Two hundred guests were invited to Boris’s wedding to Allegra on 5 September 1987 at West Felton church in Shropshire. Woodhouse, the Mostyn-Owens’ country house, sitting in 1,500 acres, was the perfect setting for the reception. ‘It was a very happy wedding day,’ recalls Allegra, ‘although my parents didn’t like Boris.’ Giving Guppy the task of collecting their wedding rings from Hatton Garden in London, Allegra sensed, was ‘just inauspicious. I was side-tracked by Etonians.’ The tension between the two families was a foreboding.
Unknown to Allegra, an argument had blown up the previous night. Stanley and Boris had stayed at the home of John Biffen, a well-known slightly eccentric Tory MP. Sarah Biffen was shocked by the Johnsons’ behaviour at the pre-wedding dinner hosted by Lord Gowrie, also educated at Eton and Balliol, and his wife Alexandra. ‘Stanley behaved disgracefully,’ Sarah Biffen complained, ‘sticking a sort of cine camera up everyone’s nose.’ He would compound his tactlessness by trying to make an impromptu speech at the wedding reception until Sarah Biffen abruptly silenced him.1 In the morning, Boris revealed that he did not have the required morning suit. Biffen agreed to lend him an old one and then Boris discovered he had no cufflinks. In Sarah Biffen’s immortal damnation, ‘The reason he didn’t get married in my husband’s shoes is that his feet were larger – he would have limped to the altar.’2 Boris wore his own shoes with holes in the soles. Both Boris and Stanley were insensitive to those blunders, just as Stanley was unaware of the Mostyn-Owens’ disquiet about Stanley’s flagrant infidelities. Since Allegra’s parents were on the verge of separation for similar and other reasons, their sentiments may have been sanctimonious but Charlotte sensed their disapproval.
On the morning of the wedding, Charlotte arrived with her other children to a ‘grand but uneasy’ atmosphere. Gaia was ‘difficult’ and ‘a terrible snob’ casting ‘her dissatisfied mood over everything’. Gaia disliked other women, Charlotte noticed; she spoke only about people’s wealth and clearly disapproved of Boris. ‘Gaia wanted Allegra to marry a lord or a rich man,’ Charlotte knew. The premonitions were muddied. While Charlotte ‘liked Allegra’ and Allegra ‘loved’ Charlotte, Boris and Allegra seemed to expect the world at their feet. Allegra, Charlotte spotted, ‘was strong-minded and would not compromise. There would be trouble. But because I liked her I did not warn Boris.’ The best man was Leo, his younger brother and a favourite. After returning from a happy two-week honeymoon in Egypt, Boris was told that John Biffen had found their marriage certificate in his trousers. Boris had also lost his own wedding ring. ‘I know where it is,’ he reassured his bride, but never produced it.
Their first weeks living in unfashionable Olympia were unstable. Allegra found life on the Evening Standard’s famed Londoner’s Diary irksome. Success as a journalist depends on survival in the gutter and swimming in the sewer. Allegra was unsuited to cajoling and charming the rich, famous and scurrilous to divulge embarrassing secrets. She left Fleet Street to become a solicitor. Boris was equally dissatisfied. Within one hour on his first day as a management consultant at £18,000 p.a. he admitted defeat. ‘Try as I might,’ he would recall, ‘I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth-profit matrix and stay conscious.’ Unlike his wife, to escape the commercial world he had discovered a sudden passion to be a journalist. Personable, masterful with words and intrigued by the exercise of power, it was a natural next step. By chance, he bumped into Miriam Gross, the arts editor of the Daily Telegraph. Impressed by his charisma and intelligence, Gross arranged for Boris to be introduced to The Times’s editor, Charlie Wilson. Hired as a trainee, Boris was sent to the Wolverhampton Express & Star to learn the craft. Living in provincial lodgings was neither fun nor healthy for his new marriage, but did expose the Old Etonian to the reality of Britain’s working class. Too many, he thought, lacked ambition and relied on benefits. Margaret Thatcher’s glory was to destroy the poisonous welfarism of the 1970s and she became his hero.
His reunions in London with Allegra were uneasy. Seemingly depressed, she saw the glass was always half empty. Unlike their friends, she refused to host dinner parties and preferred restaurants but, conditioned by his parents’ marriage, Boris was unaware of the brewing problems.
His arrival at the headquarters of The Times hardly improved their spirits. Working at the end of the news desk – the bottom of the heap – his chore was to rewrite stories supplied by news agencies, an unglamorous life for a man of destiny. Through graft, trial and error, he needed to master the skill of devising an ‘angle’ to enliven a dull story. So it was that the glamour boy was asked to rewrite a tedious report about the discovery of the ‘Rosary’, the palace of Edward II, at Hay’s Wharf on the Thames Embankment. Boris decided that the story needed sexing up. In his rewrite he added, ‘According to Dr Colin Lucas of Balliol College, Oxford, this is where the king enjoyed a reign of dissolution with his catamite Piers Gaveston, before he was gruesomely murdered.’ A catamite is a boy kept for gay sex.
In his insubordinate manner, Boris ignored a salient fact – Piers Gaveston had been murdered in 1312 and construction of Edward’s palace began in 1325. Not only could the catamite story not be true but Colin Lucas, Boris’s godfather and Stanley’s best friend, was not an expert in medieval Britain but in modern history, especially France in the eighteenth century. At the time, Lucas was a lowly tutor at Sheffield University but he was a Balliol graduate with ambitions to become a pre-eminent scholar.
Hurt by his fellow academics’ scorn about his ignorance as reported by The Times, Lucas complained to Charlie Wilson. After hearing from Boris that the quotation was accurate, Lucas’s objection was rejected. But after compounding his lie in a second article, Boris was summoned by the editor. In his defence, Boris declaimed that most of the quotations in The Times were fabricated. Shocked by his insolence, the editor fired the anarchist. ‘I was angry that Lucas complained to Wilson,’ said Stanley indignantly. ‘He put a whole new interpretation on the word “Godfather”.’
Boris’s good fortune was Miriam Gross, willing to help him escape from a sticky corner. She appealed to Max Hastings, her editor at the Daily Telegraph, to meet Boris. Since his appointment in December 1985, Hastings had notably improved the conservative newspaper. The military historian and formidable journalist appreciated fast-thinking mavericks and was unfussed by Boris’s abrupt departure from The Times. As an individualist himself, Hastings appreciated that every young journalist learns from their mistakes. Just as he had been given chances through personal connections, Hastings was willing, in 1988, to give Boris an opportunity to shine, and to be booted out if he failed. The result was positive. Boris proved himself to be a remarkably fluent, unconventional fast writer with a self-confident style of writing, identifying himself with the contemporary Telegraph reader’s political opinions – middle class and middle of the road. And he offered eccentricity. Asked to write an article for a skiing supplement, he focused on the importance of clipping the ski sticks behind before schussing down the piste. The only complaint was his congenital untidiness and unpunctuality.
Within a few months, Hastings decided that Boris would be an ideal correspondent in Brussels: French-speaking, knowledgeable about the EU and eager to puncture the EU’s growing complacency and corruption. He arrived in summer 1988 just as Thatcher’s Britain was booming and she had denounced in Bruges the EU’s plan to transform the continent into a federalist state. Behind a smokescreen, Jacques Delors, the French president of the Commission, was plotting to build a European super-state with its own borders, its own currency, and eventually its own army. For the moment, the EU’s bureaucrats were intent on imposing unwanted regulations on Britain, and that, Boris rightly sensed, was just the beginning. Welcoming him to Brussels were his father and Jenny, his stepmother.
While Boris was excited by the posting, Allegra was ambivalent. First, she delayed her departure to Brussels by two months until her law exams were completed. Then, on arriving in Brussels, she disliked the apartment Boris had rented. To save money, he had rejected the flat used by his predecessor in the francophone town centre near other journalists and had chosen a dismal flat in a miserable Flemish suburb. ‘Why did you do it?’ asked Allegra, but she never extracted an explanation. Disheartened, she lacked the energy to even put up curtains. ‘He was tight with money and he gave me none,’ she says. ‘He would always forget his wallet when we went shopping. I had to buy the food.’ She relied on her income from family investments and her new job, promoting Italian cotton in the EU. Annoyingly, Boris also always used the red Fiat, a wedding present from her parents, so she was marooned. Yet, Allegra would always believe that Boris had married out of genuine love and not for money.
Dressed in a torn jacket, dirty trousers and a crumpled shirt, Boris began the daily routine of arriving at the Berlaymont, the European Commission’s headquarters, for the briefing by the EU’s spokesmen to over one hundred journalists representing the world’s media. The club’s rules dictated that being taken seriously by the Commission’s staff was critical. But unlike other British besuited journalists, Boris did not feel beholden to curry favour with the well-paid Commission spokesmen serving platitudes about the EU’s seamless achievements. With long experience of the institution and the Eurocrats’ machinations during his school years when Stanley was employed as a Eurocrat, he felt no compunction to report uncritically the spokesmen’s pronouncements. Why, he asked, should the EU’s bureaucrats be assumed to be honest just because they were serious? Extracting the unvarnished truth about the Commission was difficult. First, because Commission officials often lied to protect their activities; and second, there was no single truth but just a conflict of policies between competing power groups.
Initially, to find his way, Boris charmed his competitors to give him help and advice. Acting the bumbling English gentleman, his image undermined his credibility. Joking, never malicious and always self-deprecating, his fellow journalists assumed as he glided past with a smile that he was an unthreatening innocent.
A succession of his reports overturned their assumption. ‘Brussels recruits sniffers to ensure that Euro-manure smells the same,’ appeared on the Telegraph’s front page. ‘Threat to British pink sausages’ was followed by reports from Boris about Eurocrats dictating the acceptable curve of bananas, the size of condoms, an order that women must return their old sex toys, that euro notes make people impotent, that euro coins make people sick, and a plan to blow up the Berlaymont because asbestos cladding made the building too dangerous to inhabit. Berated by their editors in London for missing good stories, Boris’s rivals spluttered in outrage, ‘Boris is making the stories up.’ Embellishing was usually more accurate, but that was a charge rejected by his opponents. ‘He was fundamentally intellectually dishonest,’ said David Usborne of the Independent. ‘He was serving his masters in a very skilful way … He was writing things without really believing in his heart what he was writing.’ Sarah Helm, also of the Independent, agreed: Boris was ‘a complete charlatan … His writing was a cheap thrill – a stunt and quite a dangerous stunt actually.’ James Lansdale of The Times blasted: ‘Boris told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp.’3 Their anger that his imprecision had become secondary to witticisms was ignored by the Telegraph’s editors. Max Hastings was a Eurosceptic keen to expose the idiocies of the Brussels bureaucrats. Boris’s real success, ignored by his carping rivals, was to dredge up documents and decisions made by unknown Eurocrats intended to propel the EU into a federal state. ‘Put that on page one,’ his editors ordered. ‘We never had a single complaint that Boris was lying,’ says Jeremy Deedes, the newspaper’s managing editor. ‘Boris understood better than anyone what was going on in Brussels.’ Their correspondent might be ‘exaggerating but it was all too good to check. His reports were all correct in spirit if not in detail.’
Untroubled by the accusations, Boris was on a roll. For a man in a hurry to impress the world, his accusers were an undistinguished pack, regularly seen in the middle of the day gossiping in bars. He ignored those destined to be forgotten and constantly trawled the Commission buildings looking for more scurrilous tales to feed his insurgency. Beating his competitors, he told Allegra, was bliss. ‘He never lied,’ she says loyally. ‘He just has his own attitude to the truth.’ Turning the circus upside down promised stardom, a mantra supported by Stanley.
‘Exaggeration is OK,’ said his father, the Eurocrat, ‘because Boris had to ask, “How do I make my mark?”’ An ironic herogram from Hastings was stuck on Boris’s office wall: ‘You know how highly I think of you but you must learn to be more pompous.’ In return, Boris hero-worshipped Hastings, grateful for being catapulted to prominence.
Among Boris’s most serious critics was Sonia Purnell, the number two in the Telegraph’s Brussels office. She would later write about ‘rumours’ that Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, had asked Hastings to fire Boris, but that was inaccurate.4 She would also write that ‘the Foreign Office even set up a Boris unit, a team of people tasked with rebutting negative Boris stories or trying to stop them appearing in the first place’.5 That was an exaggeration. The European Commission, according to Charlie Pownall of the Foreign Office’s communications team, did establish the ‘Rapid Response Unit’ to combat Euromyths but that was directed more against Christopher Booker and Richard Littlejohn, two other prominent British journalists.6 In Brussels, Purnell summarised Boris’s demeanour as: ‘under a well-cultivated veneer of disorganisation lay not so much a streak of aspiration as a torrent of almost frightening focus and drive’.7 That antagonism prompted Jeremy Deedes in 1989 to visit Brussels. ‘Purnell,’ he concluded, ‘always behaved as if the cards were dealt to her from the bottom of the pack. She was permanently disgruntled. She was tricky with a capital T.’ Having agreed to lunch with Boris, Deedes went to the Commission’s daily briefing. While one hundred journalists carefully wrote down the spokesman’s announcements, Boris stood at the back, hands in his pockets not taking a single note. To Deedes’s surprise, at the end, many journalists queued to ask Boris in different languages to explain what it all meant. For thirty minutes, he held court and belatedly the two went for an oyster lunch.
In the same year, Bill Cash, the Tory MP for Stafford and an early Eurosceptic, began to travel regularly to Brussels. His soulmate in the capital to explain the creeping federalism was Boris, whom he had known as a child. ‘Boris was a fish out of water in Brussels,’ says Cash, ‘but he was buried in the detail. He was the only journalist who knew the detail of what was happening.’ Boris believed in the idea of Europe – intellectually and emotionally – but as a committed libertarian was suspicious about the EU’s ambitions to interfere in people’s lives. On his return to London, Cash reported to Thatcher that Boris was ‘in the game and on the game and telling things from the front line that are true’. Cash became so close to Boris that he would appoint the journalist as his literary executor and invited him to stay in his Shropshire manor house. ‘We were never sure how many rooms he slept in,’ he sighed cryptically.
In summer 1989, Boris and Allegra flew to Sharm El Sheikh for a holiday. ‘The relationship was already creaking,’ she says. Distressed by the break-up of her parents’ marriage, she needed Boris’s support but he, flippant and emotionally superficial, was indifferent to his depressed wife’s low self-esteem. Living in his own space, his head swam with ideas and problems. His generosity of spirit, his desire to believe the best of people and a lack of pettiness and envy, did not extend to Allegra. That was ‘girly blouse’ and women’s feelings did not matter. Lonely, self-doubting and locked in a competitive boys’ game, he was reluctant to discuss his ambitions and never revealed to Allegra the pains of his childhood. To conceal his vulnerability, the guard never dropped. Oblivious to his wife’s quirks, two needy and insecure people sat on an Egyptian beach and could not help each other.
Allegra had arranged to learn scuba-diving but became ill. Boris reported to her that the staff wanted to know what she did. ‘I told them that your job is to keep Egyptian cotton out of Europe.’ Later she wrote, ‘This shows his spiteful side quite clearly.’ As a half-Italian, she was also irked by what she called his ‘ridiculous’ Euroscepticism, and they disagreed about his support for Thatcher. Finally, she would be angry that Boris included diving as a hobby in Who’s Who despite failing to dive because, according to the instructor, he could not control his breathing.
On their return to Brussels, Boris made himself busy. ‘He’s married to his job,’ concluded Allegra.8 ‘He needs the adulation of others. He cannot thrive without that.’ Spotting Allegra, one British journalist approached her, ‘Could you please ask Boris to stop ruining my weekends?’ ‘He’s ruining my weekends too,’ she replied. The only diversion from work was visiting Stanley and Jenny in a Brussels suburb for Sunday lunch and a game of tennis. On reflection she realised that Boris’s interest in culture and travel was limited. Other than the ancient classics, Shakespeare and Wodehouse, he barely read contemporary literature; he was uninterested in classical music, preferring the Rolling Stones, and seldom went to museums and art galleries. Moreover, he never took the opportunity to drive to Amsterdam or Paris: ‘He wasn’t interested in art. He was too interested in frantically writing about crisps or rushing off to Strasbourg.’ When Allegra was fired from her job, he showed neither sympathy nor interest. Sitting alone in her undesirable flat, she couldn’t find a career to satisfy herself but had enough money not to work. ‘We rarely spent an evening together,’ she muses. His refusal to be with her, she decided, was a blind spot he had inherited from Stanley: ‘an inability to take women seriously’.
The final straw came in February 1990 when she cooked dinner for him one evening and he failed to return home. The following morning, she bought the Telegraph and read his story with a byline in Zagreb. Without telephoning her, he had accepted the offer of a trip on a special EU flight. His passport and a suitcase were kept in the office for that eventuality. Out to enjoy himself, he didn’t really care what others thought. He telephoned his wife only after he returned to his office in Brussels. ‘I didn’t give him a hard time,’ says Allegra. ‘I didn’t even ask why he hadn’t called.’ Unemployed, lonely and occasionally drinking herself to sleep, she quietly fumed about his selfishness and feared she was heading towards a breakdown similar to Charlotte’s because of Stanley’s behaviour. She returned alone to London.
In reality, she could not understand a competitive workaholic so unlike her own father. Gaia Servadio would blame Boris’s demand for someone obedient and silent. ‘My daughter wasn’t that kind of person. Lacking self-confidence but strong-minded, she is very sensitive while Boris was very ambitious.’ Allegra disagreed. Boris, she said, did not want a submissive wife. He wanted someone who enjoyed sharing the rough-and-tumble of life. But his selfish terms did not match her special needs. ‘I was lonely in the marriage,’ she told Matthew Leeming, a friend from Oxford, on what Leeming calls ‘a manic high’ in London.9
Tearfully, Boris called Roger Clarke, his school friend, to fume that the public image of Allegra as the broken blossom, the Virginia Woolf-type, passive and aesthetic, was phoney.10 Under extreme emotional pressure, Boris’s friends would discover, he sobbed. He next called Matthew Leeming to discuss how to repair the relationship. Losing public esteem because of her rejection, he feared, would be intolerable. ‘He’s an actor,’ Leeming concluded, ‘and actors remember the one person in the audience who didn’t clap.’ Briefly Boris and Allegra discussed divorce but agreed to try again. She would try to complete her interrupted law studies in London and commute to Brussels for weekends. At the law school she was seen with a boyfriend.11 Charlotte also heard from a friend that Boris was spotted with a woman in a Brussels restaurant. ‘I was shocked,’ she says. The marriage had unravelled fast. ‘But I did nothing because Allegra wasn’t easy and his own parents were not a shining example.’
During that summer of 1990, Boris was telephoned by Darius Guppy. His school friend had run into trouble. Earlier that year, he had called the New York police to claim that he had been tied up by thieves in a hotel room and they had stolen jewels worth £1.8 million. After convincing the police that a genuine theft had occurred, Guppy successfully claimed compensation from Lloyd’s, the London insurers. Three months later, Guppy heard that Stuart Collier, a journalist on the News of the World, was investigating that the ‘theft’ had been staged by Guppy and a friend. After pocketing the profits from his fraud, Collier had been told, Guppy was offering the ‘stolen’ gems to Hatton Garden dealers.12
In his telephone call to Boris, Guppy asked his friend to provide Collier’s home address and telephone number. His purpose, he explained, was either to threaten Collier or have him beaten up. At the end of Guppy’s first call, Boris refused to help. Guppy persisted. Responding to Guppy’s demands for loyalty in their last conversation, Boris asked ‘how badly’ Collier would be injured. ‘He will not have a broken limb or broken arm,’ Guppy replied. ‘He will not be put into intensive care or anything like that. He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a cracked rib or something like that.’ As the conversation continued, Boris said, ‘OK, Darry, I said I’ll do it and I’ll do it.’ But Boris did not ‘do it’. Collier remained unaware of the threat and was unharmed; and Boris forgot the call.
A second seminal moment came two weeks later. Unlike the Guppy call, Boris realised at the time how much it would influence his future, albeit for very different reasons. By then, Allegra had been persuaded by Boris to attempt a permanent reconciliation. Returning to Brussels at the end of September 1990, she started a new course in European law. She had barely settled in before Boris flew to Rome for a summit of EU leaders. In a critical moment, Boris witnessed Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, the leaders of Germany and France, trap or ‘handbag’ Thatcher. Both countries wanted her approval for Europe to forge an economic and monetary union. Robustly, she refused. That would lead, she said, to a political union. She walked out. Kohl and Mitterrand illegally dismissed the British veto and agreed to launch Europe towards a single currency through the exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Boris saw for himself the power wielded by Berlin and the humiliation of Thatcher. ‘I was there,’ he would write, ‘when they ambushed Margaret Thatcher with conclusions that the British thought had been explicitly rejected.’13 The two men had treated Britain’s veto with disdain. Europe, Boris realised, would no longer remain the economic free trade area Britain had joined in 1972 but, guided by the Commission’s centralising mission, was heading towards a European federal state. Despite her protest and against Britain’s interests, Thatcher was squeezed by her Chancellor John Major and other Europhiles to join the ERM. In mid-November, as the power struggle intensified, the senior Tory and former Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, desperate to succeed Thatcher, forced a leadership contest leading to Thatcher’s resignation. Distrusted by many, Heseltine lost the election and Major, the least talented, slipped through to become prime minister.
Electrified, Boris followed those events in Brussels. As ever, they occupied far more of his attention than his troubled wife, whom he’d persuaded to attempt a permanent reconciliation. Allegra now once again returned to London. Morose, Boris met Matthew Leeming in Dublin. ‘I’ve been living a lie,’ he told their Oxford friend. He wanted Allegra’s Italian cooking and sex but it wasn’t working. ‘How long does this awful feeling last?’ he asked. ‘Two to three months and then you’ll be out of it’ replied Leeming. Rather than ending the marriage, Boris once again persuaded Allegra to commute between the two capitals.
Amid the see-saw of their emotions, Boris was reporting from the front line about the EU’s fate. In 1991 John Major, a passionate supporter of the EU, signed the Maastricht agreement to pave the way for Britain to join the ERM. Except that Major distorted the treaty’s intended outcome, calling it a ‘decentralising treaty’ and pledged there was no prospect of a single currency.
Implementation of the Maastricht agreement depended on approval by all the EU’s member countries. Some required a referendum. In Britain, there was a vote in the Commons. With a majority of just eighteen after the 1992 general election, Major was fighting a tight battle against twenty-two Tory Eurosceptics including Bill Cash. Maastricht, the rebels protested, would inevitably transfer Westminster’s powers to a federal European state ruled from Brussels. British sovereignty and democracy was in peril, they argued, an assertion denied by Major. During that ferocious party battle, Major complained about Boris’s sceptical reports in the Telegraph exposing the Brussels bureaucrats’ plans to forge an ever closer union. To Boris’s glee, Major even voiced his anger about his reports at a meeting of EU leaders. ‘That cured Boris’s insecurity,’ said Allegra. ‘For a time anyway.’
As his marriage deteriorated further, Boris spotted Louisa Gosling, a friend of Allegra, on a street in Brussels. Convinced that Gosling was spreading untrue stories about his aggressive behaviour towards Allegra, he complained to her. Gosling denied the allegation but it would be repeated by Sonia Purnell to enhance her description of Boris’s temper in their office.14 ‘He is capable of a very bad temper,’ agreed Allegra, ‘but he doesn’t hit out.’ Charlotte agreed: ‘His temper is his anger directed against himself.’
Depressed and moody, Allegra was again persuaded to return to Brussels permanently. Soon after, she regretted her decision. ‘He couldn’t change,’ she realised. Only recognition made Boris happy. ‘The same energy and enthusiasm which could make things happen was also exasperating,’ she sighed. Their final argument was about education. He believed public schools epitomised education. ‘Oh God,’ thought Allegra. ‘He’s got no political baggage and no ideals. And that did it for me.’ Her husband (whom she called Alexander at Oxford), she concluded, was three different personalities: Alexander, Al and Boris. ‘Boris is the public person, but did I meet Al, the private person, or Alexander, a mixture of the private and public person, or had I lived with Boris? I never knew.’ Even Boris, at any given moment, appeared unable to decide who he was playing.
Boris told his mother about the end. ‘I’m unhappy,’ he told her, ‘but Allegra is too demanding.’15 After hearing about the break-up, Stanley called Allegra and suggested that they meet. Allegra found the venue he selected, a hamburger bar, underwhelming. ‘A bum rap,’ said Stanley unwilling to acknowledge that Allegra was rejecting his son. ‘Rejection is not in the Johnsons’ vocabulary,’ she realised. ‘There wasn’t even a bunch of flowers to apologise.’
One evening in early 1992, Boris returned from work and found the flat empty except for one mattress on the floor. ‘That’s all he bought,’ Allegra would say. The rest of the furniture had been moved into storage. ‘When we got married,’ Allegra concluded years later, ‘that was the end of the relationship instead of the beginning.’16
By the time of the break-up, Boris was in a relationship with Marina Wheeler. They had first met at school in Brussels and had much in common – the children of two journalist families and long time friends were neither pompous nor class ridden. Most important, as the daughter of Charles Wheeler, Marina was accustomed to a journalist’s frequent absences and Boris’s preoccupation to fulfil his ambition.
Grounded, happy, secure and intelligent, Marina could provide the substance and emotional interpretation of his life in the world he required. She had read law at Cambridge, studied European law, qualified as a British barrister in 1987 and was working in Brussels as a lawyer. Charlotte was thrilled. Marina was a loving, honest and practical person. And Boris got on well with Charles Wheeler and Dip, his Indian wife. The only possible hazard was the Wheelers’ support for Labour, and Marina’s Labour friends. On arriving at the London birthday party of Philippe Sands, a Labour-supporting lawyer and academic, Boris was not greeted as a friend. In uncompromising terms, Sands described the Tory’s arrival as ‘painful, hilarious and devastating all at the same time’. Sands was ‘totally appalled’ by Boris. He was not only ‘fucking ugly’, said Sands, but his support of Thatcher was a ‘ghastly moment’.17 Sonia Purnell also personally warned Marina about the danger: ‘I delivered a judgement more candid than careful – “I think he is the most ruthless, ambitious person I have ever met.”’18 Ignoring that hostility, Marina embraced Boris and never fussed when he left the city to report from EU summits. Few were more important than a foreign ministers’ meeting in Portugal in May 1992. Maastricht had not yet been fully ratified. Denmark was due to hold a referendum on 2 June.
For Boris, the bogeyman in Brussels was the Frenchman Jacques Delors, the well-educated and savvy president of the European Commission. Boris was convinced that Delors’ furtive ambition was to create a federal Europe state ruled from Brussels. That was not the opinion of John Palmer, the Guardian’s correspondent in Brussels. In advance of the meeting in Portugal, Palmer wrote a lengthy scene-setter. Boris asked his rival whether his account was based on official documents. ‘Yes,’ replied Palmer. To Palmer’s anger, the following day, under the front-page headline ‘Delors Plans to Rule Europe’, Boris asserted that the president’s ambition for monetary union was a smokescreen to strip away the veto rights 19of individual states in order to ultimately create a political union. Palmer was outraged by that report, a gross distortion and untrue, he said. Boris would say that he understood Delors’ ambitions better than Palmer, because that precisely became the Commission’s formal proposal. By contrast, Palmer appeared to write what he was told. History remembers Boris. His Telegraph report was widely discussed in Denmark and, in a tight race, the marginal majority that had been predicted for ‘Yes’ to Maastricht switched to ‘No’. Boris became famous. Charles Moore, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, warned him that Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, was urging Hastings to dismiss his Brussels correspondent. Both Hurd and Hastings robustly denied Moore’s assertion.20 The notoriety thrilled Boris. Thirteen years later, he confessed to the excitement of ‘Sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party. And it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.’21
The horror for Boris and most Britons struck on 16 September 1992, ‘Black Wednesday’. After days of financial turmoil, Britain was forced to leave the ERM. The value of the pound collapsed, interest rates soared and Britain was humiliated. Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, blamed Germany for selfishly refusing to modify the ERM’s rules. From the front line in Brussels, Boris’s reports about Europe’s perfidy strengthened the Tory Eurosceptics against John Major, blamed for foolishly ignoring the warnings, destroying Britain’s economy and crippling the Tory Party.
A few months later, the insurgent was becalmed. Not only had Boris become a renowned journalist but he was also happy with Marina, who was now pregnant, and they had decided to marry on 8 May 1993. Arranging the divorce from Allegra was complicated by Boris’s failure to submit the forms on time, a familiar habit like botching his tax returns or insurance policy payments – a recurring problem, and arguably a hangover from the chaos of his childhood. With just twelve days before his marriage and one month before Marina gave birth, Boris struggled to find Allegra and obtain her signature on the divorce papers. To track her down, he called Candida, her sister-in-law. ‘Why are you divorcing?’ asked Candida. ‘What happened?’
‘It was God,’ replied Boris. Nothing more. Despite the chaos, Allegra generously ensured the signed papers were delivered in time.
The wedding with just family and a few friends at a registry office in Horsham, West Sussex, was followed by a reception at the Wheelers’ nearby home. ‘We’ve had a Sikh wedding,’ Marina announced, describing the preceding Sikh blessing. ‘Suck and you’ll find,’ Boris added cryptically.22 The omens were good. In Marina, Boris found a soulmate. The most important ingredient in their relationship, as with all Boris’s subsequent affairs, was the absence of competition. Unlike his instinctive rivalry with men, Boris trusted Marina, an old friend, not to cause him any harm and not get in his way. One month later, Lara Lettice was born in Brussels. To the Johnson mixture of Muslim, Jewish and Christian, his first child was also part Indian.
One friend not invited was Darius Guppy. Three months earlier, Guppy had been convicted at Snaresbrook Crown Court of fraud after Collier had exposed Guppy’s crime in the News of the World. Guppy was jailed for five years. One month later he was again convicted, this time of a tax fraud. Shortly after, Boris described his friend’s virtues and vices in the Telegraph. ‘He lives by an Homeric code of honour, loyalty and revenge,’ he wrote, adding that ‘the joy of knowing Darius is the humourless self-deprecation beneath the idiotic flamboyance’.23
Later that year, Max Hastings received a tape from Peter Ridson, a co-conspirator with Guppy in New York. Ridson had secretly recorded the last conversation when Guppy asked Boris for Collier’s address in 1990. After Hastings listened to the tape, he summoned Boris from Brussels. Unaware of the reason, Boris looked surprised when told there was an incriminating tape. Pushing his hand through his hair, he explained to Hastings and Jeremy Deedes, ‘Darius was a good, old friend and he was upset but I just wanted to get rid of him. I had nothing more to do with it.’ By the end, the interview petered out. Boris had persuaded both men that he had done nothing to help Guppy, and just because he had not refused his request outright did not mean that he condoned or co-operated in the plan. Deedes agreed. The tone of the recorded conversation convinced him that Boris just wanted Guppy off his back after several telephone calls without genuinely offering any help. In Hastings’ words, ‘We sent him back to Brussels bearing only a strongly worded note from me, suggesting that he would be rash to make such an error of judgement again, or even indulge such a man as Guppy down the telephone. As a virtue, loyalty to friends has its limits.’24
Twenty-five years later, Hastings was less generous to Boris. The Guppy affair, he would conclude, confirmed two facets of Boris’s character: ‘First he will say absolutely anything to man, woman or child that will give him pleasure at that moment, heedless of whether he may be obliged to contradict it ten minutes later. Second, having registered his wild-card status as a brand, he exploits it to secure absolution for a procession of follies, gaffes, idiocies, scoundrelisms, such as would destroy the career of any other man or woman in journalism, let alone in government.’25
In 2005, Sue Lawley had anticipated Hastings’ criticism. On Desert Island Discs, she asked Boris ‘whether the charm is all a bit of a ruse … to sort of get you by?’
‘I suppose that could be something,’ he replied and unconvincingly blamed his childhood earaches and deafness: ‘I think I must have developed then a certain sort of evasiveness, because often really I couldn’t follow what was going on at all.’26
In his unworldly way, Boris returned to Brussels without considering what Ridson might do with the tape. His narcissism blinded him to consider other people’s motives, or what made people tick. Quentin Letts, the Telegraph’s diary editor, noticed that Boris never provided any gossip stories: ‘He doesn’t notice peoples’ quirks and their embarrassments.’
Boris’s last day in Brussels in 1994 was marked by a half-generous farewell from the Commission spokesman followed by the press corps rising to applaud their departing rival. He moved back to London as the Telegraph’s assistant editor, leader writer and chief political columnist. He and Marina bought a house in Islington.
In the Telegraph’s office in South Quay, Canary Wharf, he appeared as a cheerful, brazen bumbler. Not part of the club, he separated himself, ignorant about who was up or down and without insight into or interest in the people with whom he worked. Behind the smokescreen of a disorganised, untidy, unpunctual and unreliable eccentric, he was concerned only for himself, promoting his own personality but not in a hateful way. ‘Who’s Clinton?’ he asked in a conference, shocking those unaware of the ploy. In the Commons lobby, he would act the fool and ask ‘Bernard, do you know what’s going on?’ ‘As a general tactic in life,’ he later explained, ‘it is useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on – because the reality may be that you don’t know what is going on, but people won’t be able to tell the difference.’27 His shambles, the critics stressed, exposed him as an amateur compared to their professionalism. To their irritation, he never seemed bothered or prepared for anything, and attracted adoring women.
Few insiders forget the Telegraph’s cricket match at Radley that year where Boris’s determination to win showed his class as a sportsman and a trophy hunter. His success sparked envy among many of his fellow journalists. Here was a man who made life look easy, even effortless. Not only had he enjoyed success at Eton and Oxford but he could write remarkable articles in a fraction of the time his colleagues needed. Unknown to them, he was also coming to the conclusion that journalism was an insubstantial career.