Any other British politician would have been flailed by the gloom and doom dominating the media in the weeks before the Olympic Games. After predictions that London’s ageing transport system would collapse, that businesses would be crippled because tourists were warned to stay away, and that Britain would be embarrassed by its failure to match Beijing’s extravaganza, the German newspaper Der Spiegel forecast that an almighty deluge was certain to drown the event. Then Senator Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for US president, agreed the Games would be a disaster, an opinion endorsed by the Anglophobe New York Times. Their pessimism appeared to be justified after an unfortunate sequence of events. There was the failure of G4S, the security company, to provide the 10,000 guards needed for the stadium. Boris directly blamed that on Theresa May. Then the Hammersmith flyover was closed, cutting a vital route into London from Heathrow, and the American Olympic team was mistakenly driven to Southend. The doomsters, however, were wrong. Led by John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, the Olympic Park was completed, pristine, on budget, and was an outstanding testament to British skill.
‘Get happy,’ Boris ordered London. ‘See the sunny uplands.’ In his welcoming speech at the arrival of the Olympic flame from Athens to the Tower of London in bright sunshine, he chortled: ‘As Henry VIII discovered with at least two of his wives, this is a perfect place to bring an old flame.’ While the capital partied, he described a ‘contagion of joy’ spreading across London. ‘The Geiger counter of Olympo-mania will go zoik – off the scale.’ Rarely was a politician more suited to an event. Boris’s political instincts were born from competitive sport. Games, he chanted, were the supreme human achievement. ‘Ruthlessly and dazzlingly elitist’, they were ‘the antithesis of the “all must win prizes”’ mindset. The Olympics were all about character. Winning required ‘not just physical genius but also colossal intellectual and emotional effort’. Drawing on his love of ancient Greece, he worshipped the grand moral of the Games. Athletes were confronted by ‘the glory of winning, the pathos of losing and the toil that can make the difference’. That was, he exhorted, the key to a healthy society and also to economic growth.
On the morning of the opening ceremony on 27 July, the Olympic Committee was invited to a momentous celebration at Covent Garden. From the stage, Boris read in classical Greek a poem specially written by Armand D’Angour, an Oxford classicist, in the style of Pindar, a poet in fifth-century BC Greece who celebrated the beauty and mystery of athletic achievements. The mayor’s flamboyant delivery to 1,000 people was hailed as outstanding.
That evening, nearly a billion people watched a dazzling opening ceremony which included James Bond (Daniel Craig) taking the Queen from Buckingham Palace to the Olympic stadium by helicopter, and appearing to parachute together into the stadium. Then followed a few nail-biting days before the British athletes began to win medals. Amid huge cheers as Boris walked to the Aquatic Centre to watch Britain’s swimmers win more events, and said to an aide: ‘It may not get any better than this, but this is good enough for me.’ He made the Games his success, exalting that the trade at tattoo parlours was roaring, and semi-naked women ‘glistening like wet otters’ were playing beach volleyball in the rain in Horse Guards Parade. ‘The whole thing,’ he roared, ‘is magnificent and bonkers.’1 The following day, the crowds in Hyde Park chanted his name and his popularity soared further. Back in the Olympic Park, Princess Anne was greeted by Boris before making her speech. ‘It’s always good not to come after Boris,’ she confessed.
A sense of reckless fun filled City Hall. At the Foreign Office’s request, Boris agreed to receive the mayor of Ulan Batur, the Mongolian capital. ‘I’ve just been to the Gulf,’ said Boris, ‘and they put lipstick on their camels. Do you put lipstick on your camels in Mongolia?’ The mayor was thrilled.
Less thrilled were those who had helped Boris win the mayoralty, given him money and hospitality but did not receive his invitation to the Olympics. ‘That’s what’s strange about Boris,’ complained one prominent benefactor. ‘It’s all about Boris. He never thinks about repaying debts or hospitality, or even appreciating help and generosity.’
On 1 August, Boris visited the £60 million cable car over the Thames. Emirates Airlines had contributed £36 million and £8 million had come from the EU. 180,000 people were using it every week. Afterwards he headed to Victoria Park to publicise a zip wire. In theory, he should have zoomed across. Instead, having understated his weight, he came to a standstill before reaching the end of the wire and, clutching two Union flags, pleaded ‘Get me a ladder.’ Dangling helplessly, no help arrived. ‘Is there anything you can do?’ he shouted at Karl, his bodyguard, concealing the pain he was in. Slowly Karl reached into his inside pocket. ‘I thought he was taking out a gun,’ Boris said later. Instead, Karl took out his phone to take a photograph. ‘If any other politician in the world got stuck on a zip wire,’ said Cameron, ‘it would be a disaster. For Boris it’s a triumph. He defies all forms of gravity.’
On 10 September, the day after the Paralympics ended, a million people crowded into the Mall for a victory parade. ‘You brought the country together,’ Boris said to the athletes. ‘You routed the doubters and you scattered the gloomsters, [producing] paroxysms of tears and joy on the sofas of Britain.’ The crowd chanted his name. Beside him was Cameron. The prime minister was a bystander watching the mayor’s triumph.2 ‘What comes next?’ asked Gerard Lyons, his economic adviser. ‘City Hall is his stepping stone to Downing Street,’ replied Peter Hendy.
By then, Boris’s attention was distracted by a new relationship. On the opening night of the Paralympics, no one had spotted the mayor slipping away from the stadium and head to a flat in Shoreditch, east London. It was rented by a blonde twenty-seven-year-old Californian digital entrepreneur he had met the previous year. Intelligent and vivacious, her name was Jennifer Arcuri.
Jennifer Arcuri had settled in London to make her fortune in the tech industry. With sassy humour, she flaunted her looks to ingratiate herself with anyone deemed potentially able to help her build Innotech, her fledgling business that introduced aspiring entrepreneurs to policymakers. It was during a routine hunt for clients at a British Venture Capital Association reception in a Marylebone hotel in 2011 that she had stood among a group of expectant bankers. ‘What’s up?’ she asked.
‘We’re waiting for the mayor,’ one banker replied.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Boris. If you stand right here he might notice you.’
In her words, ‘a chubby guy arrives with his shirt hanging out and I watched him turn that group of sweaty old men into something on speed. I walked right up to him, shook his hand and said, “You should come to speak to my group.” “Yes I will,” he said. “Email me.”’
Nothing happened until 3 March 2012. Arcuri’s business had grown and she needed official endorsement. She talked her way onto Boris’s election campaign bus as a volunteer and sat so close that the mayor could not help seeing her. ‘She clearly targeted him,’ a Boris aide realised later. ‘She will just bulldoze her way into anything because she has that self-belief.’3 To Arcuri’s delight, Boris turned every thirty seconds to look at her. ‘I realised he was interested,’ she recalled nearly a decade later. ‘I was flirtatious, I mentioned Shakespeare, I made him smile, intrigued him and got him to laugh. I had him hooked.’ At the end of the journey, Arcuri gave Boris her card. ‘No, no. I just want to contact you directly,’ he insisted. She gave him her telephone number and soon after he called. She indexed his number under ‘Alexander the Great’.
About a month later, Arcuri faced a crisis. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, had agreed to address an Innotech reception for a £25,000 fee. She had hired an expensive venue in Covent Garden and attracted a large fee-paying audience. ‘I used sex to get people to come to my events,’ Arcuri admits. ‘It was all emotionally charged.’ At the last moment, Wales cancelled. In search of a special speaker she called Boris. ‘You said you’d talk at an event,’ she said. ‘I need you on 18 April.’ He agreed. As he spoke to her audience, Arcuri realised ‘That’s the first time he’s spoken about tech and he knows nothing about it.’ To her close friends on Facebook, she congratulated herself: ‘We made Boris look like a rock star at our event.’ In the aftermath, Arcuri was thrilled by the profit her event had generated by ‘the man of the hour’. To her further delight, ‘whenever I called him, he would call me back’. Conveniently, her Shoreditch flat was on his cycle route from City Hall to Islington.
Arcuri’s presence in Boris’s life could not be kept secret from his closest staff for long. Although he ‘swore blind’ to Marina after his affair with Helen Macintyre that he would be faithful, some could see that while he worshipped Marina as a soulmate, their relationship, they mistakenly speculated, had become platonic. Emotionally weak, he would never leave Marina. Among the first to have scented a problem had been Lynton Crosby. He had extracted a promise that Boris would not start an affair until after the election. Thereafter, he was unconcerned.
Soon after the election, having been head-hunted by News International, Guto Harri left City Hall (although he remained an unofficial adviser to Boris). Boris chose Will Walden, an experienced BBC journalist, as his replacement. Walden changed the media operation. While Harri had cultivated the media to sell Boris mercilessly, Walden wanted less fuss, less noise and more consensual journalism. He preferred not to ask Boris about his personal life, and in any event Boris refused to discuss it.
In the wake of the Olympics, Britain’s most popular politician left no one in doubt about his ambitions. Outmanoeuvring George Osborne, his principle rival, had been much easier after the omnishambles budget but he had been spooked by reports of Osborne appointing supporters to key positions in the party across the country. Suspiciously, invitations by constituencies for after-dinner speeches had been withdrawn to deny Boris’s access to the grass roots. On the other hand, Osborne’s own prospects looked bleak. After the Chancellor was booed at the Olympic stadium, the leadership polls put him on 2 per cent against Boris’s 32 per cent. He was unelectable. Boris’s only opponent was Cameron. ‘I can’t possibly do a worse job than he’s doing,’ he had told Guto Harri while they discussed his tactics for the leadership in Boris’s Islington home.
‘Stop it, Guto,’ shouted Marina playfully, ‘you’re giving him this mad idea,’ convinced it was highly improbable.
‘This is his destiny,’ replied Guto. ‘He’s wanted to do it since his schooldays.’
Anyone who failed to accept his need to exert his power would get burned.
*
In anticipation of the party conference that October, Boris’s target was the media. He needed the newspaper editors to rein in their hostile columnists. Back in early August, following a thunderclap of Borismania at the Olympics, Philip Collins in The Times had written ‘Boris will never be prime minister … He is a clown who happens to run a major city, the opposite of the leadership that Britain wants.’ And on the same day Quentin Letts wrote in the Mail, ‘Boris is not a prime minister.’4
Boris had invited Rupert Murdoch to a swimming event at the Olympics as his personal guest, despite News International being under criminal investigation. They had previously met in New York for lunch. Murdoch had never concealed his dislike of Cameron and his enthusiasm for Boris. In return, Boris had written ‘There’s a sort of demonisation of Rupert Murdoch. He’s not a convicted criminal.’ He added, ‘He’s not even under any criminal investigation.’ That was wrong. After the arrest of his company’s executives and former employees for phone hacking in 2011 and being charged with conspiracy in May 2012, Scotland Yard’s investigation could have still led to Murdoch himself. Boris’s carelessness with key facts was among the reasons, despite his Olympic triumph, the Daily Mail dubbed him a ‘jester’ not suited to the ‘serious business of governing the country’.
Dacre, Boris heard, had become gripped by Boris’s ‘box-office appeal’ and obsessed with the mayor’s private life. He was demanding to know whether there were any undiscovered illegitimate children and about his behaviour as a father. Recently, the Mail had mentioned publishing a photograph of Boris’s teenage daughter drinking from a bottle in a field near Oxford; and the newspaper had also obtained a photo of his son Milo holding his fingers as a gun. ‘Aren’t they entitled to have a childhood?’ Boris fumed, relieved when the newspaper agreed to back down. But nevertheless, Dacre commissioned a profile to discover whether Boris was a serious contender for Downing Street. Boris feared it would simply be an exposé of his sex and home life. In Boris’s view, his Telegraph column was a ‘never decommissioned weapon’ to be used if necessary ‘to get my own back against Dacre’. But he lacked the spite to ever use it, even after a meeting which Dacre would later describe as a ‘lachrymose lunch (his tears not mine) with Boris bewailing that the Mail was destroying his marriage’.5 The mayor could not stop the newspapers’ hostility, and taking on Dacre and Murdoch, Boris knew, was considerably more dangerous than taking on Cameron.
Just before the party conference, Boris and Marina had lunch with the Camerons at a pub near Chequers. Once again, the prime minister hoped that Boris’s disruptive desire for the spotlight could be contained. Sensitive to the YouGov opinion poll putting Boris substantially ahead of him, Cameron had not been displeased when Grant Shapps, the party chairman, openly said that Boris lacked the right ‘set of skills’ to be prime minister. In what could be seen as an admission of his own vulnerability, Cameron quipped, ‘No point in trying to contain Boris.6 I’m relaxed about having the blond-haired mop sounding off from time to time.’
The rivalry between Cameron and Boris – initially played out in banter about their respective careers first at Eton (Boris a King’s Scholar and head of Pop, Cameron neither) and then Oxford (Cameron had got a first, but in PPE, which Boris disparaged as an inferior degree to his own subject, Classics) – had become more profound during Cameron’s premiership. Cameron had overseen muddled NHS reforms, not understood the public’s growing disenchantment with Brussels and worst, worshipped Tony Blair, whom he called ‘The Master’. Admiring Blair’s presidential style and his team’s slick media manipulation in order to generate favourable headlines, Cameron had unquestioningly accepted too much of his inheritance from Labour. For Boris, Blair offered no redeeming features, especially after Blair asserted that the Iraq invasion was not responsible for the rise of al-Qaeda or the huge number of Iraqi deaths. ‘Tony Blair has finally gone mad’, he wrote. ‘He surely needs professional psychiatric help.’ The war, Boris concluded, was ‘a tragic mistake’ by a flawed man who had approved the invasion without a plan for the aftermath.7 For all those reasons, Cameron’s bid to be reconciled with Boris over lunch near Chequers would be difficult.
During their conversation, they disagreed about Cameron’s decision to appoint a commission under Howard Davies to report on Heathrow’s third runway. ‘A fudge-a-rama,’ said Boris. In his reckoning, Davies was a lacklustre has-been. Formerly the deputy governor of the Bank of England, in 2011 he had resigned as the director of the London School of Economics after questions had been raised about the sources of funding that the institution had accepted. But Boris’s own position had shifted. Having promoted an airport on ‘Boris Island’, he now favoured a £65 billion airport on the Isle of Grain on the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, to be designed by Norman Foster. That change of direction, however, troubled Cameron far less than Boris and Europe.
An opinion poll had reported that 83 per cent of grass-roots party members wanted an EU referendum and 70 per cent would vote to leave. To prevent a fatal split of the party, Cameron had pledged in July that the next manifesto would include a commitment to hold a referendum. During the Chequers lunch, Cameron concluded that Boris had no idea what sort of referendum there should be. His ideas were undeveloped, which was ‘potentially dangerous’. But, Cameron believed, Boris opposed an in-out referendum. He preferred, Cameron assumed, for the government to negotiate to repatriate powers and veto a bigger budget. Then, a referendum would seek approval for the new relationship with Europe. But for his part, Boris knew that he had recently proposed an in-out referendum but did not repeat that over lunch. The confusion was perfect. Cameron was famous for best understanding his own point of view. With that misunderstanding, lunch was followed by football: the children against the adults. The children won, despite Boris’s aggressive tackling forcing one of his own children to leave the field.8
Boris returned to London pleased. His popularity reflected the public’s dislike of conventional politicians, especially by the middle classes who felt ‘utterly ignored’. Cameron’s fuzzy talk, failing to promote Conservative values, spurred 150 donors towards Boris’s mayoral election fund to gather the following evening at a Berkeley Street gallery. To them, their moribund party led by Cameron risked losing the next election. To keep his flame burning, Boris refused in interviews to endorse Cameron as the best prime minister. Instead, he praised competition for the job. ‘My wife keeps saying all this is very bad for my ego,’ he said. ‘It puffs it all up.’
When Boris arrived at Birmingham’s New Street station in early October for the party conference and was welcomed by a chanting crowd, Cameron’s worst fears were confirmed. The following day, the prime minister’s forty-third birthday, Boris mounted the stage at conference, and asked ‘Where is Dave?’ From the seventh row, the victim smiled wanly. As Boris made a humdinger of a speech, Cameron accepted the difficulty of forging a deal with him. Accuracy was unimportant to the audience in the hall. They were eager to be entertained by Boris’s boasts and self-deprecation. Britain, he told them, was a paradise. The terrific Routemaster was made in Britain; the Dutch were buying British bicycles; and the French were buying British cakes. And London, he would add later, had more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris – ‘Yes, a fact too good to check,’ he gasped. He knew it wasn’t true, but his speech spread happiness. Patriotism always was a trump card at the party conference. ‘Self-deprecation is a very cunning device,’ he explained later for the first time, ‘all about understanding that basically people regard politicians as a bunch of shysters, so you’ve got to be understood … that’s what it’s all about I suppose.’9 Cameron left Birmingham deflated. Boris stood at plus 30 in opinion polls and Cameron was minus 21.
That night, responding to Boris’s conference triumph, Paul Dacre signed off on an Exocet fired by Max Hastings: ‘If the day ever comes that Boris Johnson becomes tenant of Downing Street, I shall be among those packing my bags for a new life in Buenos Aires or suchlike because it means that Britain has abandoned its last pretensions to be a serious country … Most politicians are ambitious and ruthless, but Boris is a gold-medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – with my wallet … He is a far more ruthless, and frankly nastier figure than the public appreciates.’ Hastings’ conclusion was withering: ‘He would be a wretched prime minister. He is not a man to believe in, to trust or respect save as a superlative exhibitionist. He is bereft of judgement, loyalty and discretion.’
Hurt by his former editor’s vitriol, Boris never uttered a public rebuke. He knew Hastings was outraged by Boris’s refusal to honour a £1,000 bet on the outcome of the 2010 election. Hastings had asked for his money. Boris stalled and then sent a letter with a note saying ‘Cheque enclosed’.10 It wasn’t. Johnson, Hastings later wrote, is a ‘welsher, one who does not pay his debts’.11 Hastings would also describe Boris as resembling Gussie Fink-Nottle, a character in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels. The comparison was odd. Fink-Nottle was an antisocial, bespectacled, tongue-tied dreamer obsessed by newts and terrified of women.
Boris’s relationship with Jennifer Arcuri belied that comparison. At her request, he agreed to be listed as a reference for her application for a £100,000 job as chief executive of Tech City, a quango placed under the control of London & Partners, the mayor’s official promotional organisation. Only ‘proven business leaders’ were qualified for the job. Arcuri’s application was outrightly rejected. Boris had not promoted Arcuri’s application, but his intimate relationship with her did require him to declare his interest under the GLA’s code of conduct. He didn’t.
Three days after his conference speech, Boris flew to Perugia in Italy in the private jet owned by Alexander Lebedev, the former KGB officer turned oligarch. His host for two nights was Alexander’s son Evgeny, the socialite owner of the Evening Standard since 2009. Several people warned Boris not to take hospitality from the son of a man relying on a dubious fortune apparently amassed with the blessing of the KGB and the Kremlin, but the risk was outweighed by the promise of luxurious fun in Lebedev’s hilltop house. Free hospitality was an irresistible attraction to Boris. Asked if he wanted to be prime minister, he quoted Clint Eastwood’s character Harry Callahan in Magnum Force: ‘A man’s gotta know his limitations.’12 In the movie, Callahan delivers the line just after he has killed his boss.