Seventy days after his appointment as prime minister, on 2 October, the leader’s reception at the party’s annual conference in Manchester was to be Boris’s coronation, with a pledge of ideological renewal and a declaration of war against his opponents. As he walked into the packed hall to the music of The Who, the excited, mostly young audience greeted the star. Their roars of applause as he made his way towards the stage was genuine. He was their saviour.
Just below the lectern Stanley Johnson sat beside Carrie Symonds. Both had waved as they took their seats. The televised pictures of their friendly conversation reignited the division between Stanley and Boris’s children. As usual, Stanley was eager for the spotlight. At a fringe meeting the previous night, Boris had spotted Stanley in the audience and invited him onto the stage. The glances between father and son bore a familiar message which no one in the room understood. Noticeably, in his speech to conference the following day, Boris included a reference to his mother whom he had visited before travelling to Manchester. ‘My mother taught me the equal importance of dignity and worth,’ he said. Only the Johnson family understood that sentence.
‘We are the party of capitalism,’ Boris told his admirers. The applause was genuine. War, he said, had been declared against Corbyn’s ‘fratricidal anti-Semitic Marxists’ and against the Remainers in the Commons. Britain, he pledged, would be out of the EU by 31 October, just over four weeks later. The spontaneous ovation suggested that the party was united. Boris took strength from Dominic Cummings’ conviction: ‘Nothing will stand in the way of Brexit.’
Walking out of the hall holding Carrie’s hand, Boris’s face shone with satisfaction and resilience. In the tumultuous days since he had been appointed prime minister, ‘Borisism’ or ‘Johnsonism’ had been born. Contrary to the critics’ warnings, there was no evidence so far of racism, no outright lies, and no hard-right populism. But new criticisms had arisen among the Tory Remain MPs. He had won power but could he govern? they asked. In his rush to Brexit, they murmured, he was sacrificing the party’s soul and its reputation for ‘balance and moderation, all integral to Toryism’. Naturally, he shunned the sceptics. So far, relying on Dominic Cummings had paid off. Now he was ready to take another enormous gamble, entrusting his fate to Cummings’ scorched-earth strategy.
As a professional disrupter, Cummings’ instinct was to provoke a political and constitutional crisis. In the same manner as his hero Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Chancellor who plotted to unite Germany’s thirty-nine states under the Kaiser by waging successive wars against Denmark, Austria and France, Cummings planned a sequence of anarchic events over the next few months, climaxing in Boris’s return to Downing Street after an election with a parliamentary majority. Success relied on repeated attrition – provoking confrontations and overcoming his enemies.
The timetable was precise. First, the Opposition would be ensnared to vote for a general election on 17 October. In parallel, Boris would orchestrate a disorderly Brexit and run down the clock to the deadline of Britain leaving the EU on 31 October; then, to outwit their opponents in the election, the Tories would campaign under the banner ‘People versus Parliament’ and ‘Get Brexit Done’; and finally, while the opposition struggled to make a convincing argument, Britain would threaten the EU that Britain would crash out without a deal. Success, said Cummings, depended on bulldozing all the resistors. His strategy espoused the ‘swerve’ methodology – Boris would drive the car as fast as possible towards his opponent and, just as he was spotted, he would throw the steering wheel out of the window. Ideally, Cummings and Boris hoped, alarmed Remainer MPs would support the government and the EU would abandon the backstop, agreeing to a reasonable trade deal. If not, they would be crushed.
The opening shots from Cummings had been fired in early August, soon after Boris entered Downing Street. Private focus groups suggested that Corbyn’s leadership had weakened Labour’s vote in the Midlands and the north where the majority had voted Leave. Polling also indicated that delivering Brexit would tip the balance towards the Tories. Targeting the Labour heartlands, the government pledged an additional £20 billion funding for the NHS. That enormous sum undermined Labour’s traditional anti-Tory battle cry that only they could protect the NHS.1 The same polls convinced Cummings that the ‘out-of-touch London elite’ had misunderstood the nation’s mood in 2016. Three years later, the Remainers had still not reflected on their mistakes to understand the working class. Instead, Cummings scoffed, they ‘just doubled down on their own ideas and fucked it up even more’. He looked forward to defeating them again. The self-publicist enjoyed the fear and loathing he generated, especially among the hard-core Tory Remainer MPs.
Led by Philip Hammond, Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve, roughly twenty-five Tory Remainer MPs were alarmed by Cummings’ countdown to a no-deal Brexit. On 4 August, the day after Boris handed out the £20 billion, the Tory Remainers threatened to bring down the government if Boris sought to crash out of the EU without a deal. To prove the irresponsibility of no-deal, a former Cabinet minister gave the Sunday Times a copy of ‘Operation Yellowhammer’, Downing Street’s blueprint for Britain’s survival after Dover and other Channel ports were blocked, medicines became unobtainable and food was rationed. In that moment of truth, Boris believed that the only way to save his divided party from destruction was to remove the Remainers from the Commons and unite around Brexit. That would expose Labour as divided – Brexiteers versus those pursuing a second referendum. He would not resign, he pledged, even if he lost a vote of no confidence.
As a first step, Boris dropped his original self-confident prediction of ‘a million to one chance’ of a no-deal Brexit. His new vow was ‘a high chance’ of getting a deal. Privately, he admitted to be unafraid of crashing out. His gung-ho attitude alarmed Geoffrey Cox, the rumbustious Attorney General. Thinking the EU would abandon the backstop, he warned Boris, was a ‘complete fantasy’.2 Marking Cox down as another non-believer, Boris preferred Bill Cash’s advice. ‘The EU,’ Cash told him, ‘are not our partners and allies. They are doing everything to make sure we don’t succeed.’ Boris, he was sure, ‘could pull off victory because he has Churchill’s frame of mind’.
David Frost, Boris’s chosen Brexit negotiator, was dispatched to Brussels. His offer was uncompromising. The backstop would have to be abandoned or Britain would leave without a deal. That, Boris believed, would frighten the Irish government. Next, Boris flew to Berlin and Paris with the same message. Merkel and Macron needed to understand that despite his tiny majority, the rebel MPs could not stop a no-deal Brexit. To win time, Merkel gave Boris thirty days to resolve the backstop. On his return to London, Boris gave mixed messages. To prevent the Commons extending Article 50, he gave the impression to some that there would be a deal. Others knew there were no proposals to put to the EU. Frost’s negotiations, as Cummings admitted, were a ‘sham’ just to run down the clock.3 Boris was solely focused on manoeuvring towards an election.
At least, Boris reasoned, the Cabinet would be loyal. All his ministers had joined understanding that Britain would threaten the EU to leave without a deal at the end of October. The problem was Parliament – paralysed but potent. That August, Cummings’ contempt for politicians rubbed off on Boris. In September, he raged, MPs would return to Westminster to earn their ‘crust’ by going through a ‘rigmarole’ to sabotage the referendum that had been won three years earlier. The Tory Remainers wanted a second referendum while Labour MPs just wanted to block the government’s negotiations. To extend Article 50 and prevent Brexit on 31 October, Remain MPs from both sides were co-operating under Hilary Benn, the Labour MP, and John Bercow, the Speaker, to introduce a short bill, eventually called the Benn Act, to make crashing out of the EU without a deal unlawful.
To prove his macho, Cummings concocted an audacious plan to stifle the Remainers. Usually in the autumn, Parliament was closed or ‘prorogued’ for one week and suspended by agreement for three weeks during the party conferences. Cummings’ plan was to formally close Parliament for five weeks to give Boris unfettered power to threaten Brussels with no-deal. Prorogation, suggested Cummings, would trample on the Tory Remain MPs, a shambolic rabble, he believed, without a sense of mission.
That was a critical moment for Boris. During the leadership campaign, he had said about prorogation ‘I’m not attracted to the idea.’ Now, he had to gamble whether his opponents would eventually capitulate or whether Letwin and Grieve, both loyal parliamentarians, could unite the Remainers and spawn the spirit of counter-revolution. Relying on Cummings, he was reassured they lacked the courage. Asked in a memo on 15 August by Nikki de Costa, Downing Street’s director of legislative affairs, whether he approved the prorogation, Boris scribbled ‘Yes’ in the margin. Months of plotting ended. Soon after, a civil servant leaked the plan to a newspaper. The secrecy of the plot was lost. ‘Cummings,’ Letwin later reflected, ’didn’t understand the texture of parliamentary politics.’
On 27 August, Jacob Rees-Mogg flew to Balmoral for the Queen to sign the prorogation. In effect, just six days of Parliament were cut. But as a formal prorogation, it was the longest for forty years. Due to return to Westminster on 3 September and with the prorogation to start on Monday the 9th, MPs would not return to Westminster until 14 October. Westminster became convulsed by a constitutional crisis. Remain MPs were left with just four days to extend Article 50. An application was filed at the High Court to declare the prorogation unlawful. The melodrama erupted just as Cummings’ true character was exposed.
Boris’s acquiescence to Cummings’ ‘terrorist demands’ of total control over Downing Street’s administrative machine just before his appointment as prime minister had caused immediate friction. From the outset, Cummings insisted that he approve every minister’s special assistant. Not only would he vet their abilities but also their loyalty to himself. At the regular Friday 5 p.m. meetings for special advisers, he assessed whether the person was malleable to his demands or more loyal to the ministers. He also tested the loyalty of those City Hall imports close to Boris. By definition, that group including Munira Mirza, Eddie Lister and Ben Gasgoine was classed as potentially dangerous. Cummings would seek to limit their access to Boris, although they were the prime minister’s most trusted advisers. For the moment he could do little about Mark Sedwill, the Cabinet Secretary appointed by Theresa May. Although Sedwill’s preoccupation with security and intelligence made him unsuitable to reform the NHS and the Whitehall machine, his tactful diplomacy neutralised Cummings’ hostility. Cleverly, Sedwill had approved the prorogation and summoned government lawyers to bless the ruse’s legality. But in the initial tussle for influence with Sedwill, Cummings sought to control which submissions drafted by civil servants would be read by the prime minister. Assuming that he was smarter than others, Cummings decided that the permanent secretaries running the machinery of government were best sidelined. Although his interest in and understanding of the machinery of government was growing, Boris agreed to Cummings’ rules. He even approved Cummings’ control of politicians’ access to Boris. Without realising the self-imposed limitations, his advantage as London’s mayor of meeting and listening to people was being curtailed.
Demanding total obedience from subordinates was natural for Cummings. By cultivating fear of himself, no one in Downing Street either wanted to annoy him or could be certain what he wanted – except that he would not tolerate any disloyalty. The leak of Nikki da Costa’s memo proved the unreliability of some Downing Street officials. His suspicion also fell on Sonia Khan, a twenty-seven-year-old Treasury special adviser to Sajid Javid. Khan, he believed, was in secret contact with Philip Hammond, her former boss. Without informing Javid, Cummings summoned Khan and demanded to see her mobile phone. Despite Khan’s denials of any disloyalty, Cummings asked a police officer to march her off the premises. ‘If you don’t like how I run things,’ he told the remaining special advisers, ‘there’s the door. Fuck off.’ They stayed, as did Javid. The Chancellor fumed about his humiliation and privately accused Cummings of inventing the issue to damage his credibility. Female special advisers whispered that Cummings had a problem with women.
The shock about Cummings’ authoritarianism blended with accusations that the prorogation was the first step towards a dictatorship. Hysterically, Labour MPs called for Parliament to be ‘occupied’ and workers to hold a general strike. Predictably, Boris had not anticipated how he would convincingly explain prorogation. Throughout his life, excuses for his misconduct had been thin and it was no different in the constitutional crisis. Downing Street’s explanation – that the exceptional measure was taken to ‘prepare legislation’ for the next session – was ridiculed. ‘The government,’ said Letwin, ‘could not give the real reason that prorogation was to prevent the Benn Act and Geoffrey Cox [the Attorney General] refused to lie.’ Even Peter Lilley, a Brexiteer, was puzzled: ‘I could not understand the purpose. It was so devilishly clever that no one could see that it would not work.’ Labour’s protests were predictable but those from the right were equally outraged. Tory rebels threatened to forge a breakaway coalition with Labour to bring down the government and veto an early election. ‘Boris saw that his legs were cut off,’ said a critical Downing Street eyewitness. ‘His gamble was certain to fail.’ Boris thought the opposite.
On Sunday 1 September, he summoned a council of war at Chequers. Over lunch with Cummings and Mark Spencer, the chief whip, he considered his tactics for the votes leading towards an early election. Going through the list of likely rebels, they came to Nicholas Soames. Churchill’s grandson, Boris had been told, had announced at a grouse shoot hosted by Wafic Said, a Syrian financier and philanthropist, that he would never vote against the government or against Boris. Although a great dinner companion, Soames had also predicted that Boris would ‘bugger it up’. His bullying manner made him unreliable in the jungle. Next, Dominic Grieve – the barrister, they agreed, was no longer a Tory. Next, Philip Hammond – an outright enemy. Next, Oliver Letwin, a dangerous opponent. Then, Rory Stewart, aka ‘Florence of Arabia’, whose colourful accounts of his service in Iraq and Afghanistan were disputed by eyewitnesses. Certainly a rebel. Finally, Amber Rudd, more fickle than others and determined to undermine Boris. All in all, they concluded, there would be at least fifteen rebels – fighting blue on blue to assert their moral superiority. Spencer, they agreed, would deliver the individual warnings that night: any MP who failed to support the government and the manifesto commitment to implement the referendum would be expelled from the parliamentary party. Deselection as an MP would automatically follow. The die was set for a momentous struggle. The hiatus, Boris agreed, was necessary for the revolution.
The ultimatum was repeated the following evening during a drinks party in Downing Street’s garden. The only non-combatant running among the MPs was Dilyn, Boris’s new Jack Russell dog. That same evening, Boris repeated his intimidation on TV: ‘I want everyone to know there are no circumstances in which I will ask Brussels to delay. We are leaving on 31 October, no ifs, no buts.’ If defeated in the Commons, he said, there would be an election on 14 October. No other prime minister in the past century had risked his job so early in his administration.
The following morning, fifteen Remainers led by Hammond arrived in Downing Street. All were appalled that Boris’s assurance of a ‘million to one’ chance of no-deal had been reduced to ‘touch and go’ to conclude a deal. As they waited to enter the Cabinet Room, Cummings appeared. ‘I don’t know who any of you are,’ he said provocatively to the senior MPs. Admitted to the room they knew so well, the discussion quickly became a bad-tempered exchange. Boris urged them to support no-deal as a way to get a deal. In a brash tone, Hammond derided the strategy. Your way, he told Boris, is a ‘fantasy’. Your way, countered Boris, will hand power to ‘a junta that includes Corbyn’. Hammond dismissed the fear. He threatened to mobilise the Commons to defeat the government. Readopted by his constituency the night before, Hammond promised ‘the fight of a lifetime’ if he was expelled from the party after forty-five years’ membership. Dominic Grieve was similarly trenchant. If Boris persisted, threatened the former law officer, he would support Corbyn to bring down the government.4
Seventy-five minutes later, they departed, furious that Boris was clearly not negotiating a new deal and refused to compromise. Later that day, Greg Clark, the erudite former Business Secretary and a potential Tory rebel, called Cummings to discuss a truce. His ears were burst by Cummings’ rant: ‘When are you fucking MPs going to realise, we are leaving on 31 October? We are going to purge you.’ The common hatred for Cummings, especially his disdain for the Tory Party and Parliament, and the threat of deselection bound the rebels together with a kamikaze spirit.
Unexpectedly, Boris invited Letwin for a chat. ‘Despite all the trouble I had caused,’ recalled Letwin, ‘Boris was so charming.’ His message, however, was defiant. ‘He would take it to the wire and see if Labour blinked,’ Letwin was told. ‘He was indifferent to the risk. He was not worried by crashing out of the EU. There could be no compromise and we parted.’
The Commons was packed the following morning for the debate. As Boris spoke, his first statement as prime minister, Phillip Lee, the Tory MP for Bracknell, walked across the floor and sat with the Liberals. Baited by Corbyn that his government’s majority had literally disappeared, Boris raised his battle cry: ‘Come what may, do or die.’ In that afternoon’s first vote, the government was defeated by twenty-seven. MPs took control of the parliamentary timetable, a resounding victory for the Remainers and the Labour Party. Twenty-one Tories voted against the government and in favour of what Boris called ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s Surrender Bill’. The following day, the Benn Bill would inevitably pass into law making it illegal for Britain to leave the EU without a deal on 31 October. ‘It means running up the white flag,’ Boris shouted. The vote to approve a snap election was also defeated.
Instantly, twenty-one Tories including Hammond, Soames and Ken Clarke, the Father of the House, were expelled from the party. The uproar, far greater than Boris had anticipated, was deafening. Reacting to the expulsions, John Major accused Boris of ‘aggressive bullying’ and turning the party into a ‘mean-minded sect’ while the country was ‘torn apart by the divisions of Brexit’. The purge, said Alistair Burt, a Tory MP since 1983 who had also lost the whip, ‘risks destroying the Tory Party and [is] a policy of insanity’.5 Others screeched it was a right-wing populist coup. Boris replied that they had been warned of the consequences of plotting to defeat the government and should nobly accept the price.
Oliver Letwin, one of the expelled MPs, considered the position thoughtfully. While Boris had misjudged the parliamentary strength against a crash-out, Letwin wondered whether the rebels were underestimating the public’s support for Boris. The Remainers believed they spoke for the majority, but north of Hampstead, many people were unimpressed by the MPs’ antics. After three years of May’s inertia, they wanted an effective government. The polls showed a surge in support for the Tories, up from 25 per cent to 35 per cent. Presenting the Benn Bill as the Surrender Bill and shaping up the next general election as People versus Parliament was, Letwin realised, seductive. At the same time, he reassessed Boris, whom he had first met as a pro-European in 2001. To his surprise, Boris had morphed into a genuine Brexiteer. His single-mindedness could not be underestimated. Mentally and physically, when Boris saw a brick wall, he either climbed over it or knocked it down. Characterising him as a lazy, love-me, unfocused man was redundant. The battle to prevent Boris taking Britain out of the EU would be ferocious. Even Letwin’s alternatives – a deal or a second referendum – were unacceptable to Boris. Accordingly, Letwin and his fellow rebels pledged, the government would be surprised by their unity and their parliamentary skills. Cummings, ‘an unelected foul-mouthed oaf throwing his weight around’, would get his comeuppance.6
The next morning, 4 September, Boris woke up knowing that the day would be worse than the previous one. The headlines reported his defeat and humiliation. The rebels were promising a bitter battle for the soul of the Tory Party. ‘Something mad has taken root in our party,’ wrote Matthew Parris, predicting the party’s death. ‘We are closer to the edge than we may think.’7 Nicholas Soames agreed about the poison: ‘Boris Johnson’s experience in life is telling a lot of porkies about the EU and then becoming prime minister.’ Joining the backlash, Damian Green accused Boris of being ‘monstrously unfair’. Rees-Mogg had rebelled dozens of times and escaped any sanction, he said, while the twenty-one had rebelled at most twice. The airwaves were filled with accusations that Boris had destroyed the centrist Tory Party by embracing right-wing fanaticism. By lunchtime, the twenty-one discovered that the ground was cut beneath them. Hammond was among the first to lose the support of his local association. He was deselected as a Tory candidate. Party members regarded Boris as the only person capable of preventing a Corbyn government. Well-prepared party officials were already listing pro-Brexit candidates to take the rebels’ places for an inevitable election.
In the Commons that morning, Boris faced unprecedented embarrassment. He was a minority prime minister who had lost control of Parliament. With the help of the Tory rebels, the Benn Bill was passed forcing him to delay Brexit – or break the law. Defiantly, he shunned Corbyn’s carping. Calling him ‘frit’ and a ‘chlorinated chicken’ for supporting the ‘Surrender Bill’, he taunted Corbyn, ‘Call an election you great big girl’s blouse.’ Labour’s MPs festered, particularly the women.
Tory MPs were equally annoyed during Boris’s appearance later that day at the 1922 Committee meeting of backbenchers. ‘It’s not for me to interfere with what the whips decide,’ he said, feigning innocence about the expulsions. To further provoke his critics, he compared himself to the statesman and military leader Octavius, known as Augustus after he became Rome’s first emperor. Augustus was renowned for slaughtering his opponents, gouging out their eyes with his thumb and inspecting their severed heads. He claimed that only by destroying the Roman republic could Rome be saved. And indeed, his reign introduced 200 peaceful years known as the Pax Romana. Boris explained that only by expelling the old Tories could a new One Nation Tory Party be created. Aligning his personal ambition with Britain’s best interests, he, like the emperor, would slaughter his foes and lead the country into a new era.
Exhausted at the end of the day in the Downing Street flat, he answered his mobile. Jo Johnson, his youngest brother, was calling. Jo’s return to the government as universities minister had always been fraught. As a Remainer, he had reluctantly accepted the referendum but after that week’s rebellion could no longer tolerate a no-deal Brexit. Boris’s ‘force of personality’, he would later say, ‘papered over the absence of any deliverable plan’. Brexit had been about taking back control but had become ‘incoherent’.8 Jo told his brother he was resigning from the government. ‘In recent weeks,’ he would tell the public the following morning, ‘I’ve been torn between family loyalty and the national interest. It’s an unresolvable tension.’ The torn allegiance was not just to Boris but to his wife, Amelia Gentleman, a Guardian journalist. She had joined the Labour Party in protest about the Tory government’s treatment of the Jamaicans brought to Britain on the Windrush. Jo’s resignation confirmed the reality of the Johnsons’ splintering. The magic which united the family at Chevening just two years earlier had vanished. In vocal opposition to Boris, Rachel had joined pro-EU groups, while Leo, employed by PriceWaterhouseCooper, remained out of sight. Only Charlotte, his mother, was sincerely loyal. In solidarity, she had voted Leave.
Nine years earlier, Boris had said after David and Ed Miliband turned against each other for the Labour Party’s leadership that a similar spilt was ‘absolutely’ inconceivable among Tory siblings: ‘We don’t do things in that way. That’s a very left-wing thing. Only a socialist could do that to his brother, only a socialist could regard familial ties as being so trivial as to shaft his own brother.’ Days after Jo’s resignation, the two brothers met at Charlotte’s flat for two hours in the afternoon. ‘Boris felt let down by Jo quitting,’ recalled Charlotte. ‘And Jo felt sensitive about that. We spoke about the family and the problems.’ Two days later, Boris stayed away from the celebration of Leo’s birthday at Rachel’s house. Jo and his wife Amelia were there.
The pressure was mounting. 4 September had been a bad day. The next day was torrid.
Boris headed for Wakefield in West Yorkshire to launch the election campaign at a police college. By the time he arrived, he was besieged from all sides. Ruth Davidson had resigned as the Scottish leader, endangering Tory seats in the country. John Major had called for Cummings, an ‘aggressive bully’, to be sacked. The referendum, Major believed, should be ignored and Britain remain in the EU. More Tory MPs had announced they would leave Parliament. Boris faced the possibility that after more defeats in Parliament, he would be forced to resign. The Queen would be bound to ask Corbyn to form a coalition government.
Clearly distracted and late, he walked to the lectern placed in front of police cadets. On a hot day, marshalled close behind him, the cadets were sweltering by the time he started to speak. Unable for once to suppress the emotional turmoil pounding in his head, he rambled about Corbyn’s refusal to agree to an election. His focus returned after mentioning another spending spree to wrong-foot Labour. ‘I’d rather be dead in a ditch,’ he pledged, than ask the EU to delay Brexit beyond 31 October. His resolve relied on Cummings. ‘We are not going to panic,’ said the man accused of destroying Boris’s premiership just as it began. ‘We’re not going to extend [Brexit] and we’re not going to resign.’ With that defiance, Boris denied lying to the Queen about the reason for prorogation and flew with Carrie north to meet the monarch in Balmoral. In his absence from Westminster, Amber Rudd resigned on 7 September. The deselection of the twenty-one, she said, was ‘an assault on decency and democracy’. She also objected to Boris’s aggressive language. Hold your nerve, Cummings urged Boris. Everything was going to plan. The Tories had nudged higher in the opinion polls. In public, Boris seemed unflustered. ‘We’ll get out by October 31, believe me,’ he told inquirers. ‘We’ll break free of the manacles of the EU like the Incredible Hulk. The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.’9
To Remainers, Boris’s defiance was puzzling. He agreed to abide by the law but still pledged he could ignore the law ordering him to delay departure. Even more puzzling was how he survived over the next days’ succession of embarrassments.
During a visit to Luxembourg, he was deliberately humiliated by Xavier Bettel, the prime minister. Boris had declined to attend an outdoor press conference surrounded by anti-Brexit protesters, but Bettel went ahead anyway, standing next to Boris’s empty podium. Next, Boris visited Whipps Cross Hospital. He was ambushed by a Labour supporter in front of a TV camera who complained of ‘neglect’ because of a shortage of doctors. In fact, his child recovered and left the hospital the following day. Three days later, the Sunday Times exposed his affair with Jennifer Arcuri. He was accused of abusing his political power and misusing public funds to channel City Hall money to his former girlfriend. Finally, an appeal to the High Court against the government’s prorogation had reached the Supreme Court. Accused of acting unlawfully, the government’s lawyers were floundering despite favourable judgements in the High Court and Appeal Court.
Both English courts had declared that prorogation was a political decision. Citing the Bill of Rights of 1689, the judges ruled that British courts were forbidden to question proceedings in Parliament. There was no judicial power, said the two courts, to overrule the Queen and declare that the prime minister had abused his power.
Conversely, Scotland’s highest court had ruled that the prorogation was ‘unlawful’ and motivated by an ‘improper purpose’ to stymie Parliament. Boris, the Scottish judges declared, had not told the Queen the truth. Pertinently, the government had weakened its case by refusing to present a sworn statement explaining why prorogation was necessary, an omission ripe for exploitation by any judge prejudiced against the government.
Brenda Hale, the seventy-four-year-old president of the Supreme Court, was renowned as a feminist campaigner who had rarely concealed her contempt for Boris. Wearing a large spider brooch in the wood-panelled courtroom, she would later star in Spider-Woman Takes Down Hulk, a left-wing-funded book. ‘Let’s hear it for the girly swots,’ she would tell a young female audience.10 As a family lawyer and administrator without any specialist knowledge of constitutional law, Hale would not allow the previous two judgements of English judges to interfere with her determination to slap down the government. Her hostility was encouraged by John Major. In a statement to the court, Major compared Boris to ‘a dishonest estate agent’. Prorogation, he said, was intended to prevent Parliament holding the government to account.
Although Boris had been assured by Geoffrey Cox that the government would win a majority of the eleven Supreme Court judges, the omens were not good when he flew on 23 September to New York to address the UN and meet EU leaders. At 5 a.m. the following morning, after just two hours’ sleep, he got up in Manhattan to watch Hale’s hostile ruling. Although Parliament was closed down for just one extra week, she described the prorogation as ‘an extreme effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy’. To support her decision, she introduced a revolutionary principle into British law: that prorogation had interrupted MPs’ ‘legal’ power to hold the government to account. Naturally, she did not mention that Parliament had just held the government to account in two major defeats – the Benn Act and the vote to prevent a general election. The government lost by eleven judges to zero. Not a single judge agreed with the previous four English judges. Declaring the prorogation ‘unlawful’ made Hale a hero among Remainers and Boris’s enemies. The bias was obvious but Boris obeyed Cox’s orders not to criticise the judges.
Before flying back to London, he met Donald Trump in Manhattan. The president had promised a fast trade deal in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Now, with Boris sitting next to him, Trump predicted that British trade with America would quadruple after Brexit. His hyperbolic assurances, Trump noticed, were far from Boris’s mind. Referring to that morning’s defeat, Trump told the TV cameras, ‘He’s professional. It’s just another day in the office.’ Defeats by the US Supreme Court, smiled Trump, were par for the course. In the end, he had beaten the court and so would Boris. With that in mind, Boris flew back to London. Over the Atlantic, he telephoned the Queen to apologise for causing embarrassment. He also heard that MPs had stormed back into the Commons. He was expected to head directly to the chamber from the airport.
Tired but with self-control, Boris entered the Commons just as Geoffrey Cox was arousing fevered anger among Labour MPs. Desperate Labour politicians, unable to solve their own frustration about divisions over the EU and about their leader, were being harangued in a rumbustious scolding. Calling them ‘a shower’ and ‘a disgrace’ for refusing to vote for an election to end a parliament which was ‘as dead as dead can be’, Cox loudly mocked the opposition. Targeting the Lib Dems who were chanting ‘Right-wing coup’, Cox shouted back, the prime minister was begging for an election. Which dictator demands an election? he scoffed.
As Boris took his seat, Opposition MPs vented their spleen. ‘Resign’, ‘Fraud’ and ‘He should be in jail’, they yelled. Up against the wall, Boris suspected that John Bercow would prolong the session – it would last an unusual three and a half hours. To rally his MPs, Boris denounced Benn’s ‘Surrender Act’ and accused Labour of ‘political cowardice’ for rejecting an election. Increasingly, several Labour women MPs became agitated. His repeated mention of ‘surrender’ and ‘betrayal’ of the electorate aroused their anger. They moved from highlighting the court’s damning judgement to attacking Boris in person. Paula Sherriff, the forty-four-year old MP for Dewsbury, rocked unsteadily as she delivered her attack. In a shrill voice, Sherriff pointed at Boris: ‘We should not resort to using offensive, dangerous or inflammatory language for legislation we do not like and we stand here under the shield of our departed friend [the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox] with many of us in this place subject to death threats and abuse every single day.’ She continued, ‘And let me tell the prime minister that they often quote his words Surrender Act, betrayal, traitor, and I for one am sick of it. We must moderate our language.’ The prime minister, she said, ‘should be absolutely ashamed’. Around her, female MPs sat in tears.
Sherriff’s emotional outburst confused several issues but there was no doubt that she had aligned her fate with Jo Cox’s. Calmly and politely, Boris replied, ‘I have to say that I have never heard such humbug in all my life.’ He accused Sherriff of ‘synthetic outrage’ and ‘confected indignation’. In referring to violence, she had forgotten that Jeremy Corbyn had invited members of the IRA to the Commons soon after the Brighton bomb killed and maimed Tories in 1984; she had forgotten, too, that John McDonnell had quoted a supporter who asked, ‘Why aren’t we lynching the bastard?’ of Esther McVey, a Tory MP, and basked in the laughter. The best way to honour Jo Cox, he said was to ‘get Brexit done’. Suddenly, the Labour benches rose up. Among the protestors were some women who had not vigorously defended Jewish female Labour MPs against constant threats of violence from members of their own party. Similarly, some of those MPs had not energetically and publicly challenged Jeremy Corbyn after thirteen Labour MPs had resigned in protest against Corbyn’s anti-Semitism. To attack the prime minister for the abuse undoubtedly suffered by Labour’s female MPs seemed unreasonable.
In the aftermath, some journalists joined in their attack, not least because four investigations had been launched into Boris’s relationship with Jennifer Arcuri. To accusations that he had broken City Hall’s financial rules, Boris replied, ‘Everything was done with full proprieties.’ In The Times, referring to the Commons uproar, Jenni Russell reported without correction that Boris had invoked the name of Jo Cox. Repeating that inaccuracy multiplied the damage to the prime minister.11
Labour’s rage did not derail the Tories’ celebrations at the party conference in Manchester one week later. Nor did it undermine the confidence of the party’s pollsters that the Tories could win a general election. Issac Levido – a thirty-six-year-old Australian protégé of Lynton Crosby employed by Boris to mastermind the election soon after he arrived in Downing Street – reported that in all three Stoke constituencies, Labour’s heartland, Labour’s pro-Brexit voters would swing to the Tories. Similar Tory gains would happen, reported Levido, in Wales and in the north. Polling by Michael Brooks, his associate, also showed that Labour voters did not care about the Supreme Court’s judgement. They liked Boris’s attack on Parliament, they remained concerned about immigration and 58 per cent of voters outrightly distrusted Corbyn.12 Those Labour voters were prepared to switch to the Tories. Against Boris was age. Those under thirty-nine, well educated and especially women, were much more likely to vote Labour. By contrast, wealth and class was no longer a barrier to securing Labour votes. Many of the poorest Britons trusted Boris rather than Corbyn. Overall, Brooks’s daily polls revealed the vulnerability of ‘safe’ Labour seats. The Tory grass roots gathering at the Manchester conference had witnessed that shift. Similarly disdainful of Corbyn and his clique of far-left MPs, they were outraged by Speaker John Bercow’s partisanship against the government. ‘If Parliament were a TV reality show,’ Boris told his admirers, ‘the whole lot of us would have been voted out of the jungle by now, but at least we would have watched the Speaker being forced to eat a kangaroo testicle.’ The audience’s laughter encouraged Boris to defy the Remainers and the EU.
Shortly before the party conference, he had met Bill Cash in Downing Street. The MP arrived with a legal analysis compiled by a team of senior lawyers to explain how to remove the backstop. ‘The government’s lawyers don’t understand this,’ Cash told Boris. ‘They can’t understand how to push back the frontiers of the state – and how to get out of the EU.’ Although Boris was tired and yawning, Cash was impressed: ‘I watched Boris’s body language. If his eyes glazed over we were lost. But he was on top of the detail. Top of the game.’ Re-energised by the opportunity to resolve the crisis and shape Britain’s destiny, he buried his critics’ familiar trope of lazy disinterest.
Encouraged by Cash, Boris set out a solution to the backstop in a forty-four-page letter to Juncker. Northern Ireland would stay in the EU’s single market but leave the customs union, and the tariffs and single-market regulations would be administered by the UK not at the border but inland. In effect, there would be a border down the North Sea – just what Boris had previously said was unacceptable.
Sent on a secret mission to Dublin, his chief of staff Eddie Lister sought Leo Varadkar’s agreement at a sensitive time for the Taoiseach. Facing an election and trailing in the polls, Varadkar was playing a delaying game. He wanted to trigger a second referendum and reverse Brexit. Publicly, he had called for a united Ireland. Not only was Lister rebuffed by Varadkar, but his approach was publicised by the Irish. Barnier also rejected the plan. Britain, he said, needed to improve its offer before the EU summit on Thursday 17 October. In anger, Boris called Merkel to ‘get the boat off the rocks’. She refused. He hit a wall. Everyone feared that the road to a deal had run out. In the game of bluff, fuelled by Cummings, Boris was publicly adamant that Britain would still leave without a deal.
That scenario provoked an argument during a Cabinet meeting. Both Geoffrey Cox and Julian Smith, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, told Boris that he must obey the Benn Act. His ‘do or die’ threat was illegal. If no-deal featured in an election manifesto they would resign. Both became marked men. The bluff, Boris was convinced, was working. Merkel and Macron, he had been told, were finally persuaded of their mistake to believe Tony Blair and other Remainers that Brexit could be stopped.
With twenty-fours to settle the deal, Berlin ordered Dublin to bypass Barnier and agree a fudge. Johnson and Varadkar met on Thursday 10 October in Thornton Manor, a Wirral country estate. ‘It was two guys in a room,’ Varadkar recalled. ‘Sometimes when you do these things without your officials present it’s easier. And it was one of those kind of strange conversations, where [Boris] said, “My staff might kill me for saying this but if I said this what would you say back?” And I would go down a similar road, you know, “If I moved on this might you move on that?” And I think we found very quickly that we had shared objectives.’ The next stage was secret, intensive negotiations in Brussels to finalise the deal. During those five intense days, Boris became the willing and unwilling star of an extraordinary political – and sexual – pantomime.
Appearing on ITV from Los Angeles, Jennifer Arcuri described how Boris had visited her Shoreditch flat about five times while he was the mayor. They ‘immediately bonded’, she said, over ‘a mutual love of classical literature and particularly Shakespeare’. While she refused to reveal whether they had an affair, she admitted ‘He was always a really good friend.’13 But she showed her anger that her reputation had been traduced. ‘I don’t understand why you’ve blocked me,’ she said, addressing Boris on TV, ‘as if I was some fleeting one-night stand or some girl you picked up at the bar because I wasn’t. I’m terribly heartbroken by the way that you have cast me aside like I’m some gremlin.’14 Boris had good reason to fear Arcuri. When she called to warn him that the media had discovered their affair, he had passed his mobile to an aide. The aide spoke to her in ‘Chinese’ and then cut the line. Angry, she was now planning a visit to London. If minded, she could seriously embarrass him. Yet he could not risk calling to beg her not to describe their affair.
As the speculation about Boris’s private life accelerated, the Queen obeyed his demand that she formally open Parliament. Burdened by ceremonial regalia from the Palace to Westminster, the ninety-three-year-old monarch was forced on 14 October to perform a political gimmick. Looking down at the Lords assembling in the chamber to await the Queen, Quentin Letts in The Times spotted that ‘Lady Hale sponged up the attention, saying coo-ee to bishops. The only surprise was that she did not plonk herself in the empty throne’. From the throne, the Queen presented the powerless government’s election manifesto of a ‘One Nation agenda’ with twenty-six bills.15 Accurately, Corbyn called the exercise by a government with a forty-five-seat minority, a ‘stunt’ and a ‘farce’.
That night, as five days of intensive negotiations between the EU and Britain were coming to a successful conclusion, Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe correspondent, pronounced ‘the chance of a deal is minimal’. In reality, Barnier had been marginalised and the backstop had gone. In the new deal, Britain would not be the EU’s ‘vassal state’ but Northern Ireland was separated from the mainland.
On 17 October, Boris arrived in Brussels to seal the deal. ‘Sell-out’, ‘Treachery’, ‘Betrayal’ shouted the ten DUP MPs when he returned to the Commons. They scoffed at his assurances that in trade across the Irish Sea there would be ‘no forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind. You will have unfettered access.’ Asked about the forms which Brussels insisted would be necessary, Boris would later say, ‘I will direct them to throw that form in the bin.’16 No one discovered whether Boris misunderstood the deal he had concluded – or was he outrightly dishonest?
Boris had returned to London to ram the deal through Parliament and get an election. For one week, the battle of wills was intense. ‘We will hammer them day after day after day,’ Boris told the Cabinet.17 Like a battering ram, said Cummings, MPs should be forced to vote every day on Brexit and an election. The Remainers were determined to block Brexit or get a second referendum. Once again, Oliver Letwin offered MPs an amendment to the latest Withdrawal Bill to prevent Britain crashing out of the EU before the whole deal had been considered by Parliament. On 22 October, the Withdrawal Bill was finally approved by 329 to 299 but the government’s timetable to legalise Brexit nine days later was defeated by a majority of eighteen. ‘I want the House to know,’ Boris said in the face of defeat, ‘that I am not daunted or dismayed.’ To comply with the law, Boris sent the European Commission an unsigned photocopy of the Benn Act to request an extension of Brexit until 31 January. In a separate letter he wrote that this was ‘Parliament’s delay’ and he did not want an extension. Now followed his biggest gamble – to persuade Corbyn to agree to an election in December, despite YouGov’s latest poll showing a 15 per cent Tory lead, at 40 per cent of the popular vote. In their daily conversations, Isaac Levido guaranteed that the Tories could win a forty-seat majority.
Corbyn was invited to Downing Street. In the game of bluff, Boris spoke about both parties’ equal chance to win an election. This, he said, was Corbyn’s opportunity to win power. Boris’s enormous luck was to have Corbyn as his opponent. For nearly one week, Corbyn had prevaricated but on 29 October, ignoring Labour MPs’ warnings, he succumbed to the temptation. The Commons voted by 438 to 20 to hold an election on 12 December.
The Times called Boris’s bid a ‘gamble’ which risked another hung parliament. Matthew Parris announced that he would vote Lib Dem because the Tories had been taken over by ‘a reckless cult’.18 John Curtice, the psephologist, predicted that the Tories would lose at least twenty seats to the SNP and Lib Dems. The Lib Dems, led by Jo Swinson, posing as the next prime minister, started at 18 per cent, 10 per cent better than in 2017. Pundits forecast that Boris could lose his own Uxbridge seat with a 5,034 majority. Daniel Finkelstein, the Tory peer and journalist, wrote ‘There is a very good chance that Jeremy Corbyn will be prime minister.’ No party in modern British history, Finkelstein explained, had won a fourth term. Accordingly, despite a 75 per cent dissatisfaction rating, Corbyn would lead a coalition.19 The Tories, some polls reported, faced a wipeout after being squeezed by Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party. To avoid defeat, Steve Baker urged Boris to do a deal with Farage. Loyal to the party, Boris rejected the offer as suicide.
Soon after Parliament was dissolved on 6 November, the mood began to change. Ian Austin, a former Labour MP and a confidant of Gordon Brown, advised his previous constituents to vote Tory because Corbyn was an ‘extremist, unfit to be prime minister’. Other Labour stalwarts echoed the same exhortation.
Boris’s challenge was to wrest Labour voters from Corbyn – portrayed as an anti-Semitic, terrorist sympathiser and Marxist – and from Nigel Farage with the promise of ‘Get Brexit Done’.
To the Tories’ good fortune, Labour’s manifesto was a Marxist’s dream wish: the widespread nationalisation of industries, the abolition of student fees, a massive increase of pensions, free broadband, the seizure of land and tenanted homes at reduced prices, the restoration of trade union power, the abolition of educational testing and the highest tax burden since 1945. Corbyn’s £600 billion plan had already galvanised the exodus of many wealth creators and businesses.
In the first TV debate with Corbyn, Boris was urged to ignore the Marxist agenda and focus on Brexit. To the Tories’ delight, that night Corbyn refused eight times to say whether he would campaign to Remain or Leave. Soon after, Nigel Farage announced that his party would not contest vital Tory marginals where a Brexit vote would hand the seat to Labour. The Tories’ lead against Labour increased. Three days later, more Brexit Party candidates withdrew from the election to prevent Corbyn winning. Boris’s approval ratings increased to 30 per cent over Corbyn. Simultaneously, Jo Swinson’s daily appearances discouraged voters and the Lib Dem vote declined. On 24 November, John Curtice predicted the Tories to win with a majority of fifty.
Under Levido’s orders, Boris did not lead a traditional election campaign but set off every day for a fourteen-hour stint to deliver a prepared script. Criss-crossing the country, he was encouraged by the party’s polls that Labour would be taken by surprise. Briefed to avoid any meaningful interviews with the loathed media, he delivered the same sound bites week after week.
Corbyn’s self-destruction was completed during an interview with Andrew Neil two days after Curtice’s prediction. Corbyn’s visceral anti-Semitism had been highlighted by Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi. A secret Labour Party dossier listing the details of 130 cases of Labour Party members guilty of severe anti-Semitism had been exposed the previous day. Labour Party members were guilty of Holocaust denial, saying that ‘Jews represent a viral infection that needs to be completely eliminated’ and advocating the ‘extermination of every Jew on the planet’. Hundreds of other cases remained uninvestigated.20 At that moment, Hugh Grant, the actor, was campaigning for Labour, and David Hare, the playwright, had spoken in Corbyn’s support. Corbyn, said Mirvis, was not fit to be prime minister. The chief rabbi blamed Corbyn for a ‘new poison sanctioned from the top [that] has taken root in the Labour Party’. During his interview with Andrew Neil, Corbyn refused to apologise four times for Labour’s anti-Semitism. The following day, YouGov predicted a Tory majority of sixty-eight.21 Among the Labour MPs expected to be defeated were Dennis Skinner and Paula Sherriff. Like Disraeli, Boris was building a coalition between lifelong Tories and the aspiring working class disgusted by Corbyn’s unpatriotic Marxism. Twenty-four hours later, YouGov predicted a Tory majority of eighty-two. Just six months earlier, the Tories faced obliteration after securing 9 per cent of the vote in the European elections. With Corbyn’s help, ‘Get Brexit Done’ had transformed the Tories into a united party, split Labour and devastated the LibDems – the exact opposite to what the pundits had predicted.
Jeremy Hunt could never have persuaded Labour’s voters in Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s old seat, to switch to the Tories. Boris was different. Filmed eating sausage rolls, doughnuts, crisps and clotted cream, and driving a bulldozer through a wall marked ‘GRIDLOCK’, working-class Britons across the Midlands and the north believed that Boris could be trusted as a leader because he pulled off the Brexit deal, defied the courts, and kicked out twenty-one Tory MPs. He also promised to sort out the mess in their neighbourhoods after decades of local Labour misrule. They did not care about his boycott of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, his refusal to be interviewed by Andrew Neil, or that, after also refusing to appear on Channel 4, he was replaced by a melting ice sculpture. Nor were they persuaded by biographer Sonia Purnell’s frequent appearances on BBC broadcasts to describe Boris as ‘a liar’. The vituperation of London’s liberals did not resonate north of Watford.
London’s frustration was best evoked by Nick Boles, as ever the incandescent metropolitan: ‘In the blue corner, we have a compulsive liar who has betrayed every single person he has ever had any dealings with; every woman who has loved him; every member of his family, every friend, every colleague, every employee, every constituent. As a senior member of his Cabinet once put it to me: “You can always rely on Boris … to let you down.” His bumbling braggadocio disguises an all-consuming ego utterly without conscience, empathy or restraint … He has sought to defy our courts, neuter our Parliament and deceive our Sovereign. Nothing is sacred. He will betray the NHS in a heartbeat if that is what it takes to get a trade deal out of his role model – Donald Trump.’22
Three days before the election, the roller coaster came to a juddering halt. That morning, the Mirror’s front page featured a four-year-old boy lying on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary with an oxygen mask at his side. The hospital beds were full. During that day, Boris had been filmed during a visit to Grimsby being shown a photo of the boy on an iPhone by a TV reporter. Inexplicably, Lee Cain, habitually disdainful of the media, had not warned Boris in advance of the Mirror’s story. Boris initially refused to look at the photo and put the journalist’s phone in his pocket. Prompted, he returned the phone and agreed ‘It is a terrible photo.’ Unable to think fast on his feet and tell the reporter to ask the hospital’s manager for an explanation, the headlines blamed Boris for the boy’s plight.
On the 11th, the eve of polling day, YouGov reduced the Tory lead to twenty-six seats and predicted the result could even be a hung parliament. Suddenly there was uncertainty whether Labour voters would switch to the Tories. ‘It’s not in the bag,’ Boris admitted as he started the last day of the hectic campaign delivering milk in Yorkshire. After eating a full English breakfast at a service station on the M1, he put the finishing touches to a pie in Derby, flew to Caerphilly in South Wales to appear at a factory that made Christmas crackers and wrapping paper, then to Southend, and ended the 500-mile dash at a rally in east London. ‘It’s on a knife edge,’ he said.
At 10 p.m. on election day, 12 December, the BBC exit poll gave the Tories a majority of eighty-six. Momentarily, the crowded war room in Central Office was silent. No one could quite believe it. No one in their sweepstake had predicted an eighty majority. Then Boris exploded with joy. Opening beer and wine, everyone chanted ‘O Isaac Levido’. At 11.30 p.m., the Tory victory in Blyth Valley, a former mining area and forever a Labour seat, meant victory was assured. The Red Wall had fallen. When Sedgefield declared Tory for the first time since 1931, the war room burst out ‘Things can only get better’, Tony Blair’s campaign song. Clwyd South, the seat Boris had lost in 1997 was a Tory win. All those Tory MPs who had tried to topple him and said he could never succeed were out of Parliament, powerless and pointless. At 3.45 a.m., the victor arrived with Carrie, aka the First Girlfriend, at Uxbridge for the result. His majority increased to 7,210.
Labour’s worst result since 1935 meant that the party was probably out of power for ten more years. With 44 per cent of the vote, the Tories had gained forty-eight seats and Labour lost fifty-nine seats. The Tory majority was eighty. Once the delayed boundary review was implemented, the Tories could hope for approximately another twenty seats at the next election. ‘Redcar has been turned into Bluecar,’ Boris told the party workers at Central Office. Speaking in front of the slogan ‘The People’s Government’, he said ‘We must understand now what an earthquake we have created, the way in which we have changed the political map of the country. We have to change our own party. We must answer the challenge that the British people have given us.’ He appealed to the new centre ground and an end of the Brexit war: ‘I urge everyone to find closure and let the healing begin.’ Britain was firmly introduced to the Boris Johnson era.
At 4 p.m., on his return from Buckingham Palace, Boris entered Downing Street with Carrie at his side and stood at the lectern in the street: ‘To all those who voted for us for the first time, all those whose pencils may have wavered over the ballot, and heard the voices of their parents and grandparents whispering anxiously in their ears, I say thank you for the trust you have placed in us and in me.’ Charles Moore was among many to re-evaluate Boris: ‘He is one of the few people I have met,’ wrote Moore, ‘who can be described as a genius.’23
That night Rocco Forte, a keen Brexiteer, hosted a victory celebration at Brown’s, his luxury hotel off Piccadilly. Then, Boris headed for Evgeny Lebedev’s traditional Christmas party in his house overlooking Regent’s Park, famous for unlimited caviar and champagne. Boris had unashamedly blocked the publication of the Russia report written by Parliament’s intelligence and security committee. Lebedev, according to the gossip, featured in the report. Unknown to Boris, the gossip proved to be wholly mistaken but would clearly be relevant if, as he secretly planned, the Russian was nominated on his recommendation as a peer. That announcement, he knew, would provoke protests of outrage. Lebedev had achieved nothing in London without his father’s suspicious money but he had become a trusted friend and that counted for Boris.
The next day, Boris slept off the parties while flying to Teesside for a photo opportunity – pulling a pint in Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s conquered fortress. Now he had to prove that he could not only campaign, but also govern.