JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (45 page)

And while Boris concedes Cameron has some nice lines – not least his constant repetition of ‘we’re all in this together’ – he continues, ‘I have a feeling he nicked it from me.’ He then takes the mockery to yet another level by citing a piece in that week’s
Spectator
by Bruce Anderson (which he himself had commissioned), which he brands a ‘kind of tear-sodden
nunc dimittis
. Like old Simeon in the temple, Brucie has seen our salvation … Cameron is our saviour and a light
to lighten the gentiles.’ However, even Boris is forced to admit that ‘it has been the 38-year-old’s week.’

Anderson was furious that his piece was thus portrayed as a drooling eulogy to Cameron and used as a stick with which to beat them both. But as usual, Boris had skilfully made his point without actually appearing to be nasty. It was a masterpiece in subtle sabotage – where a piece affects to conclude one thing when the balance of its arguments is very much in favour of the other. He covers his tracks beautifully by rounding off with the empty flourish that reform of both Toryism and the country was ‘the job for Cameron, and Cameron is the man for the job’ entirely against the tenor of the rest of the article.
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‘Boris is brilliant at this subtle and cunning way of delivering a message while apparently saying the reverse,’ notes Paul Goodman, his former comment editor at the
Telegraph
. It is indeed Boris’s ingenious way of avoiding the full-on confrontation he fears; but in reality the article said more about his own anxieties than it did about Cameron’s qualifications for the job.

It was time, though, for Boris to reposition himself as a serious politician. He had to convince Cameron during the final stages of the leadership race that despite these exercises in subtle sabotage, he was ready, willing and able to come back to frontbench politics. Indeed, surely it would be his just desserts. As usual, Boris chose an inventive route – an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s
Desert Island Discs
with Sue Lawley. But far from the friendly chat he might have expected to be able to control, he was subjected to quite an interrogation by an interviewer he seems to have under-estimated. Now that he was re-branding himself as ‘serious,’ radio no longer permitted him many of the evasive tactics available in interviews past – jokes, Latin tags, flights of fantasy, strange gutteral noises (aaaaghs, grrrrrrs, mwahs, etc.). So, when Lawley confronted him on the choice that he had avoided ever since he was elected as an MP, he had no option but to answer.

Lawley: If you had to choose between journalism and politics, and you might, who knows, one day, have to do so, you’d choose politics, would you?

Boris: Yes, of course. But I don’t think I would abandon journalism.

Lawley: But you’d have to. I mean, people have told you time and again: you can’t ride two horses. You’ve probably proved you can’t ride two horses.

Boris: I think I have successfully ridden two horses for quite a long time, but I have to admit there have been moments when the distance between the two horses has grown terrifyingly wide.

Lawley: Split you right down the middle.

Boris: And I did momentarily come off.

Lawley: But if you had to choose, you would choose, would you, politics?

Boris: Yes, of course. I always wanted to do it. I always knew I was going to be an MP. I didn’t read
Hansard
as a pre-pubescent but I had the sense that this was the single most interesting job you can do, the job that involved testing you to the greatest extent and it involves the broadest possible canvas.

So, rather in the manner of the Petronella saga, extraneous events and other people were cornering Boris into making a decision. Where others including Conrad Black had failed, Lawley had in effect forced Boris to commit to leaving the
Spectator
to focus on his ambitions in politics. He even dropped a hint that a job in the unlikely-sounding agriculture or world trade would be an appropriate reward. Lawley then probed him about the extent of his political sights, and particularly whether they included becoming Prime Minister. His former mother-in-law Gaia, she said, had revealed that he always expressed from a young age a determination to become PM. When pressed, he feigned laughter but conceded publicly for the first time that he did have his eyes on the top job: ‘I suppose all politicians in the end are like crazed wasps in a jam jar, each individually convinced that they’re going to make it. My ambition silicon chip has been programmed to try to scrabble my way up this ladder.’ When Lawley suggested he was a risk-taker, fond of ‘playing with fire,’ he concurred, ‘I suppose there is an element of truth in that.’

At least his choice of records was carefully uncontroversial. In fact, it had been the subject of nearly a decade of planning. Boris knew that when the call finally came his selection would be subjected to
forensic examination for clues on character, popular appeal and seriousness of purpose. Indeed, he admitted with the sort of candour second nature to a journalist – although perhaps not an ambitious minister-in-waiting – that even the programme producer had suspected him of making ‘political’ choices. ‘It’s like you’re kind of trying to appeal to everyone, a bit of Stones, a bit of Bach, you know. I mean, Nigella Lawson chose Eminem!’ the producer had said. ‘I was shattered, and insulted to the core,’ noted Boris, before replying, ‘But I love this music. And, much as I like him, I don’t want Eminem on a desert island.’ ‘She then tried to reassure me about my taste, and what exquisite choices they were, but I couldn’t help feeling, as she left, that I had failed one of life’s great tests.’
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(Interestingly, exactly 12 months previously, he
had
chosen Eminem as one of his four all-time favourite CDs but that was for an interview with the laddish
Esquire
magazine under the headline ‘Bo’selecta’ and some time before he felt the need to be quite so seriously safe. Another case of chameleon Boris, perhaps.)

For the record the tracks he chose were: ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by the Beatles; ‘Soul Limbo’ by Booker T and the MGs, better known as the theme tune to
Test Match Special
; ‘Here Would I stand Beside Thee’ from Bach’s ‘St Matthew’s Passion’; ‘Start Me Up’ by The Rolling Stones; ‘Finale of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme’ by Haydn; Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’; ‘Pressure Drop’ by The Clash and finally, the opening of the last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. There were no contemporary choices at all – the most recent piece of music on his list was ‘Start Me Up’, which was released in 1981 but actually dated from much further back. It was all very Radio 4. Boris also asked for a copy of Homer to translate, and a large pot of French mustard.

Frank Johnson, like many others, realised exactly what had taken place. In the
Spectator
on 5 November 2005, he wrote up an imaginary conversation between Cameron and close political ally George Osborne (and Boris allowed him to do so).

Mr Cameron: ‘Anything else we need worry about, George?’

Mr Osborne: ‘Well, yeah. Boris has just announced on
Desert Island Discs
that he’s going into politics.’

Mr Cameron: ‘What? Why isn’t he content to be MP for Henley?’

Mr Osborne: ‘He said he thought it will soon be time for him to choose. So if we win, he says he’d like to be a front-bench spokesman for agriculture or trade or something like that.’

Mr Cameron: ‘You mean, he intends to join our front bench?’

Mr Osborne: ‘Looks like it. What are we gonna do?’

In fact, when Cameron became Party Leader on 4 December, he did not do much. Or rather, he announced the names of the shadow cabinet and Boris was not among them. The next day, though, he was appointed shadow higher education minister – a relatively lowly position, if one that aimed at exploiting his popularity with students. It hardly compensated, though, for having to resign immediately from the
Spectator
editorship. There were no longer any choices. It was the end of an era in British journalism but there was little doubt the fun had already gone out of it.

‘Andrew Neil was the man who changed everything,’ recalls Stuart Reid, Boris’s deputy, ‘he was the Barclay Brothers’ man. We’d had a pretty good relationship with Conrad Black – he loved Boris. Once he’d gone we all realised how much we loved Conrad.’ Indeed, so regretful was Boris about the ‘good old days’ under Black – and perhaps his cavalier treatment of someone who had been such an indulgent boss – that as he left the
Spectator
, he suggested to Reid that they visit him in jail in Florida. ‘It seemed like a good idea,’ Reid says. ‘Boris didn’t go, but the idea was more than a joke – I think he thought it would be appropriate in an ideal world.’

There was undoubtedly a certain misty-eyed wistfulness for Conrad’s regime in the last days of Boris’s editorship at the
Spectator
. Andrew Neil, the new chief executive, was inevitably going to be more hands-on than his predecessors. He had made it clear as soon as he took over in November 2004 that ‘things’ could not go on in the same way, that even the
Spectator
had to be ‘managed’ and its people made to ‘report.’ ‘We all have bosses in this world and that’s true of the
Spectator
too,’ he had announced.
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But it was not welcome news to the
Spectator
staff and Boris in particular, who was disturbed by the fact that Neil (who had started to wear an old-fogey fob watch)
seemed quite so happy. ‘Boris just expressed amused scepticism about Andrew,’ says Reid. ‘He noticed early on that Andrew was going out of his way to smile a lot. It is said that Andrew didn’t like Boris and I’m more than happy to believe that. There was no sense that Andrew made Boris’s life unpleasant, but equally there was an inevitability that Boris would go. The jig was up; it had been for some time – The Andrew and Boris Show was never going to work.’

Not since Charlie Wilson (another tough Scot) at
The Times
had Boris encountered a less accommodating boss when it came to his personal whims. Reid has referred to a certain ‘abrasive management style.’ With a physical presence to match Boris’s, Neil had made it clear early on that his editor could not hold a front-bench position and continue at the
Spectator
. Boris was overheard in the office complaining ‘Neil is trying push me out’ and there were whispers that he had been offered a different, but lesser, job. For the first year of Neil’s tenure, these were merely rumblings as Boris was languishing out of favour on the backbenches and so the conflicts of interest were less acute. But with the job offer from Cameron on the table in December 2005, Boris’s departure could be delayed no longer – neither Neil nor the Tories were prepared to risk another Liverpool. After six and a half years at the helm, Boris was out – taking his bust of Pericles with him – and Neil could finally bring in the more ‘serious’ editor he had long wanted.

And Boris had quite a serious new job, too – definitely a step up from the arts portfolio. It suggested that his past misdemeanours had been forgotten, or at least forgiven. He did not try to entertain with a spoof manifesto this time, but was almost unnaturally careful about what he said, and to whom he said it. His appointment was widely welcomed, as it seemed to suggest the Conservatives wanted to give the important question of higher education more prominence than it had previously warranted.

Indeed, the leading trade journal,
Times Higher Education
, was enthusiastic. Its newly appointed twenty-something political reporter, the super-confident Anna Fazackerley, wrote of him as the Conservatives’ ‘most popular and irrepressible’ politician. Under another headline, ‘RUMPLED AND READY TO RUMBLE’, she later
wrote: ‘Mr Johnson is not known for his discretion,’ before excitedly noting, ‘He reels off exact numbers of universities, courses and students in the UK at high speed. “I am going to paralyse you with statistics!” he cries.’ And finally, she decides: ‘It is clear that those expecting controversy will not have long to wait. Mr Johnson has arrived. Let the show begin.’

Her editor, John O’Leary, was less excited, but still pleased that Boris did not continue with his predecessor’s policy of cutting university places, ‘when the Tory Party was supposed to stand for equal opportunities.’ Boris stepped back from his comments during the 2005 election, when he had dismissed ‘loony degrees in wind-surfing from Bangor University’ (prompting arguably Stanley’s best-ever quip that, ‘they also surf who only stand and wait’). In contrast, Boris now declared: ‘My instincts are not to go around trying to exterminate Mickey Mouse courses. One man’s Mickey Mouse course is another man’s
literae humaniores
.’

A close aide to Boris at the time explains his change of position: ‘Boris realised that a lot of people working on these courses wouldn’t like him if he attacked them. And Boris likes to be liked.’ But Boris did broadly share Labour’s less popular views on the need for top-up fees. ‘Most of the vice-chancellors who met Boris were reasonably impressed,’ says O’Leary. ‘He was quite interested in the subject. But it was all very much through the prism of Oxbridge; that was clearly his number one priority.’

Outside Oxbridge, Boris appeared to take the greatest interest in Edinburgh University, where in early 2006 he stood in the election for the vacant rectorship (a job once held by his hero Winston Churchill). He canvassed quite actively, attracted 200 nominations and signed a female student’s bare chest. No doubt he felt in with a strong chance against the two other journalist candidates – Magnus Link later, former editor of the
Scotsman
, and the campaigning documentary-maker, John Pilger. But his support for top-up fees prompted an energetic ‘Anyone but Boris’ campaign, with its ‘Bog Off Boris, you Top-up Tory’ and ‘Don’t Wake up With a Dumb Blond’ slogans. More than once protestors threw beer over him, but on each occasion he remembered to thank the culprit for ‘refreshing’ him.

‘I made a beeline to the oppo, swaying and chanting under banners saying “Bog off Boris!” and put on my best Cecil Parkinson beam,’ Boris wrote afterwards. “‘Hell-air!” I said, thrusting out my hand to the nearest Left-wing agitator; and to my amazement it was taken, and shaken warmly.’
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