Fellow students would later say that Boris arrived in Oxford in 1983 planning to reach the Cabinet by the age of thirty-five. Eton and Balliol are enviable starts for those with political ambitions. Eton has produced innumerable Cabinet ministers and dozens of Balliol graduates have become famous statesmen. The added ingredients to fuel Boris’s ambition were observing Stanley’s attempts to become a politician and his own admiration of Roman and Greek history. Students of history often become mesmerised by a particular character. For Boris, fascinated by the two ancient civilisations’ outstanding leaders, he unashamedly sought to emulate his heroes. Adopting not only their ideas but also their oratorical style to win popular appeal, he dreamt of hearing millions applaud his achievements. The first steps to advance his ambitions coincided with an unusual burst of heroics and leadership.
The year 1983 was a watershed in Britain – the eve of a revolution. In the wake of her victory in the Falklands the previous year, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide general election and the country was about to shake off the shackles of a socialist economy and the label as ‘the sick man of Europe’. The nightmare of the 1970s was over. Starting with Ted Heath’s ‘three-day week’, through endless strikes, shortages and devaluation ending with the destructive Winter of Discontent in 1979, the decade had been worse than a waste. Ever since Harold Wilson imposed socialism on Britain after 1964, the country’s decline had been marked by a crippling brain drain. To escape confiscatory taxation and punitive state control, the most talented of Britain’s wealth creators had fled abroad to earn their fortunes. For Boris, bred as a natural Conservative by his father and Eton, Thatcher was the harbinger of a new dawn and new hope. Boris had just enjoyed a gap year in Australia with Hillie, his father’s sister and his cousins, teaching Latin and English in Geelong Grammar, the country’s leading private school. He returned with little to say about his experience but proudly wearing Stubbies shorts and R. M. Williams boots.
Balliol excelled in teaching classics. Jasper Griffin, the author of Homer on Life and Death, was the college’s fellow in classical literature. To be taught by a cult figure famous for his wit, enthusiasm and scholarship, enthused the new arrival. Less exciting were Boris’s fellow students in the common room. Most were ‘to the left of the Communist Party’, observed Anthony Kenny, a philosophy teacher and Balliol’s master, and ‘Trots were the main people so Boris did not find it congenial. As a conventional Tory, he preferred palling up with fellow Etonians.’ The most notable were Charles Spencer and Darius Guppy at Magdalen. Eventually, Boris also met David Cameron. Since Cameron was two years younger and had been neither a King’s Scholar nor elected to Pop, Boris would honestly claim to have only the vaguest memory of his new acquaintance. Boris’s most notable friend was Justin Rushbrooke, a Harrovian living in the neighbouring room at Balliol and also studying classics. Unlike Boris, Rushbrooke was not ambitious and uninterested in fame.1
Drawing on his experiences at Eton then perfected in front of elite students in Australia, Boris arrived with a mature showman’s hunger for celebrity and ultimately election as president of the Oxford Union, the student debating society. Famous throughout the world for the high quality of debates and the star guests invited to stand in its hallowed chamber, the Union cast a spell over every student aspiring to impress themselves upon history. The Union was a natural magnet for Boris. Standing in raffish clothes at the Union bar, he entertained his audience as the life and soul of the party (although he was markedly reluctant to pay for drinks). Some would say that his routine was a camouflage to protect himself from rejection but they would be mistaken. Although sensitive to criticism, he was fearless when he challenged his opponents in Union debates.
Facing other students and occasionally famous guests, the new arrival immediately demonstrated his established and repeated music-hall routine rehearsed at Eton. After patting his pockets to ask his audience ‘Where am I? Am I in the wrong place?’, he started off in the rhythm and deliberate hesitation of Churchill’s speeches to support one side of the argument, then switched to advocate the opposing argument leaving the audience baffled but intrigued. Next, he appealed to the audience’s sympathy by highlighting his own emotional vulnerability. To win laughs and applause, he appeared to forget his lines, although that was often a well-concealed truth to manage the repetition of old jokes.2 ‘Humour is a utensil that you can use to sugar the pill and get important points across,’ he would say.3 While his opponents stuck to the normal Oxford Union rules, posing as veteran politicians to make themselves appear as authentic, Boris set his own rules to appear more honest than his rivals. Then, with the audience’s attention and embrace, he made his pitch as a trustworthy orator who would not try to fool them. Debating at the union about the abolition of capital punishment, he impressed Toby Young, a fellow student, as ‘something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. He had an electrifying, charismatic presence of a kind I’d only read about in books before.’ With his imposing build and huge head decked with an unruly mop of blond hair, his way of speaking projected, recalled Young, ‘a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power. He was the finished article.’
Within weeks of the new term, as the unrivalled star at the Union, the student gossip was about ‘this amazing person just up from Eton’. Even at this stage, a few mentioned him as a future prime minister.4 He was not the cleverest but possessed a magic combination of intelligence, wit, cunning and exhibitionism.
His showmanship disturbed Charlotte when she visited Boris at Balliol with Nick Wahl, a graduate of Nuffield College. Beneath her son’s sparkle, she saw that his childhood grief about his parents’ relationship lingered. Ignoring his mother’s new happiness and Wahl’s warmth towards the Johnson children, Charlotte noticed how Boris ‘hated Nick’. Normally shy in one-to-one encounters and uneasy to look people in the eye, he was, Charlotte concludes, ‘jealous about Stanley. He wanted his parents to be married. Boris’s reaction was primitive.’
Boris needed a soulmate, someone with whom he could speak heart-to-heart. That, he found, was impossible with men. Only a woman could ever be his confidante. His requirements rarely changed: good-looking, intelligent and sophisticated. On that scale, few girls in Oxford exceeded Allegra Mostyn-Owen, a student at the neighbouring Trinity College. Students spoke of Allegra as one of Oxford’s most beautiful women, a judgement confirmed when she was photographed by David Bailey for the cover of the re-vamped aristocratic Tatler magazine, which transformed her into the most desirable trophy. Her father, William Mostyn-Owen, was a landowner and a director of the auction house Christie’s; her mother, Gaia Servadio, was a well-known Italian journalist. The family lived in an imposing house at Woodhouse in Shropshire, and also owned Aberuchill, a seventeenth-century castle in Scotland. ‘I don’t know how many bedrooms there are,’ Gaia Servadio had once said about the castle, conjuring the impression that her Eton- and Cambridge-educated husband was rich.
Allegra was an amazing catch way beyond any student’s approach. Except for Boris. During the first term, he arrived in her room with a bottle of wine for a party, only to discover it was the wrong night. He stayed, they shared the bottle and Allegra, despite her many boyfriends in London, became attracted because ‘I’d never met anyone like Boris. I felt happy and relaxed. He was non-threatening, so easy and he made me laugh.’ His striking hair, use of absurdly unusual words and his self-entitlement as an Eton scholar and head of Pop made her feel special: ‘I felt secure with Boris.’
He was also cool. Unlike the proposals and declarations of love from others, Boris just made endless jokes. Over the following weeks, he dispatched funny messages through the colleges’ internal mail to his new girlfriend in the self-conscious style described in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. As they established a close relationship, Allegra’s attraction to Boris intensified.
*
After a trip to Turkey to trace his family history and some time at a kibbutz, Boris returned to Oxford for his second year ready to be shaped by his classical education and become a confident politician. Sincerity is not always relevant to classical studies. Originality of thought is prized, even though it can occasionally lead to flights of fancy that have little purchase on evidence. As in chess, the pieces are there, and new and ingenious ways to move them and dismay others can become an obsessive goal for bright students. Verses and prose are marked by teachers according to the quality of the rendering, not for innovation; but a critical understanding of great poetry and literature requires intensive thought and sympathetic engagement. More than other subjects in the Humanities, classics supplies a framework for thought, accuracy and self-confidence. In the classics, there is grammar, there is scansion, there is an apt quotation and a wealth of historical and political teaching concerned not just with winners but with the foundational ideas of society and civilisation. As a grammarian and student of rhetoric, the classicist is a master of language, seeking to persuade others of the merit of his case and of himself. In short, the classicist cannot be phoney; but a lesser student may be something of a bluffer, as a good chess player can be, by giving the impression to his or her opponent by mere verbal dexterity that they are pursuing a deep and well-thought-out plan.
In drawing on the classics, Boris’s critics would say he replaced sincerity with parody, an act and a promise where his ruthlessness was dressed up as integrity. That would become Boris’s smokescreen while concealing the weakness of his classical education. Unlike other classical scholars, however eloquent, Boris failed to master the dialectic and forensically destroy his opponent’s arguments. Like Cicero, when Boris lacked a good case, he relied on improvisation, bluster and playing to the gallery.
Boris’s goal now was to be elected president of the Union, a milestone for many aspiring politicians. His plan coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s new government being threatened by Marxist trade unionists, especially the miners, in a febrile political atmosphere.
Like his predecessors, Boris ignored the Union’s rule expressly forbidding canvassing for support. He recruited what he called ‘a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges’ to gather the vote. The delusion, he admitted, was to promise his ‘stooges’ a return favour to help their own election campaign for other posts. Their relationship, he later admitted, was ‘founded on duplicity’ because he could not support every stooge who helped him. Each of them ‘wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth … The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.’5
Boris entered the presidential race to win. His defeat taught him a salutary lesson. He had limited his appeal to Etonians and other public-school undergraduates, isolating himself from the majority of students. That was folly. ‘Boris hated losing,’ recalled Allegra. ‘I was uninterested in his Union stuff but I agreed that he could invite potential supporters to my parties. Hacking to get their vote.’ Allegra was also reluctant to hear Boris speak at the Union. She went just twice, once to listen to the Greek actress and politician Melina Mercouri. ‘I wasn’t interested,’ says the strong-willed Allegra. Her steely demeanour added to her attraction for Boris, if not for his close friends. The antipathy was mutual. ‘Charles Spencer,’ she declares, ‘wasn’t charming or popular so it was hard to understand the basis of his friendship with Boris – except that he was useful.’ She was also critical of Darius Guppy: ‘He was an irritant who needed reassurance that he was liked, but his exaggerated qualities amused Boris.’
More than ever, bohemian rule-breakers like Guppy attracted Boris. Despite Boris’s financial constraints and middle-class background, Boris shared with Guppy an Old Etonian’s aristocratic indifference to bourgeois conventions. Together with Charles Spencer, they jointly edited Tributary, a magazine inherited from Toby Young. Boris firmly refused to continue its seditious exposure of students’ embarrassments. Aiming to stand for election again, he did not want any enemies. He wanted to be loved. The exception were the victims of the Bullingdon Club.
Limited to about twenty-four members, the club united Old Etonians and rich progenies to a night of excessive drinking and riotous behaviour to enjoy wrecking restaurants, bars and bedrooms. This was occasionally accompanied by performances of buxom strippers. Among the well-known members were David Cameron and George Osborne. As a pinnacle of reckless fun and debauchery, Boris adored the club’s notoriety. Among his victims was Matthew Leeming who spotted Boris arriving to destroy his flat. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shouted to protect himself. Radek Sikorski recalled that while asleep in the middle of the night, about twelve students led by Boris burst into his room, trashed all his belongings and, at the end, he heard Boris announce, ‘Congratulations man, you’ve been elected.’6 Boris was also present when a flowerpot was thrown through a restaurant window and the premises wrecked. ‘The party ended up,’ he would later say, ‘with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the Botanical Gardens and trying to escape police dogs. And once we were in the cells, we became namby-pambies.’7
Boris’s enthusiasm for the Bullingdon’s raucous world stemmed partly from P. G. Wodehouse’s portrayal of the Drones Club, in which loyalty to one’s old school chums is the principal and unbreakable law. To outsiders, the Bullingdon cast were rich Old Etonian idiots who had never grown up, behaved like hooligans, treated women as goddesses or monsters, had no apparent parents, and were alienated from the lower classes. Boris was different. The Bullingdon mix for him was not to eulogise the exceptional qualities of Etonians but about embracing an anarchic passion to break rules, undoubtedly inherited from his father.
In 2013, Boris admitted that he looked back at the Bullingdon days with a sense of ‘deep, deep self-loathing’. He added, ‘This is a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness. But at the time you felt it was wonderful to be going round swanking it up. Actually I remember the dinners being incredibly drunken.’8 Since it was hard to get Boris to pay for drinks, extracting money to compensate for his vandalism proved impossible.
Membership of the Bullingdon did not harm his second attempt to be elected Union president in November 1985. He had learned the lesson. Since hardline Tories had an impossible hurdle to overcome, he would pose as a member of the new Social Democrat Party which combined right-wing deserters from the Labour Party and some Liberals. He also spoke in favour of Israel in order to get the Jewish vote and, to get the nascent green vote, about his passion for the environment. Grasping the crudity of elections, Boris, like Stanley, was not a conviction politician. ‘He wasn’t entrenched in his opinions,’ recalls Allegra. ‘I was an SDP Keynesian and he was a Thatcherite spouting trickle-down nonsense. He wasn’t a libertarian.’ Some, including Frank Luntz, an American student who would become a famous pollster and who had initially supported his efforts, were shocked by Boris’s opportunism. But as so often in Boris’s life, his critics’ anger was fuelled by their own dissatisfaction. Luntz, called ‘Frank Y Fronts’ by Boris, did not enjoy Oxford. Unsuccessful with girls, he could not understand the class system and eventually resented helping Boris.
Among Boris’s stooges was Michael Gove, the adopted son of the owner of a fish-processing business. Educated at a Scottish independent school and studying English at Lady Margaret Hall, a minor college compared to Balliol, Gove was lower in Oxford’s social hierarchy than Boris, but nevertheless eagerly supported his election. During his strategic campaign, Boris was hyper-conscious of attacks on his own character, especially by Lloyd Evans and Aidan Hartley, the joint student editors of a satirical magazine. They planned to ridicule Boris as an incompetent exiled Armenian chicken farmer. In the middle of the night, Boris stormed into Hartley’s Oxford home and demanded that the piece should not be published. Being a chicken farmer, Boris declared, was acceptable, but ‘incompetent’ was outlawed. The article was dropped.9 The two students – who would later write for the Spectator under Boris’s editorship – understood that Boris saw himself in Oxford as special. He wanted others to believe in his destiny and favoured those prepared to empower his myths. Damage to his image was intolerable.
Boris convincingly won the election. In the aftermath, he wrote an unbeatable account of campaigning for the post in Oxford Myth, a witty anthology edited by his sister Rachel. Some have damned his elegant description of how he recruited gullible students including Gove to work for his campaign in return for false promises as Boris congratulating himself for the deception, but that’s foolish. In 2003 he explained: ‘I think my essay remains the locus classicus of the English genre of bogus self-deception.’10 He captured the unique self-absorbed madness of student politics. Yet, critics insist, his essay is a confession of dishonest politicking. Whether he told lies or allowed the electorate to be deceived depends on the mindset of the commentator. Anthony Kenny was equivocal: ‘So far as I know, he told no actual lies, but his strategy recalled Macaulay’s words about the difference between lying and deceiving.’ Talleyrand, the French diplomat, ‘never told a lie and deceived the whole world’. Boris’s final sentence summarised the truth: ‘The key thing seems to me that you pick up a load of self-knowledge.’11
That summer, Boris went with his sister and Sebastian Shakespeare, another undergraduate who would become a noted journalist, to Spain and Portugal. Allegra came for part of the time, watching Boris and his sister filming wildlife, especially a chimpanzee sanctuary, for a charity campaigning against cruelty to animals. Allegra found the experience ‘bizarre’, and made arrangements to spend the nights with Boris at the homes of rich friends of her parents, leaving Rachel and Shakespeare to fend for themselves. ‘It was awkward,’ Allegra admits. She was ‘not fond of Rachel’ and decided to keep her distance. The stern woman found Rachel ‘boastful. She was always projecting herself.’
Allegra returned early to Britain. Unknown to Rachel and Sebastian, Boris had proposed marriage to Allegra, although thirty-six years later she could not recall the circumstances. Insecure, with a fear of homelessness, Boris was to fulfil his ambition to marry up. Because his proposal was couched in uncertainties, she had agreed but was not completely committed. ‘Boris’s game plan,’ she was convinced, ‘was influenced by what Stanley had done.’ His father had married a wealthy woman early and Boris decided to follow suit. In her absence, Boris was unsure whether his offer was wise. ‘Should I marry Allegra?’ Boris asked Shakespeare every night. ‘You’re too young,’ Shakespeare replied, unaware that the marriage had already been agreed.12
Boris’s concealment and uncertainty illustrated a trait running throughout his life – his vacillation during his relationships with women. After agreeing to an idea, he then feared being trapped by reality and had second thoughts. Over the following decades, women would discover that Boris inhabited an inner or fantasy world. In those circumstances, they questioned whether his commitment was genuine. There was no doubt about his love for Allegra. His uncertainty was fear that he could not cope with her moods or with a permanent relationship. Even on the night before the wedding ceremony, he would ask a friend whether he should marry Allegra. ‘Bit late now,’ his friend replied.
After Christmas, Allegra’s parents invited Boris skiing in La Plagne, France. To her mother’s surprise, Boris arrived at the resort with a suitcase full of dirty sheets and no ski clothes. Standing at the top of a challenging black run in his tweeds, he launched himself downhill, zooming without fear or style over icy moguls to survive unscathed, thrilled by the danger. ‘I am more or less addicted to the joy of hurtling myself down the slopes,’ he would confess.13 Irritated by his appearance, Gaia Servadio was insulted by his disdain for Italian politics during dinner conversation, casting the government in Rome as a joke. Allegra’s father shared Gaia’s disapproval of their guest. ‘What societies did you join?’ Boris asked the fellow Old Etonian, knowing that William Mostyn-Owen had been neither a King’s Scholar nor a member of Pop. Needling his host with one-upmanship delighted Boris. ‘He’s rapacious,’ Mostyn-Owen warned his daughter.14 ‘What do you see in him?’ Servadio asked, a question she regularly repeated. At the end of the academic year and finals, Allegra announced their engagement. Both were still just twenty-three.
Insensitive about others, and even incurious about his future wife’s character and limited ambition, Boris failed to grasp the reason Allegra rejected a job in Washington DC which had been arranged by her parents. ‘I wasn’t interested in that career stuff,’ said Allegra, whose family wealth meant work was not essential. ‘I wasn’t ambitious and I needed reassurance,’ she admitted. To relieve her solitariness and neediness, she relied on Boris’s self-confidence. She did, however, reluctantly agree to work at the Evening Standard in London edited by Charles Wintour, her mother’s close friend.
Towards the end of his final year, Boris had feared he would not get a first-class degree. Instead of entirely focusing during those last months on his studies, he had been diverted into Union politics, social life and sport. By then, his reputation among his tutors was mixed. Oliver Lyne, a Horatian scholar, was one of several unimpressed teachers. At a tutorial he told Boris, ‘I’m not going to teach you, with you sitting there all drunk and crapulous.’ Boris later recalled obtusely ‘I dimly formed the thought that I could not logically be both drunk and crapulous at once, but somehow it wouldn’t come out.’
‘Probably the worst scholar Eton ever sent us – a buffoon and an idler,’ the ancient historian Oswyn Murray declared.15 Neither were impressed by a student who either arrived unprepared or relied on his remarkable memory to recite passages but failed to show deep understanding.16 Others were sincerely positive. Jonathan Barnes, another tutor in ancient history, called Boris ‘a good egg’ while Jasper Griffin, the tutorial fellow of classical literature, was enthusiastic.17 Griffin and Anthony Kenny agreed to give Boris extra tuition to achieve a first, but it was too late. He was awarded an upper second. Forever, he was disappointed.