Life in the Daily Telegraph’s new glass tower office in Canary Wharf had become routine and unchallenging. After contributing to the daily editorial conferences in the morning, Boris was expected to deliver an editorial or feature by the end of the day. While he loved journalism, that was hardly a challenge. His real ambition had never changed. He wanted to become prime minister or ‘world king’. That dream had intensified while watching Europe’s leaders from the sideline as a journalist. As they basked in the spotlight at international conferences, stepping out of polished limousines and asserting their importance at press conferences, his desire to be a player rather than a reporter of events became fixed. Through his position at the Telegraph, he had easy access to Tory party officials and, aided by his established fame in Brussels, his chance of securing nomination as an MP gave him an advantage over his rivals. Unsurprisingly he frequently discussed his ambitions with Bill Deedes, the eighty-year-old former Tory government minister and past editor of the Telegraph with whom he shared a desk at the newspaper. Deedes, a legend in his lifetime, was unenthusiastic about his experience during the Macmillan government. ‘It’s better being on the outside firing in,’ Deedes told the younger man, ‘rather than being inside being shot at.’ Boris thought of the advantages of being on both sides, and shooting both ways, simultaneously employed as a journalist and politician. Quietly, he applied to be a Tory candidate at the next election.
Some leftish neighbours in Islington did not appreciate that their Old Etonian friend was a committed Conservative. Suspicious of Islington’s liberals, Boris rarely discussed politics at their parties. Moreover, disliking inane gossip, he refused to share any intimacies. Their suspicions were mutual. But his home in Calabria Road was happy chaos. After the birth of his second child, Milo Arthur in February 1995 (Cassia Peaches was born in September 1997 and Theodore Apollo in July 1999), the scratched furniture would soon be surrounded by bikes, sports gear, books and paintings balanced on shelves. The bliss was dented by the Mail on Sunday’s publication in July 1995 of the Guppy tape provided by Ridson. ‘I certainly did not attempt to find the address,’ Boris told the newspaper.1 That, he assumed, buried the story forever.
In September 1995, Max Hastings resigned after a series of disagreements with Conrad Black, the newspaper’s owner, about Europe and Black’s interference in the newspaper’s content. Among Hastings’ last words to Boris was advice to avoid a career in politics because ‘a penchant for comedy is an almost insuperable obstacle to achieving high political office’.2 Naturally, Boris ignored the advice from a man with whom he had little in common. In theory, Boris’s relationship with Charles Moore, the new editor, should have been better. Moore, himself an Old Etonian and former editor of the Spectator and Sunday Telegraph, respected Tory politicians more than his predecessor. But unlike Max Hastings, Moore did not respect mavericks and aspired to conform as a member of the Tory establishment. While Moore valued Boris’s ability to write speedily a good profile, political analysis or feature, his chronic unpunctuality caused him despair. Boris, summarised Moore, was like David Niven’s description of Errol Flynn: ‘You always knew precisely where you stood with him because he always let you down.’
Boris’s unreliability was a matter of choice. In an important cause, he took no chances. Getting into Parliament was such a cause. By the end of 1995 his application to be nominated as a Tory candidate had progressed, although an unexpected and considerable obstacle, he was told, remained.
In his favour was Andrew Mitchell, a thirty-nine-year-old MP and a member of the candidates’ selection board, willing to advance Boris’s political ambition. Against Boris were Douglas Hurd, John Major and MEPs annoyed by his Euroscepticism. ‘What are you doing thinking of putting Boris on the list?’ Major told Mitchell. ‘He made my life a misery from Brussels.’
‘If you don’t back me, I’ll resign,’ replied Mitchell. ‘Boris is bright and he’s a Tory. And he’s promised me not to try for a safe seat. If you start to interfere you’ll undermine the candidates’ committee.’ At the end of a ‘real fight’, Mitchell won. ‘Boris was among the best,’ he decided. ‘And there was no doubt that Boris wanted to be prime minister,’ he says. Later that year, Boris was selected as the Tory candidate at Clwyd South, a safe Labour constituency in Wales. He was certain to lose at the election due in 1997. Mindful of his promise to Mitchell, he had eventually rejected an offer from Peter Lilley, a Eurosceptic MP and Cabinet minister, to be nominated for a safe seat in St Albans.
Under John Major, the party had become divided and discredited. Ever since Britain’s withdrawal from the ERM, the party’s reputation for economic competence had been shattered. By contrast, Tony Blair’s New Labour promised an exciting new era. With a certain Labour landslide, it would be better to wait at the Telegraph until the Tory Party’s fortunes changed, although he found the prospect of churning out articles frustrating.
Nevertheless, eager to impress Tory Central Office during the 1997 election campaign, he energetically toured through the constituency and addressed a meeting partly in Welsh. ‘I say,’ said a man when he finished, ‘nobody understood a word you were saying. We don’t speak Welsh in Wales.’ Predictably trounced in the Labour landslide that May, the agent’s positive report qualified him for a safe seat in the next election. That was no compensation for a man obsessed with being a winner. As always in his life, defeat or personal disaster provoked a well-concealed depression. Marina had become accustomed to cope with those moods.
One year later, in 1998, Boris was having lunch on a restaurant terrace near the Telegraph’s office with his old school friend Roger Clarke. Surrounded by baying bankers in the sunshine by the river, Boris unveiled his misery: financially stretched, at war with his editors and fearful that he would not be promoted. His contemporaries, Boris moaned, were earning zillions in the City and he saw no prospect of fame or fortune. Unexpectedly, he spoke about his sudden desperation to move on from the Telegraph. The move, he complained, had been stymied. Aged thirty-four, his hope to be close to being in the Cabinet by then had evaporated. At the end of Boris’s lament, Clarke spoke. ‘I was hurt,’ he said, ‘about a column you wrote ridiculing “tank-topped bum boys”. You see, I’m gay,’ Clarke revealed. Boris, he saw, was visibly ‘shocked’. By the end of their conversation, Clarke concluded, ‘He wasn’t homophobic, just not emotionally acute.’ Clarke left their lunch depressed. Boris, he decided, could be generous to some and mean and tight-fisted with others. Filled with complexities and contradictions, he was just not normal, thought Clarke.
Salvation from conformist predictability was delivered to Boris later that year. The invitation to appear on the BBC’s Have I Got News for You, a popular TV comedy news quiz, was a good wheeze. Eager for the fame, he failed to consider the motives for making the offer. To his surprise, during the programme he was ambushed by regular panellist Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, a magazine he had admired, who played an edited version of the Guppy tape. Clearly shaken, Boris proved incapable of an instant crushing reply. Many personalities might have been fatally damaged, but Boris’s subsequent response embarrassed his adversary. Under the headline ‘I was Stitched Up’, he denounced the programme in the Spectator as ‘a fraud on the viewing public’. Contrary to the image of slick spontaneity, he wrote, the producers ponderously rehearsed, staged and then edited everything to disguise the plodding truth. Ungrateful for that revelation, Hislop nevertheless maintained the relationship. Although he judged Boris to be unprincipled and amoral, he was also valuable entertainment. Repeatedly re-invited, first as a contestant and then as the presenter, Boris relied on his ‘spontaneous’ delivery from autocue and instinctive jokey jabs at Hislop to win the audience’s coronation as a national celebrity. The downside of his cultivated performance was disapproval from those whom he categorised as pompous and envious. Comedians, they carped, were good entertainment but unacceptable in politics. One exception to that censure was Conrad Black, a dishonest Canadian newspaper proprietor eager for acceptance by London’s fashionable patricians.
Ever since Conrad Black had bought the Telegraph in 1985 and the Spectator in 1987, his status had risen in London despite his notoriety in Canada as a financial charlatan. ‘While Mr Black grows ever richer,’ wrote the Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul, ‘some of his companies grow ever poorer.’ Like every other employee, Boris applauded Black’s ownership of the revived Telegraph in spite of Black – a self-important fantasist – damning journalists as ‘a very degenerate group’ who ‘are revenging, money-grabbing know-nothings’. To prove his mastery of language, he added that journalists were ‘temperamental, tiresome and nauseatingly eccentric and simply just obnoxious’.3 In the past as in the future, Black had good reason to fear journalists’ investigation of his own financial skulduggery.
There was one exception to his congenital dislike. In 1992, Black married Barbara Amiel, a glamorous and trenchant journalist. Boris became a regular social guest at their Kensington home. As his celebrity grew, Amiel appreciated Boris’s style and ensured he was seated near her at their dinners. ‘I love Barbara.4 I venerate her,’ he would later say. In parallel to Boris’s rise, the Blacks became disillusioned with Frank Johnson (not related to Boris), the Spectator’s editor. Although the magazine’s circulation had risen to over 50,000, Algy Cluff, its chairman and previous owner, disliked Frank Johnson. ‘We need a new free spirit,’ Cluff told Black and urged that he appoint Boris as editor. Despite Boris’s reputation for a basketful of sins, Black agreed that Boris’s mercurial temperament and unconventional attitudes suited a weekly magazine. In Boris, Black recognised a fellow careerist, ruthless for power and wealth and conveniently uninterested in exposing swindlers in Westminster or the City. Reassured by his Etonian polish, Black assumed he could trust the seemingly unconfrontational Boris not to rock the boat.
Black’s offer to Boris in spring 1999 was not a surprise to Boris, although it was to Frank Johnson. Black made his offer conditional on Boris promising not to pursue his political ambitions. Boris brazenly gave that undertaking knowing that it was false. At that moment, several applications to constituencies were being considered but success was not guaranteed. If he told Black the truth he would not get the job, so it was better, he calculated, to take the risk. Only by breaking rules, Boris was convinced, could exceptional men like himself fulfil their ambitions. Black, he assumed, respected those who behaved like himself – politely merciless and brazen. Each thought he played the other well, but Boris played the game better and got what he wanted.
He moved from the Telegraph’s modern offices in Canary Wharf to a seedy town house in Doughty Street, Bloomsbury. The appointment was not universally welcomed. Simon Heffer, the ineffably pompous Telegraph writer, was outraged. Ambitious for the job himself, he would never forgive either Black or Boris for the snub. Another envious rival judged Boris’s appointment as ‘entrusting a Ming vase to the hands of an ape’.5
To secure Boris’s agreement, Cluff vetoed Black’s proposal to cut the editor’s salary by 20 per cent. ‘I need to pay my mortgage,’ Boris had pleaded. The salary would be maintained by also writing a column for the Telegraph. But Boris did agree to Black’s appointment of Stuart Reid, a calm, professional journalist, as his deputy to make sure that the magazine came out on time. Boris told Reid that in the big picture he opposed sanctimony about sex, favoured legalising drugs and was pro-enjoyment of life. Extolling his liberal ideology – pro-capitalism, elitism, good education, tolerance of immigrants, and anti-Blair – Boris wanted the magazine to be a haven for uncensored entertainers, with a ban on ‘preachers’. No one welcomed Boris’s anarchic spirit more than Rod Liddle. The chain-smoking drinker, former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today and Spectator columnist loved the ‘convivial, clubbable and naughty’ atmosphere overseen by a dishevelled editor who wore plimsolls, with his shirt hanging out and shapeless trousers. Looking hopeless, Boris’s short telephone conversations to brief journalists were nevertheless precise and efficient. He refused to be immersed in detail. His job was to give direction and be open to ideas. ‘I know that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell went stag hunting,’ asserted a political writer. ‘Great,’ gushed Boris and commissioned the fictitious story. ‘I’m going to draw a cartoon of Muhammad,’ said another contributor hoping to emulate a notorious Danish cartoon. ‘Crikes, great, yes, hammer the bastards.’ Occasionally, suggestions were stonewalled. Unable to make many decisions on the spot, he needed time to resolve complicated ideas. Precision was often inconvenient. His strength was enthusiasm for having a crowd around him to give support and structures without them feeling any intellectual intimidation.
Soon after his appointment, he telephoned Adam Zamoyski, a renowned historian, asking him to write an article pegged to the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of war in August 1939. ‘Say that the Poles should have done a deal with Germany,’ suggested Boris, ‘and then the war would not have happened.’
‘I can’t do that,’ replied the historian. Hitler, Zamoyski explained, wanted to destroy Poland, and the Poles could never have tolerated an alliance with the Nazis. Clearly dissatisfied, Boris prevaricated until he reluctantly agreed to publish a historically accurate article.
The pattern emerged of an editor constantly testing people, especially their loyalty. He demanded their adulation, and even if he had betrayed them, he expected their forgiveness – and love. Inevitably editors make mistakes or need to clear up a mess caused by a writer. If justified, Boris pleaded guilty, expressed undying remorse, admitted his expectation of instant dismissal and in turn begged forgiveness for himself. Every time it worked.
In late 2000 Mark Amory, the Spectator’s elitist literary editor, commissioned an especially negative review of The Constant Gardener, John le Carré’s new novel due to be published in January. Boris disliked Amory’s assault and, before the review’s publication, arrived unannounced at le Carré’s home in Hampstead, north London. Removing his cycle helmet, he introduced himself to le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, and they drank a cup of tea. Although Boris perhaps planned the visit to mitigate the dreadful review, that was not mentioned in their conversation. ‘Old Etonians are fascinated that I taught there,’ recalls Cornwell, ‘and we talked a bit about it. His visit showed he didn’t like criticism and feared making an enemy out of me.’ The review’s publication a few days later ‘came as a complete shock’ to Cornwell. Although a scathing critic of Boris, the author remembers the visit as ‘a thoroughly decent act’.
The incident also reflected Boris’s fear of confrontation. As the magazine’s editor, he could have refused to publish the review but he preferred not to argue with Amory, a difficult employee. Endorsing the abusive review reflected to some extent his lazy absenteeism and lack of principle but also his liberal belief against censorship. His operation, insiders knew, depended on appointment, trust and delegation, not on diktat. Singing ‘Tubthumping’ (‘I get knocked down, but I get up again’) by Chumbawamba, or a song by Dire Straits, the new editor preferred not to interfere and focused on maintaining good relations throughout Doughty Street. Certain of his own abilities, he liked smart, talented people around the building.
At parties and long drunken lunches, Boris enhanced the magazine’s existing hierarchy. The officer class – pompous and flaky with double-barrelled names – were separated from the ranks. Liddle, the son of a Darlington train driver, was good company but his undisguised chippy class-consciousness ruled out friendship. Conversely, young beautiful women, especially if they were Oxbridge-educated like Lady Annunziata Asquith, were welcomed. Applications for employment bereft of nepotism or patronage were automatically binned. When the circulation had risen above 50,000, not everyone was gleeful. ‘I remember when circulation was 18,000,’ sniffed Mark Amory, ‘and that was everyone’ (by which Amory meant that the new readers did not rank among those he valued as the elite).6
That atmosphere suited Boris. His talent was to make each member of his staff feel they were special. Although always friendly, he lived behind a barrier – both of class and a refusal to allow anyone too close. Among the ranks, his theatrical delivery, quoting Latin and Greek to show his genius and the public’s stupidity, was quietly questioned. Few knew whether Boris’s Latin was accurate or relevant. Like his buffoonery, the classics were a smokescreen. Among the aristos, his declamations were a delight but they still wanted to probe his camouflage. During a Spectator lunch a favoured woman guest heard Roger Clarke mention that he had been at Eton with Boris. ‘Tell me about that,’ she said to Clarke. ‘Don’t tell her anything,’ ordered Boris sharply. Secrets about his personal life had to be protected.
The evasiveness about his past mirrored his refusal to commit to an ideology. Frustratingly for those who hoped that the magazine would renew Tory beliefs to defeat New Labour, he rarely took a line about Conservatism. Political principles barely interested him. Clearly committed to Toryism, he remained unattached to any faction or tribe – other than his own. The nuances of the Tory Party’s internal politics were ignored. Other than proclaiming liberalism and opposing the Tory far right, especially the Monday Club, he was unpredictable after considering the arguments about which side the magazine would support. ‘He believed in free speech,’ complains Liddle. ‘But while he supported the sign “I’m gay, get over it” on the bus, he opposed a sign which supported Christianity.’
Liddle’s interest in the limitations of free speech became an issue in 2000 while he and Boris investigated Unicef’s suspicious aid operations in Uganda. Driven in an air-conditioned Mercedes by two humourless Swedish women from one impoverished village to the next, Boris raged about the UN’s neo-imperialism. Both journalists were aghast at the sight of privileged condescending whites dishing out aid to the local people. To both, the experience resembled the worst of the bygone colonialist era. ‘Onwards to the next bunch of grinning piccaninnies,’ Boris said in mockery of the corrupt UN executives. On the following day, in a truck heading to another village with white UN administrators, Boris began singing ‘Money for nothing and chickens for free.’ To illustrate their prejudice, he parodied their racism. When they dished out aid, he said, they would expect ‘watermelon smiles’ in return. His illustration of what he perceived to be the UN’s racism would be later construed as his personal bias.
Two years later, on the eve of a visit by Blair to the Congo, Boris witnessed what he regarded as the very same hypocrisy of Europeans descending on Africa in the same manner as their imperialist predecessors. ‘What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England,’ he wrote in the Telegraph. ‘No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.’ In the same article, he wrote ‘The Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.’ Boris would claim that he was satirising neocolonialism.
Johnson’s marriage to a half-Indian woman, and his own Muslim, Jewish and Christian ancestry, would be an unusual background for a racist, an accusation which did not arise among his left-wing neighbours in Islington – also employed in the media and law. Their particular gripe was that the Johnsons did not continue to send their children to Canonbury Primary, the local state school. The Johnsons were unconvinced. Education in Islington was appalling – practically the nation’s worst – and despite the efforts of middle-class parents, the teaching at Canonbury Primary was particularly bad. Like many other parents of pupils at the school, the Johnsons moved their children to private schools. Eventually, an Ofsted inspection failed Canonbury and its head was sacked for viewing porn on a school computer.7 During those debates that year, few of the Johnsons’ friends suspected Boris had serious political ambitions.
At the Spectator, he rebuffed politicians. Those who called to beg for a story to be either promoted or buried were usually snubbed. He won brownie points among his staff when he enthusiastically published an account of a member of the royal family shooting a wild animal. After the story was deleted from the magazine’s website, Boris loudly ordered for the item’s restoration. For those journalists who despaired about jargon or political correctness, Boris’s willingness to take a blunt risk and cause offence, often with humour, was a tonic. Few recalled that he had stood as a Tory candidate in the 1997 election or knew that his ambition to become prime minister remained as strong as ever. Their enthusiasm dampened after Boris revealed that he thought the Spectator was a mere stepping-stone to Downing Street.
Unknown to his staff, in spring 2000, Peter Sutherland, the president of Henley Conservatives, formally invited Boris to apply for the seat. Michael Heseltine, the MP for twenty-seven years, had decided to step down bequeathing an 11,167 majority. Over the previous decade, the former deputy prime minister and Europhile had forlornly regretted his missed opportunities to become prime minister. Heseltine’s misfortune was Boris’s chance. A safe seat in a picturesque location by the Thames and close to London, was an aspiring politician’s dream. The constituency had a relevant historical connection. Valentine Fleming, the MP a century earlier and the father of the famous spy writer Ian, was described by Winston Churchill, his obituarist in The Times, as a ‘lovable and charming personality … a man of thoughtful and tolerant opinions, which were not the less strongly or clearly held because they were not loudly or frequently asserted’.
Inevitably, Conrad Black heard about Boris’s application and scolded the editor for lying to him or, in his maleficent language, being ‘ineffably duplicitous’, a tag which would three years later be attached to Black himself after being accused of fraud. After a series of rants against the editor, Black succumbed to Boris’s apologies and charm. He was too good to lose. ‘He’s a very cunning operator,’ Black would say. ‘He is a fox disguised as a teddy bear. I don’t know how he’s kept it going for so long. He knows the people, he understands public sensibilities.’ Boris would admit lying to Black. ‘The blessed sponge of amnesia has wiped the chalkboard of history,’ he later told the New York Times.8 ‘I want to have my cake and eat it,’ he admitted to Charles Moore.9
Once his plan was known, Boris asked Rod Liddle if he should go for the seat. ‘But you’re the editor,’ replied Liddle angrily. That, Liddle then realised, was not a barrier. As an unrestrained ambitious enthusiast, nothing was ever enough for Boris. ‘I don’t think he believes in anything other than his self-advancement,’ Liddle reflected.
Andrew Mitchell also protested. ‘You promised me that you wouldn’t go for a safe seat,’ he told Boris, apparently convinced that he should fight marginal seats until the Tory high command decided otherwise. ‘I’m so sorry,’ replied Boris with staged humility. Mitchell was not deceived. ‘In politics,’ Mitchell knew, ‘you must look sincere, but that doesn’t mean you are.’
From Westminster, David Davis, the Conservative MP and future Cabinet minister, was intrigued by the spectacle. ‘It was a mistake to judge Boris like others. They all wriggled up the greasy pole. He leapt over the pole at a great height.’
In July 2000 Boris arrived with Marina for the final selection meeting. David Platt, a pro-Europe solicitor, was his principal rival. Backed by Heseltine, Platt expected to be rewarded for gathering many supporters over the previous months. He suffered a double misfortune. Not only the arriviste’s celebrity but his Euroscepticism appealed to many local Conservatives disenchanted by Heseltine. Ever since his failed bids for the leadership during the 1990s and the rise of the Eurosceptics, Heseltine had disregarded his constituents’ opinions. In retaliation, the members who disliked him wanted another star to restore the association’s vitality. The result was a bitterly divided constituency. At a crowded, acrimonious selection meeting, Boris’s opponents threw all the dirt at the candidate, including the Guppy tape. ‘In so far as you accuse me of keeping this Guppy business a secret,’ replied Boris, ‘well, that seems a bit thin since I have actually been questioned about it on a TV game show watched by I don’t know how many millions.’10 Asked about his editorship, he replied that he would remain at the Spectator ‘not least because I would be broke’ otherwise.11 ‘My greatest advantage over David Platt,’ Boris would later admit about his gay opponent, ‘was that I had a wife, beaming up at me from the front row, with every appearance of interest, wearing a suitably colourful flowery coat.’12
Heseltine was furious about the Eurosceptic’s success. His anger was shared by Max Hastings, his good friend and now the editor of the Evening Standard. Hastings had become disenchanted with his former employee. Puzzled that the party would choose a celebrity, Hastings predicted that ‘Johnson, for all his gifts, is unlikely to grace any future Tory Cabinet … To maintain his funny-man reputation he will no doubt find himself refining his Bertie Wooster interpretation to the point where the impersonation becomes the man.’13
Boris’s misfortune was that, unlike other politicians, his long association with fellow journalists exposed him to particular scrutiny. Few journalists could associate Boris’s untidiness, last-minute delivery of copy, colourful vocabulary and reporting, fabrications and inventions, especially when he was the Telegraph correspondent in Brussels, with the seriousness expected of a politician. ‘I was shocked by his ambition when he was adopted and would become MP,’ says Liddle. How could a journalist, asked A. A. Gill in the Sunday Times, cross the line into politics? Although that was a familiar career path, Gill, a hyper-critical purist, was nevertheless appalled. Under the headline ‘It’s Boris, the worst politician in the world’, Gill described a chaotic morning canvassing with Boris in the constituency and an interview in a pub where the candidate was ‘like a man drowning in porridge and he’s really not enjoying this’. At the end of the morning, Boris asked Gill, ‘You’re going to stitch me up, aren’t you?’ To which Gill honestly replied, ‘Yes.’ ‘Boris Johnson,’ Gill concluded, ‘is without doubt the worst putative politician I’ve ever seen in action. He is utterly, chronically useless – and I can’t think of a higher compliment.’14 Denigrating Boris became a competition. Among his bitterest critics, Boris was said to be profoundly duplicitous and insincere. His emotional reaction to the onslaught, motivated he assumed by envy, appeared to be mute. In private, his hypersensitivity drove him to despair. Only Marina and one particular friend witnessed his anger.