Scattering leaflets, smiling for selfies, waving at drivers who stopped to shout his name, the candidate marched down Uxbridge high street thrilled by the adulation. ‘Can we count on your vote in the election?’ he asked, wearing odd socks and a crumpled jacket. ‘Wonderful,’ gushed Eton’s celebrated ‘pleb’. Everywhere across the country, roaring crowds gathered to watch the spectacle. On the Ramsgate sea front to campaign for Craig Mackinlay against Nigel Farage, he stood outside the Royal pub enjoying his rock star celebrity. ‘Totally unbelievable,’ swooned Mackinlay. In Chippenham’s town centre, Nigel Adams, the Tory candidate, witnessed ‘the incredible impact’. Boris, realised the Yorkshireman expelled from a grammar school, was a man without doubts. ‘He wanted to win.’ Boris returned the compliment: ‘I like you and if the ball comes out of the scrum in the near future, I’d like you to help me.’
Cameron felt rather differently. While he did the hard work, Cameron complained, Boris was unreliable, untrustworthy, crass, bumbling, ‘and loving twisting the knife’.1 His wrath rose after Boris wrote an article describing all the Old Etonian prime ministers. ‘The next PM will be Miliband if you don’t fucking shut up,’ he texted Boris. Face to face with Miliband on BBC TV, Boris failed to land a punch with a critical one-liner to explain the difference between capitalism and Miliband’s socialism. To prevent any embarrassment, Boris was kept away from the manifesto launch – ‘A brighter, more secure future’ – but to display their unity on the campaign’s twenty-fifth day, he appeared for the media with Cameron in a south London nursery making a jigsaw. ‘A jigsaw crisis,’ cried Boris, unable to finish the puzzle quickly. Afterwards they agreed that the election’s outcome was uncertain even though the Lib Dems were struggling. Boris willed the coalition to collapse. ‘Is the Clegger heading for the oubliette of history?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know. I have the feelings of ordinary compassion just as I might feel a twinge if I accidentally trod on a wasp or a slug … There is a terrible pop if you do it in bare feet.’ The Lib Dem vote, Boris feared, would switch to Miliband. If Cameron lost, all bets were off. The leadership would be contested but Boris was not attracted to serve as leader of the opposition for five years and any way he would still be mayor for another year. Hiding from that possibility became impossible once Cameron revealed that he would not run for a third term. Boris had no choice but to admit on Sky TV his aspiration to be the leader.2 Among his first calls was to Lynton Crosby. Without Crosby, he could not mount a campaign. Then he contacted Rupert Murdoch. They agreed to meet for dinner.
Rapidly, Boris reconsidered his philosophy. His ‘inequality is good’ theory outlined in his 2013 Margaret Thatcher Lecture had been unpopular. He needed to reposition himself as a One Nation Tory – providing opportunity for everyone, a welfare net for those in need, full employment and fair taxation – rather than as a defender of the rich. In a series of articles, he somersaulted and damned the gap in earnings between those at the top and their staff under them as ‘outrageous’. Top executives, earning ‘eye-watering’ salaries 130 times more than their employees’ average wage, offended his new ‘moral purpose’. Chief executives, he wrote, were engaged in a ‘racket’ and ‘an orgy of mutual back-scratching’ while the poor he had met during his seven years as mayor could not survive on the minimum wage. ‘We’ve got to look after those people who can’t help themselves,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind people in club class quaffing champagne provided that the people at the back of the plane don’t feel their standards are falling behind. That’s what worries me.’3 Life expectancy, he knew, dropped by a year with every Tube stop from prosperous Westminster to impoverished Canning Town. ‘We cannot just shrug at the wealth gap,’ he wrote, and would campaign in favour of the living wage.4
The opinion polls on the eve of election day predicted a hung parliament. Some even forecast a small Labour majority. The exit polls proved the pundits wrong. Sipping Red Bull, Boris and Marina watched the final votes for Uxbridge and South Ruislip counted at Brunel University in the early hours of 8 May. It was their wedding anniversary and Marina looked noticeably unemotional as Boris hailed his 10,695 majority in his victory speech. In the TV studios, George Osborne was credited with orchestrating the victory, thereby improving his prospects as Cameron’s successor.
Despite being elected with the first outright Tory majority since 1992, Cameron’s weaknesses were immediately debated. Criticised for complacency and failing to make people feel good, insiders complained, ‘Nobody came out of Dave’s office feeling better than when they went in.’ Fingers were pointed at the unpleasant group of public school snobs in Downing Street who had distanced Cameron from the party faithful. Together, they failed to advance a compelling Conservative vision of society. Cameron was personally blamed for breaking his promise to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands. Instead, net immigration in 2015/16 was 323,000 people. His good fortune, after Ed Miliband resigned, was Labour’s selection as leader of Jeremy Corbyn, a 66-year-old anti-Semitic Marxist.fn1
Most greeted Boris’s return to Westminster as a celebrity outsider discredited for not being a team player. He did not find many new admirers within the parliamentary party. The resentment towards him was noticeable. Among those who spoke disparagingly in the Commons tea room were Philip Hammond, Nick Boles and Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill. Despite Boris’s achievements as mayor, these critics spoke only about his flaws – and his worst it seemed was to be one of life’s winners. Everything seemed to come too easily. Whatever the bounder wanted, he secured. He wanted a platform at the Telegraph and got it. He wanted to be editor of the Spectator and, despite a dishonest undertaking to Conrad Black that he wasn’t going to pursue a political career, he was appointed. He then got the Henley seat, said he could do both jobs and he did. Not content with two jobs he also had two women, and more. He not only attracted women but could even shrug off adultery. He wanted to be mayor of London and, despite the odds, he was elected. Then he wanted to return to the Commons and he was handed Uxbridge. Now, they assumed, he aimed for Downing Street, and with his popularity he was in danger of succeeding. Boris was charmed.
The envy among some MPs was not shared by those who resumed their meetings in Boris’s Islington home. ‘My amigos,’ as Boris called them, were led by Jake Berry and Ben Wallace. Over takeaway curries bought by his City Hall PR adviser Will Walden, Boris gathered his core team: Eddie Lister, plus three more MPs – Nigel Adams, Amanda Milling (to attract women MPs) and Nigel Powers. To identify other potential supporters, Boris met his long-standing City Hall political secretary Ben Gascoigne on Wednesdays to agree the Islington dinner invitation list. Every week, three MPs, usually liberal metropolitans, asked the same question: ‘What’s this all about?’ ‘We’re not plotting Cameron’s downfall,’ replied Boris, careful never to criticise the prime minister. ‘Just discussing what will happen before 2020.’ Boris listened to a thirty-minute discussion and then spelled out his views – optimism in the age of austerity, the living wage and One Nation compassionate Conservatism. Occasionally Marina entered to say ‘Hello’. Although Brexit was never discussed, Nigel Adams, a Brexiteer, was convinced that Boris would side with out.
For Berry and Wallace, what they called the ‘Granita moment’, confirming Boris as the right person to lead the party, dawned during a three-day summer break with Marina in Rhoscolyn, a small village by the sea in Anglesey. Staying in Wallace’s house, Boris listened to his host’s anger –‘I’m really pissed off that I haven’t been promoted’ – planned a second reception at Mark’s Club, and discussed his leadership campaign. In between, they played cricket on the beach. On his first ball, Berry’s seven-year-old nephew bowled Boris out. ‘No,’ shouted Boris. ‘I wasn’t ready.’ Boris also tried to water ski in a creek. ‘Will you teach me?’ Boris asked Berry although he had water-skied as a teenager in Greece. Now, despite repeated determined attempts to get up, he was too heavy and fell. Rather than letting go of the rope, he was dragged through the water. Sightseers came by boat to gaze at the star floating in the water.
To seal their relationship, the two MPs were invited to play in the annual Johnsons versus Spencers cricket match on 12 July. The Conservative MP Nigel Adams, who was a keen cricketer and had scored a century at Lord’s, also played. He, along with Amanda Milling, Berry and Wallace, were the self-named ‘awesome foursome’ who began laying the foundations for Boris’s leadership bid.
To other MPs, Boris remained a distant figure. Having rejected the offer of a Cabinet post as incompatible with remaining mayor, he participated only in the regular meetings of the political Cabinet, sitting amiably but isolated at the end of the table. Cameron was friendly, while others like Oliver Letwin were suspicious. Letwin, the Dorset MP responsible for the Cabinet Office, had been irritated in 2011 by Boris’s public distortion of his opposition to the idea of the Estuary airport. Letwin had argued that it was financially unsustainable because only holidaymakers and not businessmen would use it. Boris refused to apologise to Letwin. Now he sat in the Cabinet Room making no contribution. Boris, Letwin assumed, was calculating how his leadership hopes would be influenced by the referendum. After all, in 2001 Boris was the pro-EU politician who rebuffed Letwin’s Euroscepticism. Self-interest, Letwin assumed, would guide Boris’s ultimate position about the EU.
The Tory manifesto had promised that Cameron would renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership followed by an in-out referendum before the end of 2017. One month after the election, the hard-line Eurosceptics became disenchanted by Cameron’s weak demands to the EU leaders. ‘You need to be bold,’ urged Boris. ‘You have to show them that you are serious. Be prepared to walk away if the EU rejects your terms.’5 Cameron’s refusal to please the Eurosceptics coincided with George Osborne cutting tax credits to reduce the welfare budget by £4.4 billion. To Osborne’s surprise, some Tory MPs voted against the government. Boris was among the rebels. The reason, he said, was to protect low earners but others assumed he was delighted to damage Osborne’s leadership chances. Defeated in the Lords, Osborne retreated. Tarred as a politician who lacked empathy for the disadvantaged, Osborne’s misfortune enlivened the atmosphere at Jake Berry’s ‘End of Term Christmas Party’ at Mark’s Club in early November 2015. One hundred MPs, the entire 2015 new intake, were invited to meet Boris. Since most did not know him personally and also had no grounds for envy, Boris felt he was among potential friends who would not try to pull him down.
Three weeks later, at a Brussels summit, Cameron’s tepid proposals to the EU leaders, including a short-term ban on benefits for newly arrived EU migrants in Britain, were rejected. Cameron’s original list of fundamental reforms had disappeared. Without securing any concessions, Cameron nevertheless accelerated the referendum to 2016.6 ‘There is much, much more that needs to be done,’ said Boris, exasperated by Cameron’s idleness.7 The latest madness of the EU, Boris added, was a new regulation to ban the recycling of teabags.
His frustration was expressed to Peter Ricketts, the British ambassador in Paris. Boris was visiting the French capital to lay a wreath to remember the victims who died at the Bataclan concert hall in November. Boris spoke in French about the tragedy of the 129 murdered by Muslim extremists across Paris that night. On the drive back to the airport, they discussed Brexit. ‘I can see both sides,’ said Boris. ‘Honestly Peter, I’m torn.’ He expressed the same dilemma at Liam Fox’s New Year’s Eve party in the Carlton Club. For thirty minutes he stood in a corner with Osborne discussing the possibility of a second referendum, favoured by the Leavers in case they lost the first referendum. ‘I would vote to stay in the single market,’ Boris had said. ‘I’m in favour of the single market.’ Like Letwin, Osborne judged that Boris was waiting for his opportunity to realise his dream: addressing the nation as prime minister.