JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (47 page)

But there were two other parties also upset by the coverage. Petronella Wyatt was said to feel ‘heartbroken and betrayed’ by the news that Boris was allegedly having another affair. At the time she worked for Peter McKay, editor of the waspish diary column on the
Daily Mail
called ‘Ephraim Hardcastle’. The diary began running almost daily items on Boris, accusing him of suffering from satyrism or ‘unusually strong sexual desires’ and suggesting he seek treatment for sex addiction like Hollywood filmstar Michael Douglas. Meanwhile, there were other newspaper reports from ‘friends’ of Petronella’s that Boris had made a ‘lunge’ for her the evening he had visited her after leaving Fazackerley – ‘Boris is so driven by sex he’s quite capable of going from one girl to another in the space of one evening,’ the ‘pals’ declared in more than one newspaper.

There were a few half-hearted calls for Boris’s dismissal from the frontbench but Cameron chose to ignore them and he was allowed to continue in his post. However, sources close to David Willetts, shadow education secretary and then Boris’s boss, said he was privately ‘narked’ with him as he felt that he had been lied to about the affair.
And while there were few immediate repercussions, the story undoubtedly added to Tory fears that Boris was a loose cannon and a lightweight. On his website, Boris took his normal light-hearted view of events with the comment: ‘Heads down and tin hats on while news stories fly.’ It was followed by the message written by his secretary Melissa Crawshay-Williams: ‘We, in the Boris Johnson MP office, have every confidence that Boris’s talent and ability can weather any storm.’ After all, he was used to this sort of attention.

As for Anna Fazackerley, the stories were to have more painful consequences. No one should doubt that there are casualties in a jolly Johnson jape – and they are usually women (or children). When Fazackerley joined the
Times Higher Ed
– as it is commonly known – she made an immediate mark and not just because of her short skirts and brightly coloured tops. With a first-class degree from Manchester University (after rejecting a place at Cambridge), she was undoubtedly intellectually impressive. ‘Anna’s mistake was that she just took the concept of having contacts too literally,’ says a somewhat acerbic former colleague. And this was not an atypical comment from both male and female journalists. ‘She was very bright and outgoing, an unusually confident person,’ is how her then editor John O’Leary puts it. ‘She was a go-getter, someone who shook things up a bit. She liked to shock – we had to ask her to tone her language down a bit after a member of staff complained. Like Boris, she came over as very posh, very blonde and very ambitious. I might not, though, have realised how ambitious she was.’

Anna’s evident charms worked well with university vice-chancellors, typically middle-aged men older than Boris – ‘They were flattered by her and gave her stories.’ After she had interviewed Boris in January 2006, she began meeting him for lunch. ‘But then we noticed that the lunches were becoming longer and longer,’ recalls O’Leary, ‘but we still didn’t know exactly what was going on. Then her mobile phone went mysteriously missing and two weeks later the
News of the World
came out with their story. By that stage we were not surprised.’

O’Leary took a more hardline view than Cameron: he quickly realised the news coverage would be seen to be compromising
Fazackerley’s perceived impartiality as a reporter, so on Monday morning he called her in.

‘She denied the affair and continues to deny it. She was very upset when I took her off the politics beat. But whether or not she’s had an affair, the other political parties would not talk to her if she were seen just to be rewriting Tory policy. She took it badly, starting off with tears and moving onto anger. She never gave a full explanation of what Boris was doing in her flat, just that the story was wrong. She was advised to take some time off – and I think she took a week.’ It was then that Boris became directly involved. He asked O’Leary out to lunch – an invitation that confirmed it was a crisis – and ‘slipped into the conversation’ that reports of the affair were ‘nonsense.’ O’Leary told colleagues that he had quickly realised that Boris was pleading Fazackerley’s case and that she should be allowed to continue in her role as politics reporter. But the paper’s management felt she had lost the confidence of her readership. Shortly afterwards, Fazackerley resigned, but her new notoriety made it difficult to find work.

‘Anna freelanced for a bit, but found it hard-going because she had been effectively black listed by the
Times Higher Ed
,’ recalls a close friend, who consoled her in the aftermath. ‘She found that as an education journalist if you can’t write for the specialist press, there is not enough regular work. She also fell out with a lot of her friends, who were very insensitive about what they had been reading. One “friend” was even quoted in the papers as saying: “I stopped respecting her when she did this [the alleged affair.] Partly because she had been so damn self-righteous and judgemental before, but also because I know what divorce can do to people, especially children, and she was smart enough to know that too.”’
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Her genuine friend was much more sympathetic, though: ‘It was grim. She got lots of nonsense written about her, such as how she was an heiress. It was all rubbish, because the papers didn’t know that her mother had changed her name to the district of Liverpool, where she lived – they had followed the wrong family tree. Her mother was very upset, too. Anna is just a very nice standard middle-class girl who got caught up in a storm.’

Finally, in September 2006, Fazackerley secured a job as director – and sole employee – of a new think tank called Agora, set up to support Boris and his successors as Tory higher education spokesman, on a salary of £27,250. Agora (Greek for open place of assembly) was later taken over by Policy Exchange, a favourite with both Boris and Cameron. Fazackerley moved with it. Her first Agora project was the publication in May 2007 of a book,
Can the Prizes Still Glitter: The Future of British Universities in a Changing World
(Boris was a contributor).

Fazackerley’s friend, who is well connected in Tory circles, is in no doubt that Boris was also behind her appointment: ‘I think Boris felt he owed her one – he did screw up her life. There has also been the issue that she was forever going to be Anna Fazackerley, the girl who had an affair with Boris. It made it very difficult to meet anyone else or sustain a relationship if she did. She died her hair darker and would just call herself Anna, anything to get away from it. When she eventually met her husband-to-be on a blind date, the Boris stuff was virtually the first thing she said. She wanted to get it out of the way and avoid damaging the relationship later on when he inevitably found out.’ As for the question, why don’t any of the women linked to Boris ever do a ‘kiss and tell’? Fazackerley’s experience suggests they ask themselves who would fare worst if they did. The answer to that question is not Boris.

Boris’s popularity seemed higher than ever. Indeed, the more he philandered, the more of a hero he became and the more the women got the blame. Soon after the Fazackerley stories, his status as untouchable folk hero became clear when he was invited to play in a charity football match against Germany. As he ran onto the pitch in an England red shirt at the Madejski stadium in Reading, the crowd of 15,000 chanted, ‘We want Boris!’

Despite all the distractions, he was also making an impact on his shadow education brief, outside Westminster at least. ‘I think he is a serious figure,’ said Professor Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of Exeter University. ‘I am a Boris Johnson fan,’ declared Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute. ‘He has some
interesting ideas about higher education.’
⁷
Here at last was the beginning of what looked like a genuine political career – that involved, well, policies.

Boris worked quite hard on the brief, attending meetings and dinners at universities around the country. He was still
GQ
motoring correspondent, so he would sometimes arrive in an often impossibly flashy car. At Portsmouth University, for instance, he was chauffeur driven in a Russian mafia-style limousine fitted with stainless steel champagne flutes. But the fun did not stop him slogging hard on his speeches. ‘The whole premise of him being unprepared is completely wrong,’ says a well-placed source. ‘He is last-minutish, but never unprepared. He wrote out every single word of those speeches on higher education, including the gaps, tone, everything, taking an hour or two in the process. That rambling delivery was planned exactly in the writing. It is true that the more comic stuff gets written on the back of a napkin, but there is always a great deal of thought beforehand.’

Boris was working extremely long hours on all his different interests – and expected his staff to do the same; staying on until nine or ten at night and working over the weekend was commonplace. There were tensions and mistakes made but he was both fun and pleasant to work for. ‘He’s incredibly nice, unbelievably nice,’ says one former employee. ‘He’s the sort of person who, at least verbally, will blame himself if you mess up. But one of the disadvantages of working for him is that he can never say “no” to anyone and when anyone’s in the room, he desperately wants that person to like him. He’s not like any other boss in that you’d have to tell
him
to tell you what to do – he wasn’t an employer in any classic sense. I was able to be sarcastic and tell him off. It wouldn’t be something that most people would put up with.’

His main policy interest was how to streamline university funding – not then a populist subject and consequently not much covered outside the specialist journals and the
Financial Times
. And yet, admirably, Boris persisted. He also dutifully attended the Tory education team’s meetings held by David Willetts. The relationship was workmanlike, although one of Willetts’ aides notes with some
understatement, ‘it is never easy for someone to have Boris as a junior on his team.’

‘Their styles are very different,’ recalls another aide. ‘David is incredibly bright but he probably slightly resented the fact that Boris was more famous. He had been one of the massive rising stars under Thatcher but it never quite came off for him. He’s a phenomenal policy-maker but not a superb politician – whereas in many ways, Boris is instinctively a brilliant politician but not so much a policy guy.’ On one issue in particular, though, Boris held strong views that were diametrically opposed to Willetts’. ‘Boris was furious about the grammar school speech [on 19 May 2007, Willetts prompted a furore when he defended the existing Conservative Party policy of not reintroducing grammar schools].Willetts hadn’t consulted the team and Boris was, at least then, fervently pro-selection.’ Their opposing approaches to life were also demonstrated on the ice-rink at Christmas 2006, when Willetts held his annual skating party at Somerset House. Willetts is an accomplished and skilled master of the ice, while Boris gave an amusing performance in which he managed to stay more or less upright through, according to one fellow guest, a mixture of ‘sheer aggression and lack of fear.’

In the autumn of 2006, Boris hired Frances Banks, another reliable supporter, being Charles Moore’s former secretary at the
Telegraph
. Both she, and her predecessor, Crawshay-Williams, would try to mother Boris, by ‘tidying him up’ with a hairbrush. ‘But Boris doesn’t like feeling hemmed in,’ says an observer, ‘so he would disappear for hours at a time. He didn’t like being followed around.’

When he took the education job, an anonymous Henley donor provided the funds for him to hire a researcher. But Boris did not raid the usual ranks of obsessive politics graduates. Instead he asked applicants to write two 500-word essays – one on universities and the other on either ‘My trip on a Spaceship’, ‘A Country Ramble’ or the ‘Taj Mahal’. Those short-listed after this Eton scholarship-style paper were called for interview during which he spouted out phrases such as ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ and challenged them to ‘translate them into common English.’ Clearly this was a test of facility with language and also how applicants thought on their feet.
The somewhat eccentric selection process proved highly effective as it produced Rachel Wolf, a highly intelligent natural sciences graduate from Cambridge, and daughter of the
FT
commentator, Martin Wolf. She had never been involved in politics before but was many cuts above the typical researcher and rose to the considerable challenge of working with Boris. One day a week she helped him with his journalism – doing the research, even structuring his pieces so that he could spend the minimum of time, ‘turning them into Boris.’

On 3 October 2006, at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth, Boris was bashing out a ‘particularly tricky passage’ of one of these pieces (for the
Times Higher Ed
) when he heard an Apache-style ‘whooping’ and the drumming of feet of a mob outside. It was the eve of Cameron’s first Party Conference speech as Leader, in which he was to deliver the crucial message that the NHS was ‘safe’ in Conservative hands and the party was ‘getting ready to serve again.’ It was imperative the media were keyed up to cover this pivotal moment as the Tory top brass planned. But instead of focussing on Cameron’s bid to win the next election, dozens of journalists and photographers were encamped in a car-park, trying to spy on Boris.

‘To the sound of rhythmic chanting, a ladder appeared over the top of the wall and the red eye of a TV news camera was trained on us,’ he recalls. Boris’s minders in the Tory press office (where he had gone to borrow a computer) urged him to hurry up and finish the piece, ‘because the whole thing was getting a bit Gordon at Khartoum.’
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In fact, he was trapped inside for more than an hour before managing to escape.

So, why was Boris attracting all this attention and not Cameron? Boris had attacked Jamie Oliver and his campaign for healthier school dinners! And only days after Cameron had (again) made a point of lauding Oliver’s campaign to improve school food – saying he had done more than any government minister for this undeniably worthy cause. But at a conference fringe meeting, Boris had not only called for Oliver to be sacked but even offered support to some much-derided Yorkshire mothers, who had passed burgers and chips through the fence so that their children could avoid what they regarded as Jamie’s ‘over-priced, low-fat rubbish’ in the school canteen. Boris had said: ‘I say, let people
eat what they like! Why shouldn’t they push pies through the railings? If I was in charge, I would get rid of Jamie Oliver.’