At the time, in the summer of 2004, Boris’s star shone with amazing brightness. Reputable judges predicted he would be the next Conservative prime minister.
Boris himself pointed out that the book could be “the most fantastic piss-take”. But then he asked: “What about poor Allegra?” Allegra was Boris’s first wife, although for some years he omitted her from his entry in Who’s Who.
During our third talk about the book I said I was having lunch with Allegra that very day. “Oh no!” he said. “My life is literally in your hands.”
A few days later I had lunch with a friend of his mistress, Petronella Wyatt, who told me that in 2003 she had got pregnant by Boris, and had aborted the child, but that he had told her he would look after any child she had by him.
No word of any such pregnancy had yet appeared in the newspapers, but I found that Boris was getting cold feet about the book. When I met him that evening he said in a worried tone: “If it’s a piss-take that’s okay”; but “anything that purported to tell the truth really would be intolerable”.
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Some months after I started my research he offered to buy me out. As the book progressed his bids increased in size. I am inclined to think that all this must have been a protracted joke. Before the book went to press he raised the amount for a fleeting moment to £100,000.
Boris had moved from complete agreement with the book to total disagreement. He began by sounding utterly confident and ended by sounding strangely vulnerable. It was a curious transformation but also, as I was to discover, a rather characteristic one.
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WHEN Boris was 14 his parents got divorced. His father Stanley broke the news to the children. Boris lined himself and his three siblings up, stepped forward and said: “Why did you have us?” Charlotte, his mother, moved into a maisonette at the top of a high, stuccoed building in Notting Hill with the four children. Her friends gathered that Stanley had been “one amazing womaniser” and she was fed up with it. According to Charlotte: “I couldn’t stay with him. He was so inaccessible, not to say completely unfaithful. I couldn’t live with him never allowing anything to be serious. That’s the essential difference between Boris and his father. I can talk to Boris about anything.”
When Boris and his siblings were with their mother, he felt he was the man in the family, who must protect her. He was tall for his age and shy, and blushed when he spoke, gazing out through his hair like Lady Diana.
This is not the Boris the public have come to know and love. A friend of the family said: “He had a dignity about him. You could see he was a very nice person. He understood what had happened to his mother, he knew it was dreadful and humiliating, and he was enduring it.”
The atrocious pain of the divorce encouraged Boris to create a mask that hid how he felt from the outside world. Many years later he confided to a woman with whom he was in love that after his parents split up he decided to make himself invulnerable.
Any sensitive adolescent might hope to do this, but few have been able to model their escape bid on quite such a father. Anyone who has met both father and son is struck by the extraordinary resemblance. They talk in an amazingly similar way, and Boris has learnt a great part of his comic art from his father. They behave like stage Englishmen, often pretending to be impossibly baffled and stupid, while behind this screen they calculate what would be to their own advantage.
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Boris had to handle the divorce soon after he started at Eton, where the familiar Boris emerged into the limelight. He developed into a public performer who was one of the great Eton characters of his generation, but did so at the expense of the steady, unglamorous work needed to make the most of his intellectual gifts.
Martin Hammond, master in college, reported to Stanley when Boris was 18: “Although there has been no repetition of the disgrace of last half’s academic torpor, it’s clear that Boris has still not been working at anything like the limit of his capacity . . . He is, in fact, pretty idle about it all . . . Boris has something of a tendency to assume that success and honours will drop into his lap: not so, he must work for them.”
Sir Eric Anderson, who was Tony Blair’s housemaster at Fettes and Boris’s head master at Eton, says: “Boris had some similarity with Blair as a boy — both of them opted to live on their wits rather than preparation. They both enjoyed performing. In both cases people found them life-enhancing and fun to have around, but also maddening.” But while the young Blair rebelled against the system at Fettes, “Boris wasn’t a rebel at all — a satirist and a humorist rather than a rebel”.
Anderson remembered a production of Richard III in which Boris “hadn’t had time to learn the lines, so had pasted them up behind various pillars. The whole performance consisted of him running from one side of the stage to the other and failing to read it properly”.
Boris discovered the art of the bumbling performance at Speeches, an Eton tradition. Andrew Gilmour, a friend, recalls that he recited the first page of Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, which begins: “Mr Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar . . .”
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“The way he said ‘Sniggs’ made people laugh, and then he turned to the prompter and said, ‘What’s his name again?’ That brought the house down . . . I think from that time Boris realised that if you forget your lines and carry it off with aplomb, then you’re made. He performed in a Molière play in French, L’Ecole des Femmes, with a very strong English accent and had to be prompted throughout.”
Despite his “idleness”, Boris won a scholarship to Oxford. His page in the college leaving book contained a large photograph of himself with two scarves and a machinegun, together with an inscription about his determination to achieve “more notches on my phallocratic phallus”.
He set out to become president of the Oxford Union (he succeeded). He also yearned, with a passion barely conceivable to some of us, to take a first-class degree (he failed).
Jonathan Barnes, brother of the novelist Julian, was one of his college tutors. He remembered him as “not a young fogey — he wasn’t in the least fogeyish. Rather, a young old buffer”.
For most of the time Boris did virtually no academic work. Barnes said his tutorial notes read “‘feeble’, ‘hasn’t read the text’, ‘no essay’, and so on. He wasn’t lazy . . . there were other things which engaged most of his interest”.
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David Ekserdjian, who was a junior research fellow, claims that Barnes reproached Boris for copying a piece of work word for word out of Loeb, which gives a straight English translation next to the original Greek or Latin text.
Boris replied: “I’m terribly, terribly sorry, I’ve been so busy I just didn’t have time to put in the mistakes.”
One of his other ambitions on arriving at Oxford was to find a wife. Allegra Mostyn-Owen was a radiant beauty. Many undergraduates were inhibited from approaching her. Michael Gove, now a Tory MP, remembered her as “an Oxford goddess . . . unimaginably distant”. Boris was poor, scruffy, unreliable about practical matters and obsessed by student politics; but with unflagging single-mindedness he set out to win Allegra. He succeeded and even managed to get this most desirable girl at Oxford to wash his clothes. They were both only 23 when they were married. The reception was held at Woodhouse, the Mostyn-Owen family seat in Shropshire. According to Allegra, Boris was not taken by the idea of wearing a ring. “Rings were exchanged, but by the time we had lunch he no longer had his. He always insisted he knew where it was, ie somewhere in the garden, but he had somehow dropped it and lost it within an hour of receiving it.”
Nor did his bounderish behaviour end there. He arrived for the wedding without the right clothes and got married wearing the trousers of John Biffen, then MP for nearby Oswestry. Some weeks later, said Allegra, she couldn’t find their wedding certificate. “Naturally Bozzer showed not the slightest interest. Months later the Biffens were much amused to find the missing document in the pocket of the famous trousers.”
Looking back, Allegra said, “When we got married, that was actually the end of the relationship instead of the beginning.” Boris’s hunt for her had been crowned with success, but he was already embarking on another hunt, for success in his career.
In the spring of 1989, having been sacked from a traineeship by The Times after making up a quote in a story, Boris was made the Daily Telegraph’s man in Brussels. The job was to make his name. His stories about the idiocies of the European Union were received with rapture by an ever-growing circle of fans, although his infuriated colleagues in the Brussels press corps accused him of making them up. As Boris’s career took off, his marriage collapsed. Allegra often didn’t know where he was: “I used to get the paper — yesterday’s news — and there’s his byline in f****** Zagreb.”
She was apprehensive that family history would repeat itself. When he was a boy the Johnsons had lived in Brussels. When life with the adulterous and neglectful Stanley had got too much, Charlotte had checked herself into a clinic. Allegra felt she too was heading for a breakdown if she stayed with Boris. She left.
Boris was deeply upset. But also living in Brussels was Marina Wheeler, a childhood friend. The daughter of Charles Wheeler, the former BBC correspondent, Marina helped Boris pick up the pieces. She was there as a friend, she says, but Boris reverted to the chase. She resisted, but that only intensified his pursuit. Although his Tory politics were abhorrent to Marina, a left-wing lawyer, she fell madly in love with him.
They were married in 1993 and remain so today, with four young children, but five or six years ago he began a love affair that was to have painful consequences.()
PETRONELLA WYATT was already working at The Spectator when Boris became its editor in 1999. She had an exotic, hot-house air and enjoyed behaving in a stylish and outlandish way. Friendship and the enjoyment of each other’s company developed into love. They began a passionate affair, enjoying assignations at the house Petronella shared with her mother in St John’s Wood.
Soon after the affair began, Petronella confided in a sympathetic and intelligent woman, who takes up the story: “Petronella was very much in two minds about the whole thing — but obviously also rather smitten and very flattered. I think she was very thrilled by it all. And of course she hoped he’d leave his wife. And Boris quite rightly didn’t. But I think she felt very betrayed by him. But this was a classic case of a man perhaps hinting he’d leave his wife.”
Boris’s gift for unclarity, and for avoiding inconvenient questions, gave Petronella the idea that he was more committed to her than he really was. As a male friend in whom she confided said: “Boris certainly gave the impression that especially if she got pregnant there would be a future.”
Boris was wrong to start the affair, but it would be wrong to judge him too harshly for doing so. Politicians tend, with some exceptions, to have an above-average interest in sex. One of Boris’s lovers mentioned his predilection for canoodling in the back of taxis, which she thought was unwise as he doesn’t tip much.
Another woman, at whom Boris began to make a pass when left alone for five minutes with her, sought to explain the way in which he is attractive: “He’s the male equivalent of a blonde with big tits. He’s a powerful blond, he’s quite funny and he’s easy and he’d be in love with you for a bit. Then he’d piss off.”
If Boris sees an attractive woman, his instinct is to try to make a connection with her. A woman described being noticed by Boris in the deep-freeze section of a branch of Waitrose. Boris was with Marina, who was looking harassed, and their children, who were all in the trolley. The woman had her hand on a bag of frozen peas when she felt herself being watched. Whatever she leant over, Boris leant over. For the next few minutes, whichever aisle she was in, it seemed Boris was at the end.
Another woman, whom we shall call X, said: “When Boris is taking no notice of you you don’t exist. He just seemed rather a juvenile kind of a guy. But when he turns it on, he becomes immensely charming and you feel very flattered to be noticed by him. It’s digital — like a switch — I suppose that’s what charm is like.”
His pursuit of X could not have been more ardent, though his ardour, she thought, was in part an expression of the great strain under which he was operating: “It’s stress, it’s pressure. If he’s low and wants to cheer himself up I can get 20 text messages. And proposals of marriage. Phone calls in the middle of the night if he’s feeling low. I’ve probably had 100 proposals in total over the year. He does believe it in the moment he says it, because it’s the way to win the game. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do, nothing he wouldn’t say, to get me.”
Boris also takes a cavalier attitude to mere morality. As X put it: “He doesn’t think he’s a bad person. If you tell him, “You’re sleeping with Petronella — you’re betraying Marina”, he doesn’t have it in him to blame himself. I think the deal is basically that he’s ruled by his feelings. The moment he feels not totally fired up and in love with someone, he needs that fix again. He has what Aristotle calls an incontinent personality.”
Boris is a celebrity, which is a bizarre thing for a man with his classical education at Eton and Balliol to have become, or to want to become. The celebrity has sex without responsibility and is attractive enough never to be without a lover, as Boris himself once graphically boasted to a woman.
Other people in the Spectator office could see that Boris and Petronella’s relationship was more ardent than is usually the case. Screaming matches occurred between them. Petronella would weep and Boris would make it up with flowers. But staff did not realise they were having an affair until a taxi driver brought in a tape that Boris had left behind in a cab. The tape was of Petronella singing songs from La Bohème. They had asked the driver to play it while they canoodled in the back.
Some have said that Conrad Black, who owned The Spectator, and his wife Barbara Amiel promoted Boris’s affair with Petronella, which they regarded with proprietorial pride as “their adultery”. But Black told me: “I did take it upon myself to say to Boris that he should bear in mind that his wife was a divorce specialist.”
While talking to me about Petronella, Black wished to check if his use of idiomatic English was correct. “Tell me if I’m misusing this phrase,” he demanded, before saying: “I can understand the temptation when working at close quarters with Petronella to give her a seeing-to.”
Several times Petronella broke off the affair. On one occasion she even went to America for three months and got engaged, but it did not last.
Petronella was a bit vague about contraception, and in 2003 she found herself pregnant by Boris. According to a friend of hers she told him immediately: “He was never nasty about it. He said to her, ‘It’s your decision. Whatever you do you have my full support’.”
Boris had much trouble with Petronella’s Hungarian-born mother Verushka, who rang him all the time to tell him: “You said you’d marry my daughter.
Meanwhile there were other odd goings-on at The Spectator. ()
One of the most disagreeable tasks for an editor is to sack contributors who he thinks are not doing well enough. It was said that Boris took Susanna Gross, The Spectator’s bridge columnist, out to lunch in order to sack her, but slept with her instead.
“Who told you that?” Susanna said, looking fierce, when I had lunch with her.
“Well, I don’t remember,” I said. “I mean, as far as I know it’s what everyone in London thinks. Not that I go out much.”
“I’m outraged by the idea that he was going to sack me,” Susanna said. “He certainly was not going to sack me. He was meant to be having lunch with me to tell me off because my Spectator column was always late, but he didn’t even mention it, because he hates confrontation. We had such fun that we had a series of little lunches.”
“Why was there no affair?” “First of all because I was then with (the actor) Neil Pearson, and secondly because Boris was married with a mistress and with a crush on Mary Wakefield (a member of The Spectator’s staff).”
Furthermore, “I don’t fancy him. He’s too self-deprecating. I like a man to be a bit of a bastard. Also going about on his bike all day. Too sweaty. And also I was madly in love with my boyfriend.”
Nonetheless, The Spectator acquired a reputation as a hotbed of illicit liaisons and became known to a wider audience as The Sextator. It was possible to see the signs of strain building up. At an editorial conference a spectacular row broke out.
Rod Liddle, the associate editor, generally looked as if he had spent the night clubbing before crashing out on a park bench, but this morning he seemed in an even rougher state than normal. He had almost lost his voice and was trying to get out of speaking at a debate organised by Kimberly Fortier, the magazine’s American publisher. He lit a cigarette. Kimberly told him: “You shouldn’t smoke!” Liddle: “Don’t you f****** well tell me how to live my life!” Kimberly: “If you’ve got bronchitis, you shouldn’t smoke. I’m telling you that as a friend.”
Liddle: “I’m not speaking! I can’t speak!” Boris (coming in): “Pax vobiscum! Hey, hey, it's Thanksgiving! Peace!” Mary Wakefield (leaving the room): “I don’t mind the row, it’s the reconciliation scene I can’t stomach.”
Kimberly could get extremely cross with people. I incurred her wrath on two occasions.
First, I wrote a piece in which I complained that my wife wanted me to help look after our children. This included an exchange in which she threatened to go back to work, to which I replied: “Oh darling, you’d just be one of those horrid driven women.”
While writing the article I had consulted Boris, who agreed that it was jolly inconvenient having a wife who went out to work. He offered me a quote on condition that I did not mention him by name: “Nobody takes any interest in whether you have any socks or indeed pants. My wife buys herself pyjamas but she never buys any for me. I’ve totally run out.”
Kimberly assumed, wrongly, that the article was about herself, and flew into a rage. She told me that if I wanted a wife who stayed at home I had no business wasting my time at The Spectator and should go off to the City and earn some real money.
I also irritated her when I wrote an editorial attacking David Blunkett, who was still home secretary. Kimberly said: “I didn’t realise you were so nasty.” If anyone had put it to me that she was having an affair with Blunkett I would have given an incredulous laugh.
When Liddle was revealed to be having an affair with Alicia Munckton, the amiable young woman who answered the telephone at reception, Boris howled with laughter.
But the Liddle and Kimberly scandals heralded mortal danger for him. Billed as the next prime minister but three, MP for Henley and shadow arts minister; he was ripe for shaking.
On the day he headed off to apologise for the Spectator editorial that had criticised Liverpool, Petronella aborted the second child she had conceived by him. She rather than Boris reached the decision on an abortion, and her friends are adamant she has never sought to blame him.
A close friend said: “She didn’t want to be a single mother and she thought it would cause immense complications.” But Boris lost his head, telling a newspaper: “I have not had an affair with Petronella.” This gave the tabloids a perfect excuse to prove him a liar.
When the story of the abortion broke, a friend of both Boris and Petronella says: “He was suspicious. He didn’t understand how this came out. How did they know about the abortion? He wanted to know how they knew. He was really scared that Petronella had something to do with it. He wanted to be reassured that she had nothing to do with it, but he couldn’t speak to her.”
Marina had known about Boris’s affair with Petronella for some time and she now took the view that it had been grossly exaggerated by the press. She felt he treated her fine and that, while the Petronella thing was unfortunate, it was not as bad as people made out.
But she was also very angry with her husband for seeing Petronella again a couple of times quite recently, and she threw him out of the house temporarily. Many others were distressed on her behalf.
A woman who knew him when he was growing up said: “We don’t think Boris is as funny as he thinks he is. His thing is to gloss over all the real damage and pain he’s caused to people. His thing is to be like a little boy — a 40-year-old man being more irresponsible than a well-brought-up teenager.”
The truth is that Boris would find a life without risk intolerably dull. But he also craves comfort and reassurance. Unlike many Englishmen of his class he enjoys the company of women and acknowledges his need of them.
Prigs think he needs to learn to be “serious”, and he has recently given a nod or two in their direction. But as a master said of him when he was at Eton: “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”
While many politicians have the urge to perfect society, Boris believes in the imperfectability of mankind — and especially of himself. His real problem, an old friend of the family suggested, is to take himself seriously.
© Andrew Gimson 2006 Extracted from Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson to be published by Simon & Schuster on September 18 at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19 with free postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 ()
MADCAP CHILDHOOD THAT MADE HIM A STEELY COMPETITOR UNDER A SMILING MASK
From his earliest years, Boris had a passion for coming top. His sister Rachel recalls that when asked as a small boy what he wanted to be, he would say “the world king”. Nor has he ever grown out of this ambition. He has simply learnt to conceal it. His manner is so shambolic and laid back that this side of him can be overlooked.
You will never find a more ferocious competitor than Boris, driven by what he himself has called, with the intention that we presume he is merely joking, his megalomania. He was not born to ease and comfort but to wage a ceaseless struggle for supremacy.
He also has a lingering insecurity from childhood. He was born on June 19, 1964 in New York city while Stanley, his father, was on a study fellowship. Other scholarships followed as the growing family shuttled between Britain and America. Stanley was quick-witted and energetic but not by birth a man of substance. Boris had a privileged upbringing but also a rackety, hand-to-mouth one. With his boundless optimism goes the fear that he and his family are only a couple of meals away from the poor house.
Boris was almost five when the family left London for Nethercote Cottage, the smallest of the three houses on an Exmoor farm owned by Stanley’s father. Charlotte remembers living there with three children — without a car, washing machine or television, but having “actually a wonderful time”.
Here the competitive pressure continued. The children’s grandmother would ask Rachel, a precocious four-year-old, to sit at the kitchen table and read the Times leader, and would tell her how well she had read it. This praise for his sister, who was just over a year younger than him, drove Boris mad with rage.
Another favourite family story has Boris playing table tennis with Rachel, losing a point during the knock-up, and kicking the wall so hard he broke his toe. He is also supposed, when playing snooker, to have got so angry that he ripped the cloth and broke the cue after she got a fluky shot in.
Julia Johnson, one of Stanley’s two children by his second wife, Jenny, has described a Johnson upbringing: “As long as I can remember there have been cut-throat mealtime quizzes, fearsome ping-pong matches, height, weight and blondness contests, and of course academic rivalry of mind-numbing magnitude. When my brother Jo gained a first from Oxford, Rachel rang Boris (who had failed to win one) to tell him the ‘terrible news’.”
To Marina, Boris’s second wife, who knew the family when she was a child, the Johnsons seemed “incredibly rough — they were all so wild and out of control”. If you were playing a ball game the ball would hit you hard on the nose, you would burst into tears and would feel you were being feeble. To visit the Johnsons on Exmoor was a shocking experience, “so much harsher than I was used to”. It was freezing cold and everyone had holes in their socks.
In August last year Stanley showed me Nethercote Cottage. He said: “Charlotte maintains I left her here for a year while I wrote a book called The Green Revolution. I’ve looked at my diaries. I did three longish trips but it doesn’t add up to a year.”
Stanley led me inside and up the stairs. Near the top on the left a small door, only a few feet high, opened into a kind of box room — a long, narrow space with a sloping roof and a small window at the far end. A grown-up could not stand in here but one could imagine that a small boy would love it. It is the room where Boris slept.
Some childish pictures were still attached to the wall. We could make out a rainbow, a frog (or possibly a flying saucer) and some birds, and two words in capitals: MAMA and ANDER. Boris’s first name is Alexander, and the family still call him Al.
In 1970 they returned to London, one of many moves. As Charlotte recalled: “We moved 32 times when I was married to Stanley.”
By 1973 he had secured a job at the European commission. The following year Charlotte had a nervous breakdown. From then until she and Stanley were divorced, Charlotte was “in and out of hospital quite often”.
She said: “It was terrible because I’d had before this all that time when I was so, so close to the children, and then I disappeared.”