JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (8 page)

No wonder Boris has sought security, both financial and emotional, ever since. As someone who has known both him and Rachel for years says: ‘I feel genuinely sorry for the Johnsons, whatever their successes in life.’ But surely they rarely feel sorry for themselves? Indeed, they collectively feel almost a duty to be determinedly funny, brave and entertaining. Stanley and his first brood of children in particular benefit from each other’s pre-eminence and talent for self-promotion. Their father never ceases to trumpet their achievements, even ostentatiously counting the number of times his family appears in one day’s papers in the public arena of his local newsagent. He himself admits one of his greatest pleasures is that he managed to send all his offspring to top-ranking public schools. And for Boris that could not mean his own mid-table alma mater Sherborne, it had to be Eton.

A well-worn gag about the great old schools of England goes:

‘That’s pure Boris!’ cries a childhood acquaintance. ‘I was brought up with generations of arrogant Etonian boys but Boris’s arrogance transcends any I’ve ever met. He is the ultimate Etonian product, an opportunist to the core.’

In fact, dig deeper and the story is more complicated. Boris Johnson shares the overwhelming sense of entitlement of many Old Etonians, as his friend says, but there also remain traces of the insecurities of the outsider. Even an Etonian education did not completely dispel them and in some ways reinforced his empathy with other lone wolves.

In the autumn term of 1977, Boris entered Eton as a King’s Scholar, one of a group of thirteen or fourteen boys a year who pass a gruelling entrance exam. He was by no means at the top of this list of dauntingly clever 13-year-olds, having scraped in at thirteenth, but it confirmed him as a member of the intellectual elite. In the 1970s, when Boris was at School (as every Etonian must call it), King’s Scholars were excused all or most of their fees. This meant several of
the Scholars were of relatively modest means compared to the scions of landed and commercial dynasties making up the ranks of the other boys, known as Oppidans. But Stanley gets quite snippy if anyone mistakes this for an attempt on his part to save money rather than a natural demonstration of his son’s superiority. ‘Winning a scholarship is a matter of honour,’ he insists. ‘It wasn’t because we couldn’t afford the fees.’
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‘We were intellectually superior, the Oppidans socially superior,’ explains a fellow Scholar, who knows Boris and his family well. ‘Traditionally, scholars were seen as swotty and downmarket, but it didn’t matter to us – we revelled in it. Actually, we felt protected. There was still fagging in the other houses, for instance, when we were there, but not in College [the name for the Scholars’ House].’

College also had a more liberal bent than other houses in what was an overwhelmingly Conservative-supporting school. ‘There were lots of rabid Tories amongst the Oppidans, who all read the
Daily Mail
. College was much more cultured and diverse and in our view at least quite left wing,’ the Labour-voting Scholar recalls. Often reared on a diet of ‘breezy anti-intellectualism,’ the brasher Oppidans viewed Scholars as nerdy and even had a pejorative name for them: ‘Tugs’. The name is derived from the gowns or togas worn by Scholars at all times, thus distinguishing them from the Oppidans. Surprising as it may seem to more meritocratic minds, it’s not unknown for those who win Scholarships to turn them down in favour of a fee-paying place to avoid any hint of social stigma. Those who narrowly missed a Scholarship then, including the journalist Marcus Warren (Boris’s junior by two years), talk of being ‘spared.’

Such thoughts were no doubt far from Boris’s mind on his first glorious day at Eton that Michaelmas Half (term), back in September 977. Even if his apparent bumbling fooled his soon-to-be friend Viscount Althorp (later Earl Spencer) into believing at least there was ‘one boy at school thicker than me,’
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it was, of course, an act. Resplendent in gown, white tie and tails, he would have been fully aware of his status as a direct heir to King Henry VI’s Foundation, which set up the school in 1440. Scholars go to get ‘gowned’ – a formal
investiture exclusive to them in a ceremony dating back to the school’s medieval origins. It’s an inspiring occasion; participants recall tingling with a certain excitement and awe.

‘The Provost presided over it all,’ recalls a fellow Scholar from Boris’s time. ‘He told us we were the future leaders, that we had a responsibility and a destiny that was not to be taken lightly. We were privileged, but we were also duty-bound to give back to society and contribute to it. There was an expectation of us, and also a feeling that nothing was too big a stage. You found yourself thinking of someone like Pitt the Elder and asking yourself, am I really potentially that great?’

Over the years, Boris has observed to friends how such exhortations affected his outlook and that he believes those lucky enough to be educated at the great public schools are indeed being groomed to ‘rule’ over others. He was, in any case, accustomed to being around ‘great’ men – including Lord Charteris, who became Provost shortly after Boris started, whom he had known since a young boy as a friend of his mother’s family.

The 70 Scholars are not only treated differently, and look different, they also have their own accommodation in the most historic buildings in the school. Lower School, dating from the Middle Ages and with desks eaten away by centuries-old boys’ carvings, is exclusively for Scholars and used for prayers in Latin on Sundays. As one former Scholar puts it: ‘You do feel you need to live up to these grand old buildings.’ Until relatively modern times, Oppidans would reside with private landladies, whose lodgings evolved into the houses where the majority of Etonians now live. Even in Boris’s day, while many College bedrooms would look out over the sweeping central courtyard in the heart of the school, the other 1,180 boys would have rooms in less-exalted buildings dotted further away all round Eton. The sleeping arrangements serve to this day to reinforce the College versus Oppidan distinction.

However, A.B. Johnson, KS, as he was formally known, was not immediately admitted to the hallowed College rooms and for the first term had to muck in with the Oppidans. His low ranking in the Scholar league meant that he had to wait until sixth formers staying
on for their seventh term Oxbridge exams finally left and vacated their rooms in College.

David Guilford was Boris’s housemaster for that first term and taught him Classics until O-Levels, as the first set of formal school examinations were called before they were renamed GCSEs, with a new syllabus starting in the autumn of 1986. Now retired, he was a housemaster for 16 years and taught hundreds of clever Etonians, but Boris Johnson still sticks out in his memory. ‘I had him in Private Business [an Etonian tradition similar to tutorial time when reports and extra-mural subjects of interest are discussed among a small group of boys with a master], and he always wanted to do something more advanced,’ he recalls. ‘He was streets ahead of other boys who were not Scholars. He was certainly not at the top of the Scholarship list and not always in the highest divisions [subject sets] either, but he was a very fine chap, quite remarkable really and a much better scholar than he made out. But at school, he didn’t come on top of the list or in the top 10: he was instead an all-rounder, very good at rugby and the Wall Game, but perhaps less at cricket. He was a School figure – unusual for a Scholar.’

This crystal-clear recollection more than three decades on is all the more striking considering some of the other students Guilford encountered in his time. ‘I also taught David Cameron, but I don’t remember him at all – he must just have done what he was told.’ Another master – Tim Connor – actually denied having taught Cameron, having no recollection of him. Presented with concrete evidence that he had indeed taken the future Prime Minister in the Upper Sixth, a dumbfounded Connor admitted it was still a ‘complete blank.’ With generations of upper middle-class heritage and financial security, Cameron of course did not have so much to prove. ‘Cameron was posh, even by the standards of Eton,’ says Marcus Warren, an exact contemporary.

The fact that Boris, in contrast to most Scholars, became such a prominent School figure is instructive as Tugs traditionally found security in separation. Arriving as ‘Al’ or Alex Johnson, he gradually became known as Boris – chosen for its greater distinctiveness – and so did he incrementally perfect the eccentric English persona so
just boris popular today. In an establishment of real toffs, Boris’s confected version outshone them all for humour and bravado: here was a Scholar who was certainly not nerdy or weird, whose intelligence and chutzpah marked him out over time as something special across School. He seems determined not to have played the role of the outsider (indeed, at Eton he abandoned his mother’s Catholicism in favour of the Church of England). His success in blending in was a remarkable achievement, as Marcus Warren explains: ‘College was more of a hothouse than other houses, with a reputation for eccentric and bookish boys in a school of 1,250 teenagers, where such attributes were out of the ordinary. So, Boris was unusual in that his strength of character allowed him to survive and thrive outside College’s protective environment. Unlike most other Scholars, he appealed to the rest of the school. He was a figure of fun but we weren’t laughing at him, but with him. He had this gruff delivery, but great comic timing. He was a star! He was a figure much like he is now – I really don’t recognise any great change at all.’

Boris joined Eton at a time of considerable change under the headmastership of Michael McCrum, when brains began to matter more than mere privileged birth, or at least take equal billing. Fagging (the custom of using younger boys as personal servants) was on the wane and beatings administered by boys had finally been banned, while learning was on the up. ‘McCrum was very austere, but in the bigger historical context was responsible for a big improvement in the academic success of the school,’ explains Warren. ‘He recognised that Eton could no longer rely on its social cachet, that it would need galvanising academically so from the 1970s onwards, it became this academic hothouse.’

Boris started off his Eton career modestly. His academic and humorous abilities were quickly evident and at 13, he was already a formidable debater. He was also adept at deflecting questions with the deftest of non-committal answers. ‘He could block hostile or difficult questions from masters even then,’ recalls one contemporary. ‘Great training for dealing with the media later on.’ But news of his parents’ divorce temporarily dampened the flamboyance of the young
Boris. Although his flaxen hair and undoubted intelligence marked him out, his place in school mythology would not come for another couple of years. For now, traces of his old shyness still remained. ‘As a kid I was extremely spotty, extremely nerdy and horribly swotty,’ he admits. ‘My idea of a really good time was to travel across London on the tube to visit the British Museum.’
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Although popular, initially he was not seen to be particularly close to anyone. And academically, he was not always in the top sets or divisions, which are typically dominated by Scholars. In his second year, known in baffling Eton parlance as ‘E Block’, he was in the second division for English when almost all other Scholars were in ‘Div One’. In Science, he mustered a lowly Div Five and even Div Six in maths, neither subject ever being his forte (his fellow Collegers were mainly in the top group for virtually all subjects). He quickly shone at Classics, though – which stood him in good stead in a school where they were revered.

Only in his third year, or ‘D-Block’, in the 1979 Michaelmas term was he promoted to Div One for English. His genius for the verbal pirouettes that would later help make him famous was finally recognised in the Lower Sixth, when he won the English prize in the summer of 1981 at the age of 17. He was also writing for the school magazine,
The Chronicle
, in a style not dissimilar to the one his public knows today. On 10 October 1980, he produced a description of Sir Edward Heath on a visit to the Political Society: ‘Edward Heath was lit up from behind, his face in shade and a halo of silver light extending from his temples, like some prophet of old.’

By this time he had become a fully-fledged school celebrity, known to everyone simply as Boris for the first time in his life. Here was the near-perfect prototype of the seemingly bumbling, shambolic persona wrapped round the rapier intellect that we know today. Already he had learned to conceal his ambition with humour and self-deprecation, but it took time and effort to hone the act and this apparently could only be completed at the expense of his schoolwork. His innate brilliance could get him only so far, particularly in those subjects where he was less of a natural. The masters were fond of, and exasperated with Boris in virtually equal measure, but towards
the end of his Etonian career there are signs that their patience was beginning to wear thin.

Martin Hammond, who became a popular Master in College in 1980, came to know Boris well. A richly cultured, but grounded man with liberal sympathies, he wrote to Stanley in December that year saying that his son was ‘a delightful person, a real life-enhancer. I like his open friendliness of manner, and his ready wit.’
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But the next report, dated 3 April 1981, expressed concerns that Boris had ‘a finger in a wide variety of pies.’
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Soon there are grumbles about lateness, non-appearance of work and a lack of organisation, plus a doubtful ‘commitment to the real business of scholarship’.
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Nevertheless he managed to scoop up some considerable trophies, such as the Newcastle Classical Prize, albeit by a ‘narrow’ margin.