With his mop of blond hair, wearing his scholar’s gown over his tails and white tie, Alexander Johnson stood out among Eton’s 1,200 pupils. For more than most of the entrants, the school exposed him to a new world. Boris’s ambitions were transformed. The provost’s introductory speech encouraged the scholar to regard himself as a future leader. No fewer than eighteen Old Etonians had been prime minister and, as Robert Birley, a famous former head master had said, ‘We are turning out the human material to run the nation.’ With brutal expectations, Eton chose its elite with an emphasis on winning. Each pupil was bestowed with a ‘sense of his own importance’ and instilled with a conviction that nothing was impossible. While emphasising courtesy, bearing and a duty to care for society, scholars felt protected by a glass ceiling through which others could not break.
Eton liberated Boris. During the ransack of his room by other pupils, his passport was found and defaced – de Pfeffel became Pee-Pee – and his fellow pupils, amused by his non-establishment second name, decided to call him Boris rather than Alexander. Charlotte noticed how Eton changed him. He became a bare-knuckle boy, anxious in full public view to get everything out of life. ‘He was a very good member of College,’ said John Lewis, his housemaster. ‘Humorous, loyal and, in the politest possible way, irreverent.’ These qualities were attractive to others, who enjoyed him quoting Nigel Molesworth (‘girly swot’, ‘down with skool’), and shared his obsession for Private Eye. Combined with P. G. Wodehouse, a new person was emerging.
The happiness was interrupted during his summer holidays at Nethercote in 1978. Stanley told his children that he and Charlotte were divorcing. They had been married for fifteen years. ‘Why did you have us?’ Boris asked his father alongside the three other children. Stanley would subsequently claim not to understand why his marriage collapsed, or whether his children suffered, ‘because I never asked them’.1 Charlotte made no secret to their friends about her reason for demanding an end: ‘I couldn’t stay with him. He was inaccessible, not to say completely unfaithful.’2 His flippant insincerity, she said, was intolerable. Her close friends in Brussels knew that the fact that she was no longer prepared to put up with the violence was the tipping point. She also revealed Stanley’s violence to Nick Wahl, a charming American academic whom she had met that year in Brussels at a dinner hosted by Roy Jenkins, the Labour politician serving as the European Commission’s president. The following morning, Wahl came to see her paintings and then invited her to Paris where he lived. Since Stanley was, as usual, away, she accepted and began a regular commute. Her children endured benign neglect. Clive Williams, the classics teacher at Ashdown, noticed that Jo, the most gifted of the four children, ‘became very quiet’.
‘I was upset when they broke up,’ was the limit of Boris’s disclosure in 2004, adding, ‘It had some effect. They handled it brilliantly.’3 In truth, Stanley’s violence has forever haunted Boris. ‘My father promised me that they wouldn’t divorce,’ he told a girlfriend years later, ‘and I could never forgive him for that.’ The ‘divorce’ was code for Stanley’s rage towards Charlotte. What followed compounded the damage. ‘We were abandoned as children after the divorce,’ wrote Rachel. ‘We had to bring ourselves up. We had no home.’4
The family house in Primrose Hill was sold and Charlotte bought a two-bedroom maisonette in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill Gate, for herself and the four children. By installing partitions, three extra bedrooms were created. With little money, Charlotte survived by selling her paintings and letting out the bedrooms during term time. ‘There was nothing in the fridge,’ recalled Rachel. ‘There wasn’t much to eat.’5 Thereafter, Stanley declared, he had little influence on his children. ‘I paid for all the children’s education,’ he insisted. Financed by his EU salary, the school payments were reduced by Eton’s scholarship and an exhibition Rachel won to Bryanston. But, Charlotte recalls, the Fawcetts also made regular contributions. The schools, said Stanley, were responsible for his children’s fate. The children disagreed. During the holidays they were often alone in Notting Hill Gate while Charlotte was in Paris, or they travelled unaccompanied to Brussels, and later to New York after Wahl moved there, joined by Charlotte.
Before his return to Eton at the end of the summer, Rachel noticed Boris’s insecurity, as did a visitor who entered the table-tennis room at Nethercote and saw Boris banging Leo’s head into the wall because his younger brother had just beaten him. In Boris’s world, winning was essential. Etonians were about to witness his determination to defeat others.
The contrasts in the school were unique. Boris found himself surrounded by the children of Britain’s aristocracy with seemingly unlimited wealth who had also suffered difficult childhoods. ‘We were the children of fathers who failed their sons and created troubled boys,’ recalled one early friend. Boris shared that destabilising neglect. The pain, said Rachel, made him impetuous. The romanticism of his beloved classics justified his recklessness. In Greek and Roman literature, there is contempt for the risk averse: fortune favours the bold, sacrifice is noble and even the brave are prepared to die in the ditch. Like magic, after reading Jasper Griffin’s lucid Homer on Life and Death, he had understood the Iliad and the Odyssey, the principle characters of Athens, their relationship between death and glory, and that there could be no glory without death. According to Homer’s Iliad, heroes are more virtuous than the gods because mortality compels them to develop the supreme virtue of courage.
Boris also found a hero, Pericles, a revered Athenian who, with charisma and shameless populism, pleased the crowds to win constant re-election. Blending the influences – Wooster, Molesworth, Just William and Pericles – Boris developed a unique oratorical style in the school debates combined with the belief that every speech must include humour. But unlike Stanley, he remained noticeably sensitive about his audience, always searching for approval. In the same way, he was loyal in sport, leading the charge in rugby, a zealous overperformer, excising his unstable background.
Poor, scruffy, haunted yet shrewd and able to conceal his self-doubt, Boris gradually emerged as a leader, usually captain of the team. He chose his friends, not for their wealth, but to share their ‘parentlessness’. Roger Clarke, at Eton thanks to his adopted parents’ sacrifice, enjoyed long discussions about literature and admired Boris’s ‘slightly wonky poetry jukebox’. Blessed with an excellent memory, Boris could recite hundreds of poems, Shakespeare sonnets and the first hundred lines of the Iliad in Greek.6 His more infamous friends were Charles Spencer, the brother of Diana, later Princess of Wales, and Darius Guppy, a louche, iconoclastic Anglo-Iranian. All three shared emotional hardship during their childhood.
Boris and Charles Spencer shared an interest in writing. Frequently, Boris mentioned his father – dubbed ‘Stanley the Steel’ – as a writer, mirroring his need to emulate and outperform Stanley. As in all his friendships with men, Boris disguised his hurt and solitude beneath brash humour and personal warmth. Without revealing his true thoughts, especially to Spencer, he nevertheless sought his approval. That summer, Spencer invited Boris to Spain. He returned dazzled by Spencer’s fame and fortune. In return, Spencer was invited to Nethercote. The viscount was noticeably appalled by the conditions but soon enjoyed the games – especially ‘Murder in the Dark’ – and the drinking. Darius Guppy was not invited to Nethercote. Boris’s relationship with that ‘exotic creature’ was unconventional. Byronic and romantic about mysterious cult forces, Guppy’s exaggerated qualities amused Boris, especially his obsession with ghosts and witches. Like Boris, Guppy sought reassurance. Some doubted whether in Eton’s fiercely competitive atmosphere those were genuine friendships. Etonians were not encouraged to be mutually supportive, but rather to take each other down. In any event, unlike his contemporaries in the school, in 1979 Boris was not just a romantic adolescent but also was beguiled by politics.
On 4 June, Founder’s Day, Stanley paid a rare visit to Eton, to watch the annual cricket match on Agar’s Plough. Parking his dilapidated Fiat alongside Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, his car stood out for many reasons, especially because the scratched paintwork was covered with ‘Vote Johnson’ stickers. For some months, Stanley had sought a parliamentary seat. The Labour government was collapsing and Margaret Thatcher was on the eve of entering Downing Street that May. To have become a candidate required Stanley to cultivate relationships. His early efforts had been sabotaged by his own risky language and careless attitudes. When asked in Leicester whether he had ever previously visited the city, he replied, ‘No, but I have often walked through Leicester Square.’ Charlotte noticed that while Stanley had always chortled about rejection, Boris learned not to tread on people’s toes and, unlike his father, to be kind. Charlotte credited herself with inculcating in her children genuine politeness.
After repeated failures, Stanley was finally placed that year on the shortlist for East Hampshire in Europe’s first parliamentary elections. His competitor was Bill Cash, an old friend from Oxford. Johnson won the nomination for the safe Tory seat. ‘Stanley,’ recalled Cash, ‘was not a Tory and he had no political convictions. He was just passionate about environmental laws.’ Three days after the cricket match, Stanley won the election. He drove Boris down to Portsmouth for the count. On the way, the Fiat caught fire and all the rosettes were singed. Just days before his fifteenth birthday, Boris watched his father, wearing a burnt rosette, claim victory and, as the new MEP, bask in the applause. There was no prepared speech, merely an outpouring of words intended only to grip the audience’s attention and without much care about their accuracy. Success, Boris evidently concluded, depended on an energetic performance and good jokes.
Within months, Stanley was disillusioned with politics. Life in the impotent European Parliament, he discovered, was uninteresting. He applied again to be a candidate for election to Westminster. ‘I made some silly jokes,’ he admitted, ‘and didn’t get the seat.’7 He abandoned his parliamentary ambitions and returned to a post in the Brussels Commission. By then, Boris had learned some of the lessons of his father’s failure. Unlike Stanley, he recognised the importance of concentration, beliefs and principles; and details were more valuable than generalities, although as the master of opportunism he often struggled to implement all those lessons. When faced with unfortunate difficulties, Boris embraced one motto that Stanley preached: ‘Nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.’ And, he could add, avoid apologising.
At school, Boris had established a relationship with one particular teacher – Martin Hammond, a noted classicist. Hammond was delighted to encounter a student who not only shared his enthusiasm for Latin and Greek but also shone as an outstanding intellect. In September 1980, he wrote to Stanley: ‘I’ve found Boris a quite delightful person, a real life-enhancer. I like his open friendliness of manner and his ready wit.’ Seven months later, Hammond again wrote to praise Boris for ‘asserting his intellectual ascendancy powerfully but modestly’. His caveat was that the sixteen-year-old could undermine his ability as a ‘considerable scholar’ and ‘a classicist of real distinction, one of the best we’ve had for years’ by a lack of focus and tardiness to deliver his homework on time.
Proud of what he called ‘my benevolent disinterest’, Stanley ignored the warning. ‘I didn’t read Hammond’s reports,’ he says, ‘or perhaps I gave them a cursory read, but I never sat with the children to discuss their reports or told Boris to behave.’8 He rarely went to ‘tedious’ parents’ evenings. ‘I wouldn’t want to take up the teachers’ time,’ he explained. Regarding his eldest son’s education, Stanley’s only stricture to Boris was, ‘If you’re working hard, don’t show it. You should be paddling underneath but show effortless superiority.’ Hammond was invited once for dinner with Stanley but Boris was not mentioned.
Stanley was focused on his new marriage to Jenny Kidd, a young widow and the stepdaughter of Teddy Sieff, the chairman of Marks & Spencer. Within one year, Jenny gave birth to Julia. Between his marriage and daughter’s birth, Stanley’s relationship with his other four children changed. They found that there was no bedroom provided at their father’s new home in Brussels. All four blamed Jenny for the rupture. Jo in particular found the distancing from Stanley difficult. Over the following years, Stanley and his new family would create a separate existence, whitewashing the reasons for the breakdown of Stanley’s first marriage and rejecting any description of Stanley which did not accord with their version.
In 1981 Boris was elected to Pop, the society for Eton’s most popular and outstanding pupils. Spencer joined him, as did Guppy who, unlike Boris, was forced as a Non-PLU – ‘Not People Like Us’ – to campaign for his election to Pop. For some, Guppy was ‘exotic’ while for others he was ‘slimy’. For his admirers, Guppy’s self-mythologising was electric. Working himself into a frenzy, he held his audience’s attention by boasting, ‘I’m off to fight the Russians.’ On another occasion, proffering his pilot’s licence, he related how in mid-air he had frightened a passenger by turning off the plane’s engine. Styling himself as a poet and womaniser – he had sex before anyone else in his year – he beguiled Boris by his adventures with the mother of a London friend. Still a virgin, Boris was impressed by Guppy’s account of regularly slipping through a garden window into the married woman’s Chelsea house. Later, Boris offered stories about himself, boasting about sex with some of the family’s au pairs and about a relationship with Alex de Ferranti, a school friend of Rachel’s.9 Sex had become ever more important in his life. The wonder of male superiority in ancient civilisations was free sex and unrestrained relationships enjoyed without rancour or guilt. In ancient Greece, endless sex was perfectly acceptable. Christianity, Boris would later curse, suppressed that idyllic world.
Fortunate that he could read and absorb textbooks much faster than others, he began busking his studies. Disliking solitariness, he was immersed in rugby, cricket, debating, acting, learning to play the piano and running the Political Society. In everything, Boris sought to excel and, with the exception of the piano, succeeded. In rugby and the wall game, Eton’s unique test of brawn and courage, he led the pack, renowned for hurling himself – do or die – at his opponents. Reckless to some, he loved the uncontrolled aggression – breaking bones and egos – with one objective: to win. The price for his hyperactivity was angry teachers, annoyed by his tardiness and waning diligence. Conformity had become for him an anathema.
‘Rubbish,’ growled Eric Anderson, a remarkable English teacher and later head master of Eton, while Boris was reading an essay about a subject which bored him. And if he was bored he was idle. ‘Unacceptable,’ carped the drama teacher after Boris failed to learn his lines for his part as the king in Richard III and stuck slips of paper on the props across the stage. ‘Johnson’s atrocious acting did not quite destroy this production,’ was the sentiment of the review. Boris was perfecting the art of playing himself, but as an actor he was wooden. Busking and cutting corners annoyed some, but his jokes and good nature appeased the rest. The casualties were miffed. Roger Clarke, the joint editor for three months with Boris of Chronicle, the school magazine, was shocked when Boris disappeared leaving Clarke to do all the work. If the choice was sport or engaging in the solitary editorship of the magazine, Boris chose the fun. Clarke paid a high price. He failed exams to win a school scholarship – which still rankles forty years later.
In April 1982, Hammond issued a stark warning to Boris’s parents about their unconventional showman son: ‘Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies and the scandal … would be if he did drop a grade at A level through sheer fecklessness.’ Hammond concluded that his prize pupil ‘sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of School for next half) … 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.’10
Stanley did not read the report, while Charlotte urged Boris to improve but that did not influence his teacher’s stark conclusion at the end of the academic year: ‘Boris has something of a tendency to assume that success and honours will drop into his lap: not so, he must work for them.’ Nevertheless, as one of the school’s most popular pupils, a charmer and a friend to everyone, Boris was elected a member of Pop, Eton’s elite club of elected prefects. The appointment brought duties and influence, the first rung on the ‘greasy pole’ to power.
Hammond’s criticism spoke of Eton’s ambition to stretch pupils and juggle their lives so they learned the true sense of self-worth. ‘You have to give them the tools to shape their destiny and change the world,’ said a later head master. ‘We should be unashamed about excellence and celebrate elitism. But also teach how to deal with failure and sticking with it. Be ambitious, have self-belief but don’t be arrogant.’11
With Hammond’s encouragement, Boris won a place to study classics at Balliol, one of Oxford’s top colleges. A first in Greats, classics teachers believed, was a passport to a dignified life, not necessarily rich but correct in a social and moral sense. That myth hardly matched Boris’s lifestyle or his aspirations. He did not seek a conventional, dignified life. Content to be the insider’s outsider, he sought to be flamboyantly exceptional, a trait Hammond recognised and condemned. Winning the Balliol scholarship irritated his teacher. Hammond disliked his pupil’s ‘effortless superiority’, excelling without apparently much effort. ‘My fear,’ wrote Hammond in his last message to Stanley in January 1983, ‘is that Boris may take his easy-going ways with him to Balliol and add to the statistics of Etonians who do little work at Oxbridge.’ Anticipating that Boris would not work hard enough to win a first, Hammond concluded that despite his ‘very sharp intelligence … I think it true to say that Boris has no real academic bent, and he’ll be an easier prey than some to the temptations of Oxford life.’12
Hammond’s judgement was accurate. In his farewell to Eton, Boris inserted in the leaving book a photograph of himself wearing two scarves and holding a machine gun, with his pledge to score ‘more notches on my phallocratic phallus’. A bold gesture, bordering on inappropriate, but nothing if not memorable. Two years later, the relatively invisible David Cameron recorded a forgotten message in Eton’s leaving book.