robin, the former Foreign Secretary, betrayed her with his secretary, was one such woman to vent her anger and dismay at the saga. ‘The deference and privileges received in the Palace of Westminster,’ she wrote, ‘tend to inflate a man’s idea of his own importance, and this particular man obviously feels above the rules that govern the plebs.’
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She pointed to the contrasts between the pictures in the press of Petronella – ‘frivolous party gear, all low neck lines and stocking tops, fringes, flesh and fancy jewels’ – with those of Marina – ‘high-necked, cover-up, winter woollies.’ But like many men – and a surprising number of women – she hinted that
Marina could barely have expected any other outcome: ‘While feeling sorry for the wife, I cannot help remembering a time some eleven years ago when she performed the same trick on Allegra Mostyn-Owen. She became pregnant and got her man. Maybe that was what led Petronella to rate her chances highly of doing the same.’

If Cook’s high-handed account sounded like the stuff of soap opera, the true picture was even more complicated. On 14 October Boris had defied a rare attack of flu not to attend either his pregnant mistress just four days before she had an abortion, or his wife and children at home, but an attractive young Oxford undergraduate. Boris explained that he was ‘as sick as a dog and could barely speak. But I would be letting the side down if I hadn’t attended.’ The event in question was an Oxford Union debate – on the customary ‘this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government’ – with Lord Lamont and John Redwood. In the chair just happened to be one Ruzwana Bashir, with whom the papers said he had struck up ‘a close relationship’ (and who had attended that summer’s
Spectator
party.)

Boris is nothing if not energetic and goes for a certain upmarket type. At any one time, there were usually at least one or two well-bred Oxbridge women in short skirts starting out in journalism – and quite a few found themselves invited to a
Spectator
lunch so that Boris could give them ‘advice.’ One such attractive, bright and well-heeled young woman – with the curtain of swishy straight hair he goes for – was targeted several times by Boris during this period and she spotted others of a similar style (he does not do cocktail waitresses) subjected to the same ‘treatment’. She describes his technique: ‘He invades your personal space, gets really close up to you, and then with those slightly popping blue eyes of his says intently in a deep voice: “You really must come and write for me at the
Spectator
.”

‘I can see why it would work with a particular sort of emotionally vulnerable young woman but it certainly didn’t work with me. In the end he gave up and tried someone else,’ she says.

Boris has an almost Clintonesque ability to make the person he is talking to at any one time – male or female – feel special. ‘He makes the rest of the world disappear,’ says one admirer. So while he was five foot ten inches of goosey flesh, overweight, sweaty and not
classically handsome by any means, he was fast becoming one of Britain’s most accomplished lotharios. It is, in any case, his brain that really attracts. Otherwise rational young women have even asked him to sign their underwear – knowing Boris, it is likely he obliged.

As so often in these situations, one or other of the women involved was attracting more of the blame than the culprit-in-chief himself. In Henley Marina’s supposed failure as a wife was commonly held up as a reason for her husband’s infidelity. ‘We were having a Conservative ladies’ luncheon when the Petronella story blew up,’ recalls Maggie Pullen of the South Oxfordshire Conservatives. ‘Some of them were quite elderly and I thought they’re going to be horrified but they blamed Marina – it’s all the wife’s fault, they said. They all agreed that it was because she works and spends far too much time with the children.’ But how Marina can be blamed for Boris’s roving eye is far from clear. He once told another man that he had to have a lot of affairs because he was ‘literally busting with spunk.’ On another occasion, he is reputed to have asked a woman whether she would like to be Mistress 2009. ‘Marrying Marina created a job vacancy for a mistress’ became a common refrain among men who vicariously enjoyed his sexual adventures. The
Henley Standard
ran a banner headline over its front page: ‘WE STAND BY BORIS’.

Not that Marina, who never really took to Henley anyway, would have taken much notice of the chatter: she is her own woman and would have taken the decision that best suited first, her children (her eldest had just started secondary school) and then her own needs. She handled it all with dignity, never succumbing to the temptation to vent her anger or frustration to a journalist – even though she personally knew dozens who would have lent a sympathetic ear. Like Boris, Marina seems particularly adept at compartmentalising her life. ‘I had lunch with her at a time when she could easily have bawled him out about his behaviour,’ says Sarah Sands. ‘But she was very upbeat and loyal, calmly talking about plans for a family holiday.’ And so she continued to focus on her work, enduring the stares and sotto voce comments of those she encountered, in and out of court.

In heart-breaking fashion, one of Marina’s most protective friends explains her extraordinary fortitude: ‘She copes because she knows
he loves her. In any case, it is not so much the affair itself that hurts, it’s the publicity and humiliation.’ Robert Seabrook QC, the head of her chambers at One Crown Office Row, has observed her through many a crisis and marvels at Marina’s ability to deal with Boris. ‘Her self-containment is part of her charm,’ he says. ‘She must skip a beat but you never see her in tears.’

Whatever the appearances, their marriage is a union of equals. It is wrong to assume that Marina is the downtrodden wife who sticks by her errant husband because she has to. She has her own life, her own career, her own friends, her own beliefs – and, according to a couple of her friends, her own low-key flirtations including, it is said, a crush on the actor Neil Pearson. She expresses herself through a confident dress sense fortressed by a large collection of shoes and expensive hairdressing. Quieter and more reserved than Boris, in some ways Marina is tougher because she is not scared of confrontation – for example, in negotiations on house buying, she is plain speaking and forthright.

She also kept Boris on a long leash and the papers raised the suggestion that she might yet sue for divorce. She was, after all, an expert in that field of law and could have made it expensive. So concerned were the management at the
Spectator
that Dan Colson took Boris aside to give him a paternal word of advice. ‘I said, “You know you’re terrific, but I also think you must have a death wish,”’ recalls Colson. “Because in case you’ve not noticed, you’ve got four kids, you’re not rich and you’re married to a fierce barrister, who is a divorce lawyer. You’re going to be living on the bread line at this rate.” He just did the normal Boris routine, “oh, aaarh, grrrr, of course, of course.”’

Marina’s parents – Charles and Dip Wheeler – had been so supportive of the marriage with Boris in its early days and continued to deny that he was guilty of any wrongdoing as long as they plausibly could. ‘There was a great sense of embarrassment for them over the whole Boris thing,’ says one prominent journalist and old friend of Charles. ‘They were careful never to make disparaging remarks but the episode over Petronella was torture for them.’ A couple of friends of the family suggest Marina’s parents in part blamed Petronella’s
mother for pursuing the idea of her daughter marrying Boris. But in any case, it seems that Charles also took Boris aside for a talk – warning him to stop humiliating his daughter and the Wheelers as a whole. Boris respected and admired his father-in-law and no doubt took in his strong words on the subject.

Although never an establishment figure, Wheeler’s reputation as a correspondent was such that ambassadors and Government ministers would rise deferentially when he entered a room and later, in 2006, he was granted a knighthood for Services to Journalism. In the presence of such a distinguished man, even Boris could appear uncharacteristically subdued. ‘He was never the rumbustious figure with Charles that one knows publicly,’ recalls the journalist Adam Raphael. Boris promised to behave and ‘put on a good Christmas.’ As part of the reconciliation process, he took the whole family away on a skiing holiday to St Anton.