JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (43 page)

While Marina grew in stature from the saga, Boris was undoubtedly chastened. His front-bench career seemed to be over, virtually before it had started. If, as Henry Kissinger once noted, ‘power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,’ then Boris perhaps found his sexual magnetism not quite ‘weapons grade’ any more. Michael Portillo led the growing chorus that Boris had proved himself a lightweight. ‘When I first met Boris Johnson, I marked him down as unserious. He came to interview me as Defence Secretary and arrived forty-five minutes late. Apparently, experienced political journalist that he was, he had thought the ministry was in Victoria Street, not in Whitehall. He had the decency to look flushed and sweaty, but also gave the impression that I should find his shambolic performance endearing. I pretended to do so.’
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Worse still, other Tories of his generation, such as David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove, were winning glowing notices from Portillo and others. And they were all at least two years younger than him.

But that is not to say that there was not still some residual sympathy for Boris. Not a few (mostly male) commentators believed that Howard had done his own standing no good in being harsh with his far more popular subordinate. In the
Observer
, David Aaronovitch
wrote that most voters were not nearly as ‘narrow-minded as muckraking Sunday tabloids or fear-scented politicians believe. They liked Boris and – my guess is – they will now like Michael Howard and his party less on account of his unnecessary departure.’ And many years later – now retired from political life – even Howard has come to regret his decision, perhaps with the aid of that ‘blessed sponge of amnesia’ again.

‘I should have been more relaxed,’ he admits. ‘We never knew whether the allegations were actually true. It was represented to me that he had lied to my press secretary and my press secretary took that very seriously. And that’s why I didn’t like it. But if I had my time again, I wouldn’t sack him. Boris’s view was that it would all have blown over. And I think it probably would.’

There were also a handful of senior Tories, even then, who still considered Boris destined for great things and believed his current troubles to be merely temporary distractions but at the tail end of 2004, the immediate outlook was not rosy. There were rumours again that his tenure at the
Spectator
was no longer secure. On the day of the famous jog, the magazine had passed from Conrad Black and, along with the
Telegraph
newspapers, into the less-indulgent hands of the Roman Catholic Barclay Brothers. The
Spectator
’s new chief executive was Andrew Neil, a grammar school boy from Paisley and former
Sunday Times
editor, who was not expected to take kindly to Boris’s Etonian excesses. Boris’s writ would never run so large again – there would be less laughter at the
Spectator
and perhaps rather less daytime sex, too. Harry, Ann Sindall’s dog, was to be banned, as was ping pong in the garden. In fact, the whole magazine would eventually move out of the house of fun into rather less atmospheric accommodation.

Almost straightaway Neil told the Radio 4
Today
programme – the message board for the chattering classes – that: ‘We are looking forward to a period of quiet. I think the more time the editor spends in Doughty Street editing the magazine and the less we see of him in the newspapers, then the better for the editor and the better for the magazine.’ The Barclay brothers were said to want a more serious and cerebral publication with fewer scandals (however good they might be for circulation, which was at a record high of nearly 70,000).

Mercifully for Boris, his ‘period of quiet’ came quickly. A week later, the
Sunday Telegraph
broke the story that ‘open war’ had broken out between Kimberly Fortier and David Blunkett. Their relationship had collapsed in acrimony when she returned to her husband Stephen Quinn. Blunkett also faced accusations that he had fast-tracked a visa for her Filipina nanny, and so began a series of events that finally led to the Labour Home Secretary’s resignation on 15 December. The next day Kimberly was in hospital having her second child. Boris proposed a toast to ‘absent friends now languishing in their beds. I miss her – this is not a popular view – I miss her dynamism.’ It was classic two-edged Boris – giving something with one hand by saying he missed ‘her dynamism’ while taking it back with the other by saying, ‘this is not a popular view.’

So at the end of a challenging year, Boris found himself on probation at home, considered an unreliable loose cannon by his own party and an attention-seeker by the
Spectator
’s new boss. At least the kerfuffle did nothing to dent his earnings, which were now mounting fast – one lucrative by-product of the
Sextator
saga was that he was in hot demand as an after-dinner speaker on some £10,000 a time. With his TV appearances,
Telegraph
column and other journalism, he was making £150,000 a year before either his undisclosed
Spectator
salary or the £59,000 MP’s pay. But it meant that he ended the year having started (and finished) a frontbench career and with even more enemies in his own party’s ranks.

Charles Moore, who continued to use him as a columnist, saw the funny side of the story. He started cracking the joke: ‘I told Boris I don’t care what he does in his private life and he told me, “Nor do I.”’ Others had a lot of fun with the ‘pleasing similarity’ of the word ‘piffle’ and Boris’s third name ‘de Pfeffel’. Even his old boss, Dan Colson, enjoyed the fun, noting: ‘He always looked like he’d just got out of bed and apparently he had.’ No doubt Boris hoped it would all die down into a longer period of what Andrew Neil called ‘quiet’ but alas, this was not to be. There was so much action in Boris’s life that other people wanted a part of it.

The
Spectator Affair
, which was broadcast on BBC 2 in February 2005, had started off as a film portrait of Boris as much as his
magazine. But in the event, there was surprise that Boris’s ‘shenaningans’ were less prominent than those involving either Fortier or Rod Liddle. Boris, of course, was a national figure by this point. ‘Boris emerged from the programme relatively unscathed,’ the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ in the
Evening Standard
reported. ‘His affair with Petronella Wyatt was barely referred to – leading some to suggest a deal was done behind the scenes between Johnson and the BBC. “Boris had them over a barrel regarding interviews, filming in the
Spectator
offices and the
Spectator
archive,” says an insider. However, the programme’s producer, Patrick Forbes, denies accusations of a stitch-up.’
⁷

In truth, Forbes – one of Britain’s most experienced and respected documentary makers – had found Boris extremely difficult to work with. He recalls being shocked at his first meeting back in 2004, having known him previously only by reputation as a bumbling raconteur. An employee of Forbes’ company, Oxford Film and Television, conducted the on-camera interview with Boris, ‘but because we were more worried than usual about potential trouble, I went along as well. I have never seen anyone who is tougher behind the eyes than him in a billion years of interviewing. He is clearly a right piece of work. He’s completely under control – except in one area, where women are concerned. He made no attempt to engage at all, and avoided answering all the questions. His bluster and wit serves to obscure his real politics, which are nasty. He is a charmingly evasive and ruthless customer.

‘He gave the interview with eventual good grace after he realised that more of the other people involved were talking to us than he had expected. No fool he. We couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to do it, but then all the stuff about his private life exploded.’

The fly-on-the-wall concept was subsequently abandoned in favour of merely chronicling events – there were in any case a lot of them.

The
Spectator Affair
also featured an interview with a brooding Lord Black, now in the United States fighting criminal charges and multi-million dollar law suits. Perhaps understandably given the unflattering personal coverage Boris had run about his former patron, he hit out at him, dismissing his one-time protégé as treacherous. ‘Boris has his
charms,’ he growled, ‘but Boris is not Mr Loyalty.’ It was a damaging, if justifiable, observation. But by July, there was a rapprochement and the pair lunched together in London on one of Black’s last visits to Britain before his incarceration.

It appears that Boris had somehow avoided the blame for the 2004
Spectator
article with its references to Black’s hairy knuckles, murky business origins and provincialism. It had, after all, appeared under the political editor Peter Oborne’s byline – like the earlier hazardous piece attacking the Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith. Black’s right-hand man and friend Dan Colson says: ‘The Oborne piece was bitchy but I’m 99 per cent sure that Boris didn’t read it before it went out. It’s not OK, of course – it’s Boris.’ In turn, Black now comments: ‘The Oborne piece was irritating but there were many worse at the time and (later) [Boris] wrote a nice letter to the trial judge in Chicago for me. I consider him a friendly acquaintance.’

Boris was now playing it safe at the
Spectator
, however, and the magazine no longer had the sparkle and irreverence of its recent past. But all these events were sideshows to the real political arena, where he was now a conspicuous absence. There were quite a few voices in the Conservative ranks – and elsewhere – who believed they were witnessing a sad squandering of talent. Even Guy Black began to feel some sympathy: ‘Boris disappeared from view – you couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him.’ (In turn, Boris is said by colleagues of the time to have chiefly blamed Black for his downfall. His rage at him was ‘scarcely containable,’ one said.)

In the lead-up to the General Election of May 2005, however, Howard was intent on instilling discipline in the party as it prepared its latest attempt to dethrone Tony Blair. Conservative fixers were at pains to keep a tight leash on Boris – arguably still their greatest electoral asset. A senior member of the Conservative Central Office staff during that election recalls specifically being told to ‘keep Boris out of the picture.’ ‘It was all very tightly controlled,’ he recalls. ‘Boris’s quotes were kept to a minimum.’ A very senior Tory (who now advises him) was just one who simply dismissed Boris at this point as an ‘idiot.’

Even in Henley, Boris was comparatively little seen. Oliver Tickell, son of Sir Crispin and a family friend of the Johnsons, had stood for the Green Party against Boris in the 2001 election. Although he did not stand again in 2005, he watched the local campaigns closely and could not help noticing how rarely Boris was ‘let out.’

Underemployed in Henley, Boris slipped away at one point to advance the Johnson dynasty as a whole by helping his father Stanley fight Teignbridge in South Devon – a rare example of a father attempting to follow his son into Parliament. Nevertheless, Boris increased his majority in Henley over the Liberal Democrats to 12,793. Stanley eventually lost to the Lib Dems by 6,215. Nationally, the Conservatives had lost for a third time to Tony Blair, winning only an extra 33 new seats and reducing Labour’s majority from 167 to 66.

So Boris was returned to Henley, but some local Conservatives thought they detected a certain loss of fizz. ‘I think he wanted something more,’ recalls Maggie Pullen. Local campaigners working to save Townlands hospital also noticed a shift in his attitude and began to attack him publicly for failing in his support. Terry Buckett, chairman of the Save Townlands Action Group, told the
Henley Standard
how disappointed he was. ‘I watched a House of Commons debate on the TV recently and Boris wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘We want him to represent us at this level and he’s not doing it.’ A normally supportive councillor, Dianne Browne, complained: ‘We’ve had no help from him recently.’
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Events in London would only make matters worse. In July 2005 the
Spectator
’s own theatre critics staged a play called
Who’s the Daddy
? at the King’s Head theatre in Islington. Toby Young and Lloyd Evans had decided to convert the
Sextator
‘bonkathon’ into a stage farce with Boris as principal character. Many of those cackling in the audience at this spectacularly irreverent piece were
Spectator
staffers. They chortled at the actor playing Boris, who was wearing a pair of ‘grotesque’ tiger-print boxers over ‘plump, margarine haunches glistening horridly’ under the stage lights. One of them was Boris’s assistant Ann Sindall, who claimed she had been driven by ‘curiosity’ to attend the riotous first night. Asked whether the on-stage version of the
Spectator
matched the real one, she refused to
comment, although she did note, ‘I think they’ve got Kimberly down to a tee.’
⁹

It was also reported that a lawyer representing David Blunkett – now restored to the Cabinet in charge of Work and Pensions – was among those looking particularly amused. Actually Blunkett, who in real life had endured a painfully public spat over the paternity of Kimberly Fortier’s second child plus a tearful resignation as Home Secretary, emerged as the play’s most sympathetic character. Whereas Fortier was portrayed, according to the
Evening Standard
’s reviewer, as a ‘heartless acquisitor of his powerful sexual scalp’, who frequently scrapped with Petronella – typically clad in Chanel, glugging Krug and carrying dozens of upmarket shopping bags.

Boris utters a series of rugby cries as he seduces Petsy in a broom cupboard – ‘Come on, Petsy, nothing like a good scrum after lunch!’ He also boasts of having sired four children – or is it five, he affects not to remember – all the products of what he refers to as his ‘weapons grade testosterone.’ Asked if he was planning to watch the play too, Boris replied cuttingly: ‘I don’t know whether I’ll have time to catch it before it closes.’ But the publicity was such that after five days, the play sold out for the rest of its six-week run and was lined-up for a transfer to the West End.