JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (63 page)

Boris did help his brother Jo to win his first attempt at a Parliamentary seat, however, and in the process launch a new political dynasty. (One senior Tory present recalls the ‘feeling that Jo’s selection in Orpington was the start of a Johnson takeover.’ During the campaign, Rachel even made the offices of the
Lady
available to Jo’s supporters for telephone canvassing. She explained the offer as ‘fealty’ to her family rather than the Conservatives – although this did not entirely protect her from criticism – the magazine had not once been overtly political in its 125-year history.)

Boris cast some personal insults in the direction of the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg describing him as a ‘cutprice edition of David Cameron hastily knocked off by a Shanghai sweatshop to satisfy unexpected market demand’ and naturally Gordon Brown, of whom he asked voters, ‘Do we really want another five years of holepunch-hurling
horror?’ But there was no doubting that this campaign was the Cameron and Osborne show, with Boris playing the role of occasional jester.

When Labour performed better in London than elsewhere it was proof, if any were needed, that Cameron had not played well with the capital. The Leadership also failed by a long chalk to gain the 116 seats it needed for an overall Commons majority – one that had for so long looked as if it was in the bag.

As it became clear that Cameron would not be passing through the door of Number Ten the next day – and possibly never – Rachel was quick to tweet: ‘It’s all gone tits up. Time to call for Boris.’ But after five days of horse trading, Cameron and Clegg formed a coalition government and Boris found himself no longer the most powerful Conservative in the land. Cameron was in Number Ten with his finger on the nuclear button, while Boris was, well – Boris was cycling home as normal. It is hard not to feel some sympathy for a man with reason to believe, whatever his faults, that he might well have been able to deliver his party a more satisfactory result – and without the help of the Lib Dems.

Cameron, the less charismatic of the two leaders, was forming a new Government. Boris, two years older – and said to think himself ‘the cleverest man in the world’ – was still judging ‘busker of the year’ competitions. And just as Boris appeared to be mastering his brief, the initial excitement of the job was no doubt draining away. Perhaps this feeling of drift was not helped by the sight of Jo so readily adapting to the ways of Westminster, rapidly acquiring a reputation as an expert on both the economy and India It will no doubt have served to remind him that Jo scooped the First Class Oxford degree that he himself had so fervently wanted. Indeed, Rachel (also a 2:1) had phoned her elder brother at the time with some trepidation to break the ‘terrible news.’

The sheer grind of being an executive mayor with no cabinet as supporters or scapegoats is enough to wear down someone with even Boris’s stamina. But now that there was a new prime minister in Downing Street, Boris’s other options were no longer obvious. There is compelling evidence that originally he never intended to stay more
than one term as mayor, hoping for a higher calling back in Westminster thereafter. One of his closest aides let slip in his first year in City Hall that Boris was ‘disappointed’ that he would miss the Olympics, which take place three months after the 2012 mayoral elections. Tory insiders suggest Boris had supported Ken’s campaign before the 2008 election for a one-off one-year extension of the Mayoral term so that the sitting mayor could preside over the Games and leave in 2013. However, the then Labour government had rejected the idea as it would require legislation.

Cameron’s victory, however partial, changed everything. No doubt when Boris boarded a flight to the football World Cup in South Africa six weeks after the election – to promote England’s bid to host the tournament in 2018 – he had resigned himself to making the most of being mayor (and that meant going for another term). But, as always with Boris, there was something else on his mind. Although no great football fan himself – he is more of a rugby man – Marina is keen and accompanied him on the trip to watch England play. The couple looked relaxed as he larked around with a vuvuzela for the cameras and she watched the matches. ‘There was no sign of tension between them,’ says a close observer, ‘quite the reverse. Marina can’t have known what was about to come out.’

Perhaps the pair took the time together to plan out his future – Marina’s ambitions for her husband were now firmly in tune with his; she even began to champion his cause within the Tory party. As one friend notes: ‘Marina can be a bit wicked at times.’ At a dinner in a private dining room at Wiltons restaurant shortly after their return from the World Cup, attended by the Education Secretary Michael Gove and other prominent Conservatives, there had been much anguished discussion of a bad week for the coalition. Observing their collective dismay, Marina asked waspishly: ‘Is it just an accident that seven things have gone wrong this week? Or are you, by any chance, doing something wrong?’ There was no mistaking her message: if only my husband were leader, he would do better than you.

Boris followed this display of wifely loyalty by teaming up with another guest – Oxford contemporary Radek Sikorski, now the foreign minister of Poland. The two proud former members of the
Bullingdon Club decided to celebrate old times by repeatedly banging on the table and chanting at top voice: ‘Buller! Buller! Buller!’ There are no reports of smashed crockery or flying glasses like the good old college days but for some present, at least, it was a surprise to see London’s 46-year-old mayor re-enact his controversial past.

Meanwhile, City Hall was briefing the media that Boris was about to launch his bid for re-election in 2012 and then suddenly, with only hours to go, the announcement at a State of London debate was cancelled. The public explanation – that lawyers had warned him that he would be breaching rules by using a statutory event for political purposes – failed to convince. Now the fog thickened with talk that he would wait to see whether his proposed bike hire scheme succeeded or how London fared in the spending cuts before making up his mind. Speculation was rife, but Boris merely hedged or teased. On the executive eighth floor of City Hall, however, the real story was already well known, although it would take nearly another three weeks for Boris’s ‘problem’ to emerge, by which time the Mayor suspected he might be in serious trouble.

Suspicions about another affair were first aired publicly in the
Daily Mirror
, but it was not until 18 July that pictures finally appeared in the
Mail on Sunday
of a young woman with an eight-month-old, blue-eyed, fair-haired daughter who looked uncannily like Boris. The child’s mother was 36-year-old Helen Macintyre, a Belgravia-based art consultant brought in to City Hall by the Mayor without announcement as an unpaid adviser. (Indeed, her appointment, made in May 2009, led to yet more accusations of cronyism and even another inquiry into Boris’s conduct.) Invitations to senior staff to visit Boris and Marina’s country home near Thame for a swim and barbecue on the same day the pictures ran were hastily withdrawn.

Unnamed ‘friends’ of Macintyre were quoted in the press saying she was in no doubt that Boris was the father of her baby (although he had not taken a DNA test to prove it). Her live-in boyfriend was a wealthy dark-haired Canadian financier called Pierre Rolin (who Macintyre had persuaded to donate £80,000 to Boris’s so-called ‘Olympian Erection’ – the 400ft-high red metal tower commissioned as a landmark sculpture for the 2012 Games). Rolin initially believed
the child was his and spent £30,000 on private care for mother and daughter, during and after the birth. But when the baby was born in November 2009 she was physically so unlike him that he took a paternity test and this proved that he could not have been the father. Shortly afterwards, he split up with Macintyre, publicly blaming Boris for the breakdown of his three-year relationship. He had long since become jealous and suspicious when she started coming home late after meetings with the Mayor.

Perhaps wise from the furore that followed his colourful denial of the affair with Petronella Wyatt, Boris refused to confirm or deny paternity. At work, he tried to laugh it off by pointing out to staff that the baby had gingery hair, but it was clear there was little to be gained from attempting to deny a relationship. When pressed by journalists, he dodgeballed his way out of trouble, on at least one occasion displaying a flash of temper towards persistent questioners. Privately, Boris contacted newspaper editors to remind them that he had ‘never set out to preach about the private lives of others’ and now had ‘no intention of talking about his own.’

Macintyre, meanwhile, declined to talk to the media at all. But a visit by Boris to the home she shared with Rolin in South Eaton Place when Rolin was away on business had been caught on security camera. A close associate of Rolin’s also describes feeling uncomfortable when lunching with Macintyre at Franco’s restaurant in Knightsbridge when Macintyre was pregnant. She recalls that Boris would call Macintyre repeatedly during the meal, making her giggle and even blush. ‘I thought then that Helen was speaking like she had a crush,’ the associate says. ‘I asked her who she was speaking to, and she said Boris.’

Boris had first met Macintyre 15 years previously at Edinburgh University, where she enjoyed a reputation as a party girl with rich boyfriends. She has just the sort of upmarket appearance, with a good bust and legs and swishy shoulder-length hair that appeals to him. What’s more, she dresses well, speaks well with a voice slightly husky from smoking and is supremely ambitious. Her friend Annabel Rivkin describes her as ‘the proverbial bloody good bloke with bosoms and a brain’.

Macintyre and Boris met again at the economic forum at Davos in January 2009, when the Mayor was staying in the same chic Swiss-chalet-style Morosani Posthotel, right on the Promenade. She had long been interested in Boris, keeping a pile of books by or about him by her bed. ‘She would say all the time, “Boris is so brilliant, so smart, he’ll be Prime Minister one day,”’ says Rolin. ‘She’d make me read his columns.’ Macintyre had also pressed Rolin to take her with him to Davos, where, he claims, she behaved oddly whenever she encountered the Mayor. ‘I remember Helen running after Boris several times wanting to advise him on art, or at least that is what I thought she wanted. And then I saw him in the hotel lift,’ recalls Rolin. ‘He knew who I was and he suddenly got really nervous, his eyes shifting all over the place.’

In early March, Macintyre told Rolin, who was by this time engrossed in a business crisis, that she was pregnant. ‘My first comment was, “Are you sure?” I had been travelling quite a bit. When I did the maths, the dates seemed out by a fortnight.’ He says he was persuaded the baby was his and when she was born on 14 November, paid for a private room on the VIP floor of the private Portland Hospital (where coincidentally Petronella Wyatt had had her abortion). Two weeks after she left hospital and following several rows, Macintyre moved out of their joint home and Rolin rented a nearby flat for her and the baby. Soon afterwards, she admitted the child might not be his, and in April a paternity test proved this to be the case. To say Rolin was angry about what happened is an understatement. ‘How could Boris take £80,000 off a Tory donor after sleeping with his live-in partner of three years and possibly father[ing] her child?’ he rants. ‘He has no moral compass whatsoever! Despite my donation, I have not been asked to any Olympic event under Boris’s instructions but he has also never returned the money.’

While Rolin has been left picking up the pieces of his life, Macintyre has disappeared from public view. Like other women with whom Boris has been linked romantically, she has not spoken about him and the paternity of her daughter has never been declared. Indeed, the child’s birth certificate does not name the father. Nonetheless the suspicions
of infidelity raised by the press had left Marina faced with yet another intolerable situation. Shortly after the story broke she was seen without her wedding ring and once again she ordered Boris out of the marital home, this time to take up residence in a rented one-bedroom flat on the same road. Marina’s housekeeper was spotted carrying clean laundry to Boris’s modest two-roomed place of exile – a bolthole plagued by unreliable plumbing that on occasion made its presence felt in the apartment below. Finally, Boris had used up his nine marital lives, or so it seemed. It was becoming impossible to ignore the damage inflicted on those closest to him by such a buccaneering approach to life. His children, ranging in age from 11 to 17, could no longer be fully protected. Boris too seemed unusually stressed. Colleagues noticed that the Mayor was more than usually concerned with his finances – perhaps paying for the country home, four children in private school and now two London residences and the staff to run them was putting a strain on even
his
considerable earnings.

But then Boris and Marina were spotted playing tennis together apparently amicably – if ultra-competitively – on a north London court. Yet another rapprochement seemed to be on the cards. It may be going slightly too far to compare the two with Bill and Hillary Clinton – although Boris has more than once poured praise on the former presidential couple – but Boris, like Bill, certainly holds his wife’s respect and tenacity dear. And despite all her suffering at his hands, Marina shares Hillary’s one-time tigress determination to further her husband’s career. She puts up with his temper and apparent selfishness – and the peremptory way in which he sometimes addresses her in private.

According to her close friends, she takes the old upper-class view that the family should be put first. For her, the publicity is almost always worse than the affair itself because of the harm it might do to her children but she also simply disbelieves a lot of the worst that is said about her husband and feels anger and sympathy on his behalf when his ambitions are thwarted. Despite all his straying, those who know her well say she still casts her life in terms of ‘Boris and Marina against the rest of the world.’