Boris’s life in Islington with Marina and their four young children was becoming routine. Marina, he later confided to one person, was no longer a woman much interested in a close relationship or spirited conversations. Another was given the opposite impression: that Marina remained his best friend and a rock in difficult times. A third eyewitness simply concluded that the nine-year-old girl he first met in Brussels had transformed from a sister-like friend into a fun-loving party girl, and was now a homemaker, mother and lawyer. She was no longer the full-time, uncritical confidante he required. Too often, she told him the unpleasant truth. Despite enjoying time with his children, he discovered that fame had attracted other women. The agitator had become ‘untrustworthy’. He felt waning loyalty towards Marina. Convinced their relationship was secure, his appetite fuelled him to risk a new challenge. Ann Sindall, his sulphurous gatekeeper in the Doughty Street office, knew how to protect her employer from demanding women. One called to confirm an appointment. ‘He’s not coming,’ Sindall declared. ‘You know Boris. He only agreed to make you happy.1 He didn’t mean it.’ But he needed friendship, comfort, support and consolation. During 2000 he found that at the Spectator.
Ever since he became editor, his relationship with Petronella Wyatt, the magazine’s thirty-two-year-old deputy editor whom he had inherited from Frank Johnson, had become closer. Good-looking, vivacious and intelligent, she was the daughter of the late Woodrow Wyatt, a former Labour MP and peer, and Verushka, her Hungarian mother, both of whom enjoyed the turf and mixing with royalty and celebrities. Petronella wrote witty articles, but her critics carped that she was not wholly committed to journalism; and even she would admit that she was a well-connected young woman who enjoyed being chased by eligible men. ‘All Petronella wanted,’ said a boyfriend, ‘was to get married and have children. And that’s what her mother wanted too.’ Naturally, Petronella’s racy articles about her elusive matrimony concealed her burning ambition. ‘No one expected me to settle down,’ she would colourfully write about her first engagement, in 2009, to a ‘gloriously unsuitable man’. ‘This is because of my repeated protestations over the years that I would never, ever, live with a man, let alone get engaged.’2
Over lunches and in the office, her friendship with Boris intensified. Discovering a mutual interest in ancient history, poetry and later music, Boris taught his deputy to read Greek and occasionally they exchanged messages in Latin. Petronella discovered his affections for her by accident. Rummaging through his untidy desk for a Spectator lunch’s guest list, she found a handwritten love letter to her from him. In his shy manner towards women he found attractive, he had never revealed his passion, not even by a physical gesture. Boris was certainly not a groper. Those who would claim the opposite, Petronella believed, were lying. But, she realised, he had no problem renouncing any conscience about Marina.
The mutual attraction for two vulnerable people was companionship. ‘You are the first woman friend I have ever had,’ Boris said to Petronella.3 ‘He was a loner with few friends,’ she later wrote, ‘and like many loners, he has a compensating need to be liked … he wants to be loved by the entire world.’4 During those first months, Boris hinted at emotional fractures of his childhood with violent swings between happiness, hilarity, moodiness and depression. Stopping on the way to his home, he found someone to impress who welcomed him. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all day, and you’re wonderful,’ Petronella mused. He thought he was safe, but he was completely unsafe. After their affair started, he revealed intense jealousy about Petronella’s friendship with two famous historians. Convinced that she was unfaithful, his rage exposed insecurity, especially about his own intellectual inferiority, his stretched finances and what he perceived were his inadequate looks. Recklessly, he poured out his emotions in reams of letters and poems. During that first summer, Boris telephoned Petronella on holiday in Italy. ‘I want to marry you,’ he said. On her return, he discussed the prospect with Petronella’s mother. Nothing happened. Unwilling to be a mistress, Petronella demanded action. In 2001, about eight months after their relationship began, Petronella was pregnant.
Attracted by the notion of a second family, Boris urged Petronella to have the child. She was torn. Unwilling to be a single mother, she insisted that they should marry. Boris visited her mother’s house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood, and discussed marriage. He saw a divorce lawyer and then he confessed to Marina. His wife was shocked, moved out to stay with her parents and then persuaded him, she thought, to end the affair. As the guarantee of his promise, he wrote a cheque for a large amount, handing all his savings to his wife. The next morning, after looking at his four young children eating breakfast, Boris was faced with reality: his family’s certain disapproval, the prospect of confrontation and poverty too. Remembering his own horror of his parents’ divorce, he retreated. His marriage, he decided, was not over. Petronella had an abortion. Solemnly, he again promised Marina that his affair was over. In the nature of Marina’s love for Boris, she chose to believe him. He lied. His disloyalty to Marina, Petronella wrote later, was justified by being ‘inordinately proud of his Turkish ancestry and his views on matters such as monogamy are decidedly Eastern’. Boris believed it was ‘genuinely unreasonable’ that men should be ‘confined’ to one woman, said Petronella.5 Inexplicably and recklessly, he imagined that he could continue his affair even as a famous politician.
*
At the general election on 7 June 2001 Boris won his seat in Henley with a majority of 8,458. That was just over 2,700 votes fewer than Heseltine’s majority had been in 1997, and Boris’s share of the vote slightly decreased too. In the midst of another Labour landslide majority of 167 with the loss of just five seats, Boris’s election was hardly noticed. Blair’s magnetism had crushed a rotten Tory campaign led by William Hague under the slogan ‘Last chance to save the pound’. Boris was thrilled to have ‘MP’ after his name. ‘Someone,’ he later wrote, ‘it may have been Trollope, once said that a man could have no higher honour than to have those letters after his name. He was right.’6
Days after the election, Graham Brady, the chairman of the Conservative backbenchers’ 1922 Committee, invited the new arrivals to an introductory speech about the behaviour expected in Westminster. In a world suffocated by conceit, Boris stood out, not as the Spectator’s celebrity editor, but as a dishevelled interloper. Elsewhere in the room were George Osborne and David Cameron, also newly elected. Hugo Swire, the new MP for East Devon, sat opposite Boris. As Brady drawled on, Swire was impressed that Boris was busy writing. ‘Bit keen aren’t you, taking all those notes?’ Swire asked him at the end. ‘I’m twenty-four hours late for my GQ column and getting stick from the editor,’ explained Boris.
The Conservative MPs’ first task was to elect a new leader. Among those who approached Boris was Oliver Letwin, a leading Eurosceptic canvassing for Michael Portillo against Ken Clarke, a passionate pro-European. Over the previous decade, Letwin had written over one hundred articles for the Daily Telegraph, critically scrutinising line by line the consequences of Maastricht; ironically he would later become Cameron’s fixer to avoid Brexit. ‘I’m supporting Ken,’ Boris told Letwin.
‘If Ken wins, the party will split on Europe,’ Letwin countered.
‘Nonsense,’ Boris replied.
Letwin put Boris down as pro-Europe. Over the following seven years while Boris was an MP, Letwin would never encounter him among the small passionate band of EU critics. ‘He was invisible in the Commons,’ noted Letwin, ‘he was politically light, there was no ideology and the Spectator was not anti-EU.’ Boris told the Commons in 2003, ‘I am not by any means a Eurosceptic. In some ways I am a bit of a fan of the European Union. If we did not have one, we would invent something like it.’
Michael Portillo also sought Boris’s support. Boris refused. In pique, Portillo replied that Boris should decide between being a serious politician and a joke. Outraged, Boris never forgave the wayward Tory. In the third ballot, Portillo was one vote behind Iain Duncan Smith and was eliminated. Boris’s vote would have given Portillo a chance for the leadership in the final round.
From the outset, Boris was depressed by the House of Commons, dominated as it was by Labour. The political prospects for the new Tory MP were grim, and having failed to make an initially positive impression, Boris’s reputation in the Commons slid downwards. Appointed to shadow the government on culture, Boris never turned up to David Davis’s Tuesday meetings. Nor did he arrive on time for a lunch date with Davis, then shadowing the deputy prime minister. ‘Many apologies,’ he spluttered after appearing nearly one hour late. ‘At the time,’ recalls Davis, ‘I put it down to a mistake in my diary but later I realised it was a pattern. He was a needy character and gave the impression you were unimportant because, with a sense of his own importance, he had no time for the rest of the world.’ Unless Boris was the captain, he refused to play in the team.
Ignoring the whips, he often missed votes to fly off on fact-finding trips, edit the Spectator, write his column for the Telegraph, appear on TV or test cars for GQ magazine – and even the Guardian. GQ’s editor complained that Boris’s parking tickets had cost £4,500 while the Guardian calculated that his test drive of a Kia had generated £500-worth of unpaid parking tickets and congestion charges.7 In answer as to why he spent so much time on extra-parliamentary work, Boris replied that he was no different from scores of MPs with directorships or Labour MPs working for their trade unions; and no different from Churchill, Disraeli and many other lesser-known MPs who wrote books and articles. Unspoken was his need for money. Four children could not be privately educated on a parliamentary salary.8
The niggling was compounded by his poor performance in the Commons. (One notable exception was his passionate defence of pig farmers in Henley.) He could neither think on his feet nor dominate an arena packed with enemies armed with a range of tricks. He stutteringly failed to master the art of flattering previous speakers, or showing the necessary humility. Rarely seen mingling with MPs in the tea room, he occasionally appeared as required in a standing committee processing a long crime bill or squeezed into the benches for the regular Wednesday Prime Minister’s Questions. ‘Boris did not enjoy Parliament,’ concluded Iain Duncan Smith. ‘He was only interested in what would get him attention. Boris was always about Boris.’ Even his weekly chore alongside Cameron and Osborne to prepare Duncan Smith for PMQs was laboured. Duncan Smith assumed that Boris, the outstanding celebrity, could conjure up brilliant one-liners, but lacking Cameron’s ability to do so, Boris did not find it easy and gave up, uninterested in political principles or puncturing Blair. ‘Hey, Dave, what’s the plan,’ he asked after one depressing session.9 Having struggled to get a parliamentary seat, it was all rather an anticlimax. Everyone agreed he was a fish out of water. Over time, MPs said that the more they got to know Boris, the less he was liked.
The glamour was outside Westminster, and couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the drudgery of being an MP. Indeed in November 2001, Conrad Black hosted a party in Kensington to celebrate the ‘Boris Phenomenon’ – he had evidently got away with lying to his host about his political ambitions. One hundred and fifty guests were greeted with champagne, life-size cardboard cut-outs of Boris and a comic act. For the Blacks, always seeking an opportunity to flaunt their own importance, their editor was an exceptional celebrity. For the hero, the party was marred only by Marina’s insistence that Petronella could not be invited. There would be violence, she warned, if Petronella was there. Petronella was disinvited.
In his unworldly way, Boris was unaware that the champagne was financed with stolen money. At the annual meeting five months later in New York of Hollinger Inc., Black’s company, shareholders publicly called Black a ‘thief’. Grubby criminality did not interest the Spectator’s editor. Instead, he was entranced by Barbara Amiel, famous for her low-cut dresses. ‘I’m always worried about cleavage,’ Amiel confessed during an interview with Vogue. ‘I seem to keep spilling out of things.’ Shimmering in an Oscar de la Renta ballgown, Amiel confided during a tour of her vast wardrobe in her extraordinary house, ‘Now I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.’10 Excess of a different kind had become attractive to Boris – politician, editor, columnist, TV celebrity, author, father – and adulterer.
The caprice extended to his professional life. After the Spectator alleged that Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s spokesman, had interfered in arrangements for the Queen Mother’s funeral to promote Tony Blair, Campbell lodged a protest with the Press Complaints Commission, the media’s watchdog. To settle the matter, the PCC’s executives asked Boris to publish a correction. ‘OK,’ agreed Boris. But then he somersaulted. ‘We’ll fight this,’ he announced. ‘Boris failed to do as he’s promised,’ reported a PCC executive. The atmosphere in Doughty Street encouraged impulsive bravado.
Soon after his election, Boris bought a small, unmodernised remote house in Thame, about twenty miles from Henley. With the permanent excuse that constituency business demanded that he sleep away from his Islington home, he and Petronella resumed their affair. In their love nest, Boris was clearly happy. He ate his favourite dish – sausages and roast potatoes – recited Greek poetry, enjoyed excursions and especially picnics in West Wycombe Park, a favourite destination of John Wilkes, an eighteenth-century radical, journalist, MP, member of the Hellfire Club and champion of liberty. The more he read about Wilkes, Petronella’s hero, the more he realised the pleasures of eighteenth-century life, especially the tolerance of politicians enjoying relationships with a mistress, and using journalism to promote political ambitions. As their affair became known among the magazine’s staff, Boris grew even more reckless. Together they went on trips to Paris and to a conference in Moscow. In the hotel restaurant, they spotted Bruce Anderson, a Spectator journalist (Anderson had borscht all over his shirt, and he seemed more preoccupied by his meal than by the sight of his editor).
Back in London, Boris and Petronella were surprised during a lunch at Wheeler’s with David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, by the unexpected arrival of the American Kimberly Fortier, the Spectator’s publisher. ‘I’ve always wondered what it’s like to have sex with a blind man,’ Fortier said after sitting down. As Blunkett’s head jerked, she added, ‘Since I realise that a blind man cannot see me, I’ve put on special perfume so you can smell me.’
In that extraordinary atmosphere, Boris’s affair appeared to be encouraged by Conrad Black or his wife. At their dinners, guests noticed how Boris would be seated next to Petronella. ‘Boris’s adultery,’ says his mother Charlotte, ‘is just like his father’s. The motives were lack of love for their wives, boredom, selfishness and insecurity.’ To Boris’s good fortune no one at that time raised the parallel between him and Stanley. The reasons for Boris’s parents’ divorce remained unknown.
In midst of that affair, Mary Wakefield, a commissioning editor at the Spectator, developed a crush on Boris and Boris, it appeared, was swooning for Mary, ‘one of the loveliest people’, according to Rod Liddle.11 Jeremy Deedes, a director of the Telegraph Group which owned the Spectator, also noticed that ‘Mary was besotted with Boris. She was like a spaniel on heat. Boris was scratching his head: “What are we going to do?” he asked me.’ If there was no danger, Boris did not feel he was travelling. In a Daily Mirror interview, he hinted about his recklessness: ‘I am a juggler.12 I can have it all.’ He could not control his impulses – what he wanted, he could justify. Dancing with danger, he was engaged in a rhetorical dialogue with the gods: ‘If I do this, will I get away with it? If I do get away with it, and the gamble comes off, I won because I am blessed.’ The relationship with Petronella proved to him that he was special.
Inevitably, his reckless lifestyle imploded. In the summer of 2002, Petronella was suffering from the pressure and secrecy of their relationship. If Boris refused to marry her, she said, they should stop seeing each other. That horrified Boris. ‘He threatened suicide and cried – buckets full,’ a close friend of Boris witnessed. Expelled from Verushka Wyatt’s home in St John’s Wood, he walked down the street. Fearful of what he might do, Petronella ran after him. A rapid conversation produced no solution. Soon after, Petronella headed for a holiday in Porto Ercole in Tuscany. Boris was with his family in Sardinia. Abruptly, he left Marina and his children and flew to the mainland. After arriving in Porto Ercole, he climbed a wall to enter Petronella’s villa and declared that his impulsiveness and bravery proved his love. But again, nothing happened. He returned to Marina.
On her return to London, Petronella sought to rebuild her life and met an interesting American. Since the relationship with Boris had reached deadlock and she was exhausted by all the lies, she moved to Virginia in the USA to live with her new friend. The chance of a new permanent relationship and marriage was shattered by Boris’s constant telephone calls. Unable to be alone, he needed Petronella’s friendship and support. Eventually she returned to London. At midnight soon after, Boris was standing at her mother’s front door. ‘Don’t let him in,’ he heard Petronella shout. Verushka liked Boris and opened the door. Their relationship was reignited.
Rumours about his affair with Petronella were reported to the Telegraph’s executives by Mary Wakefield, who also brought news of other affairs in Doughty Street. Rod Liddle had a close relationship with Alicia Monckton, the magazine’s sassy young receptionist. At the same time, Liddle was planning his wedding to Rachel Royce, his long-term partner and the mother of his two children. On another floor was Kimberly Fortier – she had begun her affair with David Blunkett. Their relationship would be exposed after Blunkett’s phone was hacked by the News of the World. Shortly after, Blunkett was identified as the father of Fortier’s unborn child. Petronella would write about their introductory lunch, ‘Mr Blunkett and I ate Dover sole. Miss Fortier ate Mr Blunkett.’
Soon after marrying Rachel Royce, Rod Liddle pondered whether he should divorce her and marry Alicia Monckton. ‘You should never leave your wife,’ Boris reprimanded his columnist, ignoring his own imbroglio. At the same time, Fortier reprimanded Alicia Monckton for having an affair, even though Fortier was also having an affair with Simon Hoggart, the magazine’s columnist and Guardian writer. In the most graphic language, she also moaned to Liddle that John Humphrys, the BBC broadcaster, had spurned her seduction.
*
None of that turmoil seeped into Westminster. Boris’s appearances passed without any mention that Doughty Street resembled a sexual madhouse. For his own part, despite hating a backbencher’s routine drudgery, Boris had no doubt about his destiny – to be prime minister. ‘All politicians in the end,’ he admitted in an interview, ‘are like crazed wasps in a jam jar, each individually convinced that they’re going to make it.’ That was not an opinion shared at the Spectator. When the prospect of Boris as prime minister was uttered at the magazine’s editorial conference, it provoked universal roars of laughter – except from Boris.13 He bore the insult silently. Naturally, he feared their lack of faith in his own vision of his destiny. As ever, most people underestimated his talent. Undoubtedly, their scepticism was shaped by his poor reputation in the Commons. His ponderous set pieces – just oral manifestations of a good article – fell flat. And yet with so few stars among the Tory MPs, no party leader felt they could afford not to use his talents.
The parliamentary party’s decision to remove Iain Duncan Smith on 29 October 2003 after a disastrous party conference was followed by the unopposed election of Michael Howard as leader. Intelligent, articulate and forensic as a lawyer, Howard’s prospects of winning the next general election were enhanced by Blair’s unpopularity after the Iraq War. One personal weakness was his intolerance of critics. In his authoritarian manner, Howard was wary of Boris’s media celebrity and his liberal instincts. He was especially apprehensive about Boris’s support of immigration. To park him safely outside the tent, he made Boris a party vice chairman with responsibility for campaigning. Soon after, he promoted him to a Shadow arts minister under John Whittingdale, a lifelong politician. The normally anti-Tory arts luvvies, Howard calculated, would approve of Boris.
Grabbing the opportunity, Boris fired in all directions. He championed better education, a halt to local authorities selling sports fields for housing, improved broadband, more radio stations, more encouragement for the arts and the bizarre idea of presenting replica Elgin Marbles to Greece to end their demand for the originals’ return. That hyperactivity was crammed into other obligations including frequent demands from Tory MPs that he help raise funds for their local constituency with after-dinner speeches. His celebrity promised a sell-out. ‘Just remind me what this charity/organisation does,’ he usually said as he sat down late and began writing his speech. Nervous before speeches yet demanding to be the centre of attention, he disliked circulating a room, slapping backs. Arriving deliberately late, some would say, was a shy man avoiding conversation. Others assumed his native cunning was playing as a curtain-raiser to his humour. Most concluded that he was just winging it, improvising again and again with the same ingredients, accompanied by jokey mannerisms underneath the haystack hair. At the end of the performance, wherever he was, even hundreds of miles from London, he would refuse an offer of a hotel for the night. ‘I must get back to the wife,’ he explained. Usually, he jumped into a high-performance car provided by GQ, including once a Bentley, and raced back to London.
Amid all these manic activities, he also found time to write a comic thriller, Seventy-Two Virgins. The plot focused on a terrorist bid to capture the US president while he was addressing parliament in London. His hero, Roger Barlow, is a dishevelled back-bench Tory MP who cycles to Westminster, is unfaithful to his wife, is flippantly racist and politically opportunistic. Throughout the novel, Barlow fears that his political career is about to be ended by a tabloid scandal because his investment in a lingerie business was actually a cover for a brothel.
Art imitating life was risky but Boris had an urge to reveal himself in a fictional confession. The anger and envy directed against him, he thought, was designed to diminish his glory. ‘That great prodigious tree in the forest,’ Stanley called Boris, ‘under the shade of which the smaller trees must either perish or struggle to find their own place in the sun.’14 Stanley spoke about success as having ‘skipped a generation’ in the family, regretting that he, the father, had not won the garlands. Boris’s fame could even irritate the Spectator’s jealous directors. After a board meeting, everyone headed to the Cipriani off Berkeley Square for dinner. Many of the directors were standing outside the restaurant as Boris arrived on his bike. ‘Hello Boris,’ said a passer-by, ‘can I have a go on your bike?’ ‘No you can’t Elton,’ laughed Boris to none other than Elton John. ‘You’ll go off with it.’ Boris was amused by the directors’ discomfort about his fame. In his expectation of loyalty from them and everyone else, he occasionally forgot the need to show appreciation.
In April 2003, the irrefutable accusations of fraud against Black had forced the sale of his British newspapers. ‘I seem to have understated what Conrad did,’ admitted Boris. In his artless briefing to Rod Liddle, he explained ‘Basically Conrad bought a nice big chocolate cake to share with the family, and put it in the fridge, and then got up during the night and ate a lot of it.’15 ‘Conrad will rebound faster than a cannonball express,’ he told others. That proved foolishly optimistic. Four years later, after conviction of fraud by a Chicago jury in July 2007, Boris sent a letter to Black’s trial judge seeking leniency. Black, he wrote, is ‘a man of high intelligence and considerable literary interests and energies.’ But on the critical issue of Black’s honesty, Boris remained silent: ‘I cannot comment on his present predicament.’16
Boris’s enjoyable status changed after the secretive Barclay brothers bought the Spectator in June 2004. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting the Ribbentrop brothers,’ Boris quipped injudiciously about the billionaire twins whose controversial rise from poverty to living offshore in a castle on Sark in the Channel Islands, was protected by sharp legal threats to newspapers.17 Andrew Neil, the magazine’s new managing director, renowned as a former Sunday Times editor and broadcaster, was unimpressed by Boris’s commitments outside editing the magazine. Regardless of the high circulation, he wanted the editor’s full attention when he called. Too often, the background noise of their conversations was traffic while Boris cycled somewhere. That was particularly grating on Wednesdays as the magazine was prepared for printing. The Spectator, Neil believed, could no longer be ‘run on a whim and a prayer’ – he wanted someone commercially minded. The plan, Neil told Boris, was to abandon the shabby premises in Doughty Street where the pursuit of money was deemed to be vulgar and establish a more profitable expanded business in Westminster. Boris felt the skids under his feet. One month later, the colliding elements of his packed life began to implode.
First, Rod Liddle’s affair with Alicia Monckton was publicly exposed. Rachel Royce, his new wife, was miffed and blamed Boris for employing beautiful young girls instead of staid middle-aged women. Hosting fantastic parties in Doughty Street, Royce fumed, was outrageous. Her hatred for Boris was echoed by the sisterhood. ‘My impression of Spectator parties,’ wrote Royce, was ‘full of young things in short dresses, high heels and lipstick, and the men flirting with them and ignoring their wives. I just felt Boris was running the whole place as a knocking shop.’18 Shortly after, she sent ten sacks of manure to the Spectator’s office. One month later, Fortier’s affair with the Home Secretary was exposed. Not only was her husband Stephen Quinn wounded, but Blunkett, the father of her baby, was compromised. Questions surfaced about whether Blunkett had involved himself improperly in speeding up the Home Office procedure to obtain a visa for Fortier’s nanny. The debacle led to David Blunkett’s resignation irrespective of his protestation of propriety, accompanied by Tony Blair’s hilarious eulogy that Blunkett’s ‘integrity was intact’. Andrew Neil did not complain as the circulation of the Sextator, as it was now called, ‘went through the roof’, he conceded. ‘It gave Boris breathing space.’
The moratorium ended abruptly when Petronella, now thirty-six, discovered in September 2004 that she was again pregnant. For months she had believed Boris’s promises to leave Marina and marry her. Her pregnancy forced him to make a decision. In her support, Verushka Wyatt, who strangely accompanied her daughter to parties and even chose her underwear when she travelled with her boyfriends, persistently telephoned Boris urging that he marry her daughter – a habit familiar to many of Petronella’s more desirable suitors. Boris could have refused to take her calls but he listened. He and Verushka got on well. However, while he refused to divorce Marina, he did not urge Petronella to have an abortion. On the contrary, he encouraged her to have their ‘daughter’ – they decided on the spur of the moment that it was a girl – and they would raise her together. The final decision was left to Petronella. Trusting Boris would be a good father, she decided to have a full-term pregnancy.
Everything in Boris’s life was being done in an exceptional hurry – under pressure, late and often furtively. But there was nothing especially unusual in Boris’s call on Tuesday evening, 12 October 2004, asking Simon Heffer to write a leader for the following day, just before the Spectator’s final print deadline. Heffer suggested an editorial criticising Liverpool’s excessively emotional reaction to the murder in Iraq of Ken Bigley, a British aid worker, by Islamic terrorists. In Heffer’s words, Liverpool had expressed ‘a mawkish sentimentality’ about the death and the city suffered the same problem over its self-inflicted downfall since its glorious pre-war era. Constant strikes and Marxist militants had destroyed the great port and the city’s industries.
As promised, the editorial not only criticised Liverpool’s excessive emotion about Bigley’s murder but also condemned Liverpudlians as ‘hooked on grief’ by succumbing to victimhood rather than accepting responsibility for their self-inflicted poverty. ‘Their misfortunes,’ stated the editorial, were compounded because they ‘seek to blame someone else for it [sic], thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society’.
That controversial opinion was corrupted by an outright distortion. Heffer blamed the city for not accepting the responsibility of drunken Liverpool football fans causing the death of ‘more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough’, a disaster before a football match in Sheffield in 1989. Liverpool, stated the Spectator, had wrongly blamed the Sun newspaper for exposing that harsh truth. The magazine also excused the police at Hillsborough for any wrongdoing. Those ‘facts’ were totally false. Liverpool’s fans were not drunk. The Sun’s accusation was an outrageous calumny, and the paper had itself apologised in July, three months before the Spectator piece was published. Moreover, police negligence was responsible for the horrendous deaths of ninety-six fans, not fifty as Heffer carelessly threw in. Worse, to protect themselves, the police had lied about their own conduct and the fans’ behaviour.
Normally, a newspaper’s inaccuracy would be ignored, but this was special. The magazine’s editor, a high-profile politician, had deliberately disregarded the Sun’s earlier apology to the bereaved for its gross defamation of ‘drunken’ fans.
Michael Howard was incensed, ‘turbo-charged and bashing the table’ according to one eyewitness. He was also fearful. As a passionate supporter of Liverpool football club, Howard anticipated being booed on his next visit to Anfield. The calumny coincided with good opinion polls for the Tories, especially in the crucial north-west where the party needed gains. One year before the election, everything could be lost.
Knowing he was not at his best when angry, Howard refused to speak to Boris. ‘He’s too difficult to deal with,’ he complained about a man who was so very different from himself. While Howard liked to exercise total control, Boris delighted in delegating. Those who suggested to Howard that the best solution was the ‘dead-cat strategy’ – invent a ridiculous story to divert the media’s attention – were ignored. To show that he was honest compared to the mendacious Tony Blair and his henchman Alastair Campbell, Howard ordered Boris to issue a grovelling apology – and not just through the magazine, he agreed with Rachel Whetstone, his senior adviser: Boris, he ordered, should apologise in person to Liverpudlians. Whetstone called Boris with Howard’s demand. Public self-flagellation was Howard’s price for him remaining as a junior spokesman.
Boris had several choices. He had not written the editorial but to use that excuse would be weasly. He could also have refused Howard’s demand that he participate in what he would later call ‘a pilgrimage of penitence’. Howard was after all a disciplinarian with a limited sense of humour. But he was the Tories’ only hope to defeat Labour, so the honourable Etonian team player agreed to perform. His force of personality, he anticipated, would get people back on side. Without fuss, he listened to the lines of homage he was expected to deliver.
‘You do realise that Michael is out to destroy you?’ the Tory MP Bernard Jenkin asked Boris as they walked into the Commons chamber.
‘Really? Why?’ asked Boris.
‘Because he can’t stand you,’ explained Jenkin.
Boris shrugged. He was committed. He knew exactly how he would play matters to his advantage, raising his profile with a quality appearance. Only later would Howard realise that Boris had made apologising into an art form. He underestimated Boris’s ability to turn his own flaws to his advantage.
But first there was another crisis. On Monday 18 October, Petronella had a miscarriage. Distraught in the Portland Hospital, she waited for Boris’s visit. In an attempted disguise, he entered the hospital. Together, in genuine misery for both Petronella and their lost child, they sat for some time. The following day, Petronella went to the country to recover. Few could imagine the secret juggling that followed. Stanley’s homily for survival – ‘Nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all’ – would be tested.
On Wednesday 20 October, Boris went alone to Liverpool. No other editor and MP would have travelled unprotected and unaccompanied. That was Boris – a loner convinced that his courage would outsmart his foes.
Within minutes of his appearance in the city, Howard’s plan for a decorous apology fell apart. Surrounded by a scrum of journalists without a Liverpudlian in sight, Boris claimed that Howard could not have read the whole article and asserted that some parts of the editorial were accurate. Since he was fighting for his political career, the performance was polished. There were no jokes, the buffoon act was buried and he did not ruffle his hair. Narrowing his eyes, he calculated how to swerve from incoming attacks. But for once, his performance could not entirely deflect his accusers. A nasty blow landed during a radio interview. ‘You’re a self-centred pompous twit,’ Paul Bigley, the brother of the victim, told Boris. ‘You don’t look right, never mind act right. Get out of public life!’ As he left Liverpool, Boris’s refusal to make a full apology left everyone dissatisfied – except Boris. Endless interviews, explanations and his celebrity had exhausted the controversy. There was barely time to gather his breath before the next ambush.
Two and a half weeks later on Saturday morning, 6 November, Tina Weaver, the editor of the Sunday Mirror, called Howard’s office. Her newspaper had paid a member of the Portland’s staff for the tip of Boris’s visit. Weaver asked Howard’s spokesman whether Boris had paid for Petronella’s ‘abortion’. When contacted, Boris blustered and denied any affair. ‘Poor, poor Marina,’ he wailed with his wife standing nearby. ‘Why does she have to be put through this?’ Weaver was given Boris’s denial and decided to publish the allegation about an affair between Petronella and an unnamed MP – without naming Boris.
Early that same evening, Simon Walters of the Mail on Sunday heard about the Sunday Mirror’s scoop. By then, Boris had discussed the leak with Petronella. At her insistence, he agreed that he would lie. When Walters called, he asked Boris whether he would resign as Shadow arts minister because of allegations about his private life. ‘I have not had an affair with Petronella,’ replied Boris. ‘It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle. It is all completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture. I am amazed people can write this drivel.’ Combined with Verushka’s denial about the affair and that her daughter had had an abortion, Boris’s fate was left dangling.
During the following week, Verushka Wyatt became incensed about the treatment of her daughter. Finally, she snapped and confirmed to the Mail on Sunday that there had been a long affair and an ‘abortion’ of Boris’s child. Michael Howard heard the news late that Saturday afternoon. Conscious of the lies Blair had told about the Iraq War and the recent report by Judge Hutton into the BBC’s exposé of Alastair Campbell’s nefarious operation to ‘sex up’ the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Howard was hypersensitive about politicians telling truth. ‘If it’s true,’ he ordered, ‘and he’s lied to the media, he’ll have to go.’
‘Did you lie last week?’ Howard’s emissary asked Boris that afternoon.
‘It’s my private life and I have the right to lie about my private life,’ Boris replied.
‘Tell him to resign,’ Howard ordered.
‘I won’t resign,’ Boris retorted.
‘Then Michael says you’re sacked,’ he was told.
‘I have the right to lie,’ he said. ‘My private life is just that – private.’
‘Then you’re sacked.’
Shortly after, Boris was seen in Rachel Whetstone’s office with ‘his head in his hands, looking awful’. Boris was furious. He had not lied to Howard, an impetuous and blinkered man, but to a journalist. ‘People always lie about their affairs,’ he fumed. But he had learnt a lasting lesson. In future, when asked about his private life, he would never lie – a major error – but refuse to comment by saying, ‘I’m not getting into this.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m off,’ Boris told John Whittingdale, the Shadow culture minister. ‘It’s all a mess.’ On reflection, Howard regretted firing Boris. After all, Boris was just weak – an adulterer who lied – but he was not corrupt or evil. Howard blamed his advisers.
Before the Sunday newspapers including the Mail on Sunday were delivered, Boris was ordered by Marina to leave their house. For months, she had wanted to believe Boris’s promise that his affair with Petronella was over, but his lies had now become intolerable. Hurt and humiliated, she changed the locks and took off her wedding ring. He lodged in Camden Town with Justin Rushbrooke, his Balliol friend, and Nell, Justin’s wife, the daughter of Robin Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary. Several times, he begged Marina to have him back but she refused. ‘Notwithstanding his reputation as a rake,’ Petronella wrote later, ‘Boris is a home-body, and uxorious, who would prefer to be at home with Marina.’ Marina attracted universal sympathy, but not Petronella. She was accused by some of selfishly wrecking Boris’s marriage.19 Few politicians caught in a similar storm survived. Women particularly began to loathe Boris.
Contemplating his fate in Camden Town, Boris did not ask ‘What did I do wrong?’ His predicament was not a mistake. Life in his opinion was about taking risks and challenging oneself. ‘There comes a point where you’ve got to put the dynamite under your own tracks … derail yourself.20 See what happens,’ he had earlier explained. The Petronella affair was just a risk gone wrong. ‘My great-grandfather had four wives,’ he fancifully told Rushbrooke. ‘I don’t see why I should be faithful.’ Monogamy did not appeal to him.21 No marriage, he reasoned, would survive if husbands or wives always told the truth, and politicians should not be judged on their adultery. They were not elected to be paragons of sexual virtue. Loyalty and moral virtue towards Marina were irrelevant to him. Later he blamed newspapers for feeding ‘public prurience and jealousy’ by demanding that politicians, including Bill Clinton, had no right to have girlfriends. Those private relations, he insisted, were no business of the media or the electorate. He could not change his character. Exaggeration and masquerade were his means of communication against his critics’ hypocrisy. Especially by those mocking BBC commentators. In anger he called Christopher Bland, the BBC’s spirited chairman. ‘It’s utterly disgraceful what your reporters are doing on screen about my private life,’ complained Boris. ‘It’s time you realised that I know all about your private life. If the BBC goes on reporting my affairs like this, you’ll be reading all about yours in the Spectator.’ ‘That’s blackmail,’ replied Bland. Boris never fulfilled his threat.22
The fallout produced a cascade of casualties. ‘It was a truly horrible time for us,’ said Liddle. Rachel Royce, Liddle’s estranged wife, tried to make it worse. Commiserating with Marina and lambasting Spectator men, she publicly attacked men like Boris who, ‘with their power and celebrity, are so puffed up with their own egos they end up living in a parallel universe, where they think they can do what they please’.23
Four days after sacking Boris, Michael Howard turned the mess to some advantage. By chance, he was the star at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year lunch. After Boris briefly introduced his former boss, Howard delighted in delivering a well-rehearsed quip about the magazine: ‘In all senses of the word it could best be described as political Viagra. And I must take this opportunity of congratulating Boris on the tremendous enthusiasm with which you have approached your various front-bench duties. You were keen to make your mark with the City of Culture [Liverpool]. And you succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. All I can say is, Boris, keep it up.’ The only person not roaring with laughter was Boris.
Many MPs assumed Boris’s political career was finished. In limbo, Boris told Andrew Gimson at the Spectator’s offices, with familiar inconsistency, ‘I’m getting fed up with it. Obviously I’ve been very selfish and stupid, but it’s not me … There were things in the papers yesterday.’24 Marina’s anger, he sensed, was softening. She loved him and he relied on her. Eventually, he believed, they would be reconciled. His relationship with Petronella was over, but only for the moment. He still needed her friendship.
Elsewhere in the Sextator, columnists Toby Young and Lloyd Evans were writing Who’s the Daddy?, a farce about an oversexed editor and his libidinous staff. ‘They wrote the play because they weren’t getting any sex while Boris was always surrounded by girls,’ carped another writer at the magazine, convinced that Boris was already immersed in another relationship. Their play featured three affairs, Boris and Petronella, Fortier and Blunkett, and Rod Liddle and Alicia Monckton. The magazine’s publisher was lampooned giving birth to triplets all with thick blond hair. ‘I always knew my life would be turned into a farce,’ Boris told Young and Evans. ‘I’m just glad it’s been entrusted to two such distinguished men of letters.’ Neither was reprimanded. Boris, everyone agreed, was a free spirit who trusted his staff beyond expectations. Sales of the magazine soared.
Soon after, Boris was booked to be the guest speaker at the annual dinner of Peter Lilley’s constituency. Although arranged long before, Boris cancelled at the last minute and offered to send Petronella in his place. She spoke about political mistresses. Witty and well informed, her speech was a hit, especially with the men in the audience. ‘They assumed,’ said Lilley, ‘that it was a tradition for all Spectator editors to bonk Petronella.’ Petronella was forgiving. ‘Boris,’ she wrote years later, ‘never sets out to lie. It is just he will do anything to avoid an argument, which leads to a degree of duplicity.’ Nor was he vain, she revealed: ‘He regards himself as rather ugly.’25
After one week’s punishment, Marina allowed Boris to return home. By then, Boris had revealed his innermost secret to Marina: witnessing Stanley hit Charlotte. So much about Boris was explained by that experience. Thereafter, she unhesitatingly rebuked Stanley for her husband’s sins. Any contrition on Boris’s part was not publicised. In a later newspaper interview with Lynn Barber, Boris explained, ‘I’m a bit of an optimist so it doesn’t tend to occur to me to resign … I tend to think of a way of Sellotaping everything together and quietly finding a way through if I can.’ The scandals revealed the unusual potency of the ‘Boris Phenomenon’. The bulldog test would be his fate in the May 2005 general election.
By most accounts, the Tories were well placed. Despite vast expenditure of taxpayers’ money, Blair had failed to improve education, made the NHS less productive and had lost control of immigration. Blair’s own position was undermined first by Gordon Brown’s incessant demand for his resignation, and second by official inquiries in the aftermath of the Iraq War which questioned the prime minister’s honesty. Most would have agreed with Boris that the war had been ‘massively corrosive’ to the public’s trust in politicians. Tasked to win that trust, Michael Howard focused on immigration and crime. This, however, failed to resonate with the electorate. His cause was further harmed by his dismissal, in a flash of temper, of Howard Flight, a deputy party chairman, for telling the truth about the Tories’ intention to cut spending. For ambitious Tories, the result of the election was dire. Although the Conservatives won thirty-three more seats, Labour won its third consecutive election victory with a majority of sixty-four – still healthy, although a long way down from a majority of 167 in 2001. Boris’s reward for his energetic campaign was an increased majority (over the Liberal Democrats) of 12,793. Hours after Blair declared victory, Michael Howard resigned. Without an obvious successor, the Tory leadership was an open race.