JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (44 page)

Amid all the laughter was the home truth that actual events and real people with very real emotions were being portrayed. Indeed, at one point during the play, there is a sobering moment when Boris’s character says: ‘Fine – turn my life into farce, everyone else has.’ A few days into the run, one couple in the audience (who do not wish to be identified) sat there stony-faced and miserable. ‘We couldn’t believe what this must be doing to Marina,’ the husband said. ‘We wished we hadn’t gone.’

According to friends, Petronella was damaged by the affair and its aftermath. Her mother even claimed the
Spectator
had ruined her daughter’s life. Certainly, despite a couple of near misses, Petronella was still single. Nor had she had the children she so fervently wished for by the time she was 43 – in 2011. Indeed, some believe she still holds a torch for Boris. ‘The women in Boris’s life never quite escape him,’ notes one family friend.

But Boris did not sack the two members of staff who had retold his life as a comedy, a step he would have had every right to take. They had given him six weeks’ warning of their intentions but decided against their original idea of inviting him to advise on the script, recognising this would more than test Boris’s legendary sense of humour and might possibly bring the whole project to an abrupt halt. Instead they wrote to him in placatory terms:

In turn, he wrote them an equally flattering reply, part of which as seen above, was included in his character’s lines. Just like Boris, Evans and Young are enthusiastic recyclers of life into art.

Boris even allowed Young to go ahead with plans to edit a special issue of the magazine, declaring: ‘I believe in spreading peace and love.’

‘Unlike most ambitious politicians, Boris has worked out that it is much better that if someone has a go at you, to laugh it off,’ explains an admirer. ‘It is an extension of the never openly being rude thing that Boris has. It’s very hard to do, but very effective in avoiding making enemies.’ Indeed, Boris chose to underline his
sang froid
in one newspaper interview with a series of ostentatiously obscure
words – as if his flexing his intellect publicly in this way gave him comfort or perhaps protection. Claiming to feel ‘eirenic’ (peace-seeking) and ‘ataraxic’ (serenely indiffererent) about Evans’ and Young’s act of perfidiousness, he declared: ‘I’m certainly issuing no instructions to staff about it. It will not be deemed an act of disloyalty to go and see it.’ Although when he added sarcastically, ‘I’m sure it will be a thoroughly good lark. Ha, ha, ha,’ the interviewer sensed Boris’s ataraxia was not as ‘complete and total’ as he claimed.
¹⁰

But Evans certainly admired how Boris continued to appear so calm, even forgiving in public, however angry it made him privately. ‘Toby showed Boris the actual script of
Who’s the Daddy
? before it went on stage and he found it utterly distressing,’ he recalls of events just before opening night. ‘He could only bring himself to read the first two or three pages but he played his hand very cleverly. He started off by indulging us, not sacking us, and sent us the note about turning his life into farce. But when it turned into a success and was going to transfer to the West End, he had moral leverage over us because he hadn’t cut the rope before. At this point Toby, whom he knew would make the decision, was getting phone calls from Boris three times a day.’

Boris’s moral leverage was of a heart-wrenching variety: the theatre was only a mile from the Johnsons’ home in Furlong Road. Boris said his daughter passed it twice a day on her route to school. ‘He told us that she was embarrassed answering questions about it from her friends,’ says Evans. ‘This way he persuaded us not to take the play to the West End, which was fair enough. But to blame us for the pain caused to Marina and the children is not fair. My theory is that we did Marina a favour. I imagine that some little part of Marina’s mind would have said, “Well, this bloody serves Boris right!” From my point of view, yes, we were writing about this, but Boris initiated the pain. But I doubt she saw it like that – she has four children with Boris so she just has to get on with it.’ (Later, Boris’s mother Charlotte would admit her grandchildren had been ‘through thick and thin’ at this time but that fortunately they were ‘survivors and sturdy.’)

Publicly, Boris seemed to be rolling over and admitting mea culpa, even conceding, ‘Yes, I was due for a good kicking.’ When asked if he
had begun to believe some of the fawning articles written about him before his fall from grace, he replied: ‘I think we all construct a series of alternative illusions about ourselves,’ and then after a long pause, ‘verging from the modest and miserable to the really rather demented and grandiose. But there’s no harm in allowing yourself, on a Wednesday evening, after you’ve drunk something and produced what you think is a particularly snorting column, to feel that you’re quite good.’
¹¹

Marina, meanwhile, was indeed ‘getting on with it.’ At the
Spectator
annual summer party exactly a fortnight after the play opened, she turned up as usual in a heroic display of marital loyalty. A protective knot formed round her as Toby Young also showed and pressed past her through the crowd into the garden. Relations between the Johnson camp and the playwrights were undoubtedly cool. In solidarity, Rachel Johnson disinvited Young to her birthday celebrations. And according to a senior Henley Tory, the local agent Wayne Lawley now started acting as Boris’s ‘minder.’ ‘After the Petronella story, Wayne was always there with Boris to keep him roped in,’ he said.

But no one could claim the past nine months had been anything short of disastrous for Boris. What’s more, Guy Black would now be a colleague – he was about to join the
Telegraph
group as director of communications. The rumours continued about Boris’s editorship at the
Spectator
. Even one of his own contributors – his predecessor as editor, Frank Johnson – regularly wrote about him in ‘unflattering’ terms. While Boris affected ignorance of the speculation on his future and batted away criticisms with his usual brand of humour, the strains must have told. ‘There will come an evening or a morning or a noon day when I will be gathered to the Valhalla of ex-
Spectator
editors, but I haven’t yet,’ he quipped to the
Independent
. Even under stress, he could still turn a pretty phrase. No doubt that was why the criticism of him was less severe than it might otherwise have been and his popularity nationally showed few signs of abating. He chose not to react by becoming more serious and pompous – as his fellow politicians would have him do – but persisted in the reverse.

In one of the most revealing interviews in this period of his life, he was asked whether the Barclay Brothers continued to support him. He told the
Independent
: ‘Oh, they’ve been absolutely fine. I know that highly misleading newspaper reports may have given another impression but we live a life of almost embarrassingly monastic seclusion and contemplation. It is no exaggeration to say that we are capable of arguing for three hours about Anselm’s ontological argument. There is a
Name of the Rose
kind of atmosphere here. You know, monks bent over …’ (He drifts off for a moment, leaving open just what the monks are up to while ‘bent over’.) ‘I can’t quite remember what happens in
The Name of the Rose
. Oh, it gets rather racy, doesn’t it? OK, forget it!’ He continued to insist humour should not hold him back in politics, whatever the sages might warn of its effect on his career. ‘I mean, I find I don’t have much difficulty getting people to listen to me seriously when I want to. And I’m not going to produce a series of spine-crackingly tedious pamphlets for the sake of gravitas. I think it’s important to remember that most people find politics unbelievably dull, so I don’t see any particular vice in trying to sugar the pill with a few jokes.’

But if the sagas of the previous months had taught him anything, it was surely a recognition that he must eventually choose between journalism and politics. At the age of 41, with a future at the
Spectator
no longer realistically a long-term option, with his failure to land the
Sunday Telegraph
editorship, perhaps it was no wonder he was leaning towards politics. ‘It’s a great privilege to run the
Spectator
,’ he said, ‘but I’m also a Member of Parliament. There must come a point when the two horses start to diverge. I think it would be pretty rotten to keep asking the people of Henley to return me to Westminster and not give it a really good kick of the can.’
¹²

And yet his party was little nearer to returning to government and he was arguably further than ever from returning to the front benches: it was Boris who had been given a good kicking.

Boris might be down, but a man of such determined optimism should rarely be considered out. The disappointing Conservative showing in the May 2005 General Election gave him just the opportunity he needed to re-enter the fray. The next day, Michael Howard announced that he would be resigning, prompting the fourth change of Tory Leader in eight years. Not that Boris was intending to stand, of course, at least not yet; he was far too canny not to appreciate that such a short, junior and accident-prone stint on the front benches was hardly a fitting qualification for throwing his own headwear into the ring. ‘My hat is firmly in my sock drawer, where it will remain,’ he quipped.

Howard said he wanted to make way for a younger man. His decision to delay the contest until the autumn – to allow the party to consider whether to change the rules for electing a successor – played into the hands of a very young contender indeed. David Davis, a 56-year-old south London grammar school boy from the Right of the party, was the initial favourite. But Davis’s brand of populist working-class Toryism – he had been brought up by a single mother on a council estate – had never been to Boris’s taste. Boris had already recognised the electoral potential of the rapidly rising 38-year-old fellow Old Etonian, David Cameron.

Months before Cameron became a serious runner with an official campaign launch in September, Boris decided to back the man who had been two years his junior at school (and unlike him, certainly not a star). As early as June, he was one of a ‘gaggle’ of 14 mostly blue-blooded
MPs, who came to pledge loyalty in a secret meeting in Portcullis House, a smart new annexe to the Palace of Westminster. The meeting was not a success – Cameron still seemed to be dithering about whether or not to stand – but Tory sources say Boris was one of those ‘pressing hardest’ on Cameron, right through his early ‘wobble’.

News of Cameron’s ambitions, and the fact that they were attracting support such as Boris’s, soon emerged and by mid-June, bookmakers were placing Cameron second favourite behind Davis on odds of 5:1. Even so, backing Cameron had its risks for Boris and his hopes of returning to the front bench. Going into September 2005, the Cameroon ‘compassionate Conservatism’ campaign looked to be in trouble. It had so far failed to attract much Parliamentary support; there were even suggestions from some MPs that he should ‘go away.’ But Cameron’s official launch on 29 September highlighted the contrast between his modernising style (chill-out music and strawberry smoothies in a circular white space) and the tired, retread feel of Davis’s event in a stuffy oak-panelled room. Sensing the tide turning towards his man, Boris told the
Independent
: ‘I am backing David Cameron’s campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest.’ And his gamble looked as if it just might pay off.

Fortunately, Cameron was able to repay Boris’s confidence a few days later at the Party Conference. At the Leadership candidates’ beauty parade in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens on 4 October, he delivered a career-changing performance that would define his image as a modern Conservative. Speaking without notes in the verb-light oratorical style developed by Tony Blair, he gave a rousing speech on bringing in a new generation to change the party and the country. When his pregnant wife Samantha joined him on stage, he patted her stomach and the wild applause continued for several extra minutes. In contrast, Davis’s speech, although good in parts, received a negative press reaction. Boris had backed the right horse: Cameron had converted many doubters (despite his ill-advised quip at a private dinner that he was the ‘heir to Blair.’)

But Cameron’s triumph was not an unalloyed joy for Boris – who had hitherto always been so much better known, and had also already
passed the landmark age of 40. Boris was more experienced as a public performer, particularly on television where his cross-party popularity with the under-35s exceeded even the wildest Central Office fantasy. The unfortunate situation was made even worse by the fact that it was another
Etonian
laying claim to the great prize, and one who had also scooped a First-class Oxford degree compared to Boris’s 2:1. Neither had Boris abandoned his own hopes entirely: for one thing, he had been assiduous in wooing his own constituency association with flattery and bonhomie but also many others with speeches to Tory activists all over the country. He had become a beloved figure in the national party – and outside it.

Boris’s evident frustration at Cameron’s success boiled over in a
Telegraph
piece at the beginning of October, which on closer reading portrayed the younger man as an over-praised unknown, who had stolen ideas from the far more deserving Boris – as well as his rightful job. He opens with the observation that ‘over the past few months I have lost count of the number of people who have asked me – satirically – why I am not standing in the current Tory leadership contest.’ (The clever deployment of ‘satirically’ here is a common Boris-ism used to leaven a very serious point with jokey self-deprecation.) He writes that he ‘bumbles’ out some reply on such occasions, and then says he is backing David Cameron instead. ‘For the most part, this answer has so far drawn a look of anxious blankness, the look you see when people are sure that they ought to have read some classic work, and are in two minds whether to bluff it out or admit ignorance,’ continues Boris in withering style. “‘Oh yes,” they say, mentally noting they ought to get to grips with the subject of David Cameron, Stephen Hawking’s
Brief History of Time
and
Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie.’ Ouch!