JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (14 page)

Carnegie, though able to count on the support of the largish group of student ‘colonials’ at Oxford, was unable to land punches on Boris. He was ultimately defeated by an emphatic margin: 809 votes to 466, a majority (in a high-turnout election) of 343. Boris had got the voters out, and got them to vote for him. Riding high after such a glorious
victory, he never went beyond the briefest of courtesies with his defeated rival. Carnegie recalls, ‘We never once had a proper conversation. I never realised until then just how intensely focused and determined he was. Sure, he’s engaging, but this guy is an absolute fucking killer.’

By now, even the national press were taking notice of Boris and Allegra, running diary stories on their domination of Oxford – he as President of the Union and she the former editor of
Isis
, with Boris’s sister Rachel the current editor. Such early fame notwithstanding, Boris now faced the usual scramble to come up with interesting speakers who would actually turn up to debate crowd-pleasing motions. He was moderately successful but his was not to be one of the great Union presidencies. There is just a suggestion that for Boris the prize was in the winning, rather than the doing as President. ‘I don’t remember anything about his Presidency,’ says Toby Young. ‘I don’t remember it being a disaster, I just don’t remember anything – he’s certainly always been accused of not working as hard as he might in office.’

A President’s term card was then typically a modest folded and stapled booklet, listing upcoming Union events, debates and speakers. As so often with the Johnsons, Boris’s was a dynastic enterprise, the front cover adorned with a violent black-and-white depiction of angry people shouting – presumably during a Union debate – by his mother Charlotte. Allegra’s mother, Gaia, was listed for a ‘compulsory’ lunchtime talk on 7 May on ‘The Mafia Today’. His father, Stanley, came in to speak in the Farewell Debate in late June on the motion that ‘Nuclear Power will Cause a Catastrophe’ (and was frequently seen with Boris in Oxford, even when not speaking).

Today’s listeners of recordings of father and son debating at the Union would be hard-pushed to recognise Stanley’s voice. There is none of the characteristic ‘bumbling plum’ of the senior Johnson, just an ordinary home counties’ timbre. In contrast, there is little to distinguish the 21-year-old Boris’s enunciation and his Wodehousian delivery so familiar now: he was already the Boris we know. It is almost as if father has followed son in oral idiosyncrasy. ‘I wouldn’t be
surprised if Stanley hadn’t taken elocution lessons,’ remarks family friend James Le Fanu. ‘It’s the sort of thing he’d do.’

But otherwise the line-up of debates is unremarkable, touching on the familiar mid-Eighties themes of feminism, Chernobyl and the Greenham Common peace protestors. Boris does not come close to matching the coup of Jeya Wilson, his predecessor as President, who drew in Michael Heseltine to make one of his first public speeches since resigning from the Cabinet over Westland in January 1986.

He did, though, display a Europhile touch in organising a ‘ground-breaking’ joint debate with the Union of Utrecht on ‘this House prefers Dutch Courage to Double Dutch’. With one eye on the future, he brought in some personally very useful contacts such as Max Hastings, editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, and family friend Anthony Howard, then deputy editor of the
Observer
, to speak on the future of Fleet Street.

Most people at Oxford at the time remember far more about Boris as a person than what he did as President. He left little mark, although his famed lack of attention to detail almost led to disaster on one dicey occasion when he failed to record a Union meeting. ‘There was a panic that he would be branded an incompetent if it ever got out,’ recalls one supporter. ‘He was obsessed about that accusation about him, so we were very careful to hush it up.’

These debates were not universally well attended but listening to the tapes of them twenty or so years later, there is still a discernible crackle of excitement emanating from the best of them in the grand old Victorian debating chamber, with its smell of leather, wood-polish and earnest teenage sweat. Despite all the pomposity of students, many no older than nineteen or twenty, addressing each other as ‘honourable members’, something more adolescent also comes across.

As President, Boris sat in a throne-like armchair at the head of the chamber. Famous for his shambolic and soiled clothes, he and other debaters were nevertheless expected to dress formally. That requirement was one of the reasons Allegra was so keen for him to pursue a Union career as she considered him handsome in evening dress. Unfailingly elegantly presented herself, from the Fiorucci tights on
her long legs to the artfully cut hair designed to set off the shape of her face, she despaired of his normal ragged attire. They cut an odd couple – soon becoming known, rather unkindly, as ‘the Beauty and the Beast’.

‘She gently chided Boris about his dress sense and messiness,’ recalls Sebastian Shakespeare. ‘But part of her quite liked it as well. Maybe, like the old cliché, she thought she could reform him.’ Union staff obliged them both by keeping a bottle of Tipp-ex on hand to paint over stains on his white shirt; polish was also kept to restore his shoes to the appearance of cleanliness, at least from a distance in poor light. But these emergency measures were not really fooling anyone and Boris’s apparent sartorial hopelessness – combined with the allure of the Presidential position – inspired a strong reaction from Union ‘groupies’: it was the first sighting of Boris as sex god.

As one (male) observer puts it: ‘His unkempt, not obviously good-looking manner was very good at dispelling jealousy but was also a form of vanity. A vanity that said that “I have such extraordinary magnetism and appeal, it doesn’t matter what I look like.”’

During one debate, a seemingly serious female student suggestively offered to wash the honourable member’s clothes for him, perhaps the equivalent of underwear throwing at a Tom Jones’ concert. Indeed, sexual banter traded across the floor of the chamber – Boris was getting a taste of what favours come with power. ‘Women threw themselves at Boris when he was President – it’s one of the perks of the job,’ says a former associate. ‘He may well have been receptive. You do get things thrown your way as President, there’s a definite interest. Girls seemed to like the fact that you can write to the President of the USA and he will reply.’

Another former President adds: ‘It’s true that women do offer themselves to you, but it’s not something you tell too many people about.’ Such wanton offers may have prompted Allegra – who had been raised in considerable grandeur – to take on the subservient role of buying Boris’s shampoo at Oxford and doing his laundry. She may well have feared that if she didn’t, he would soon find one of any number of females curiously willing to do so.

The President of the Union is granted a grand 30ft-long book-lined
office, the envy of many a government minister – or city mayor. He can invite his friends to join him in the leather armchairs and hold forth around the vast mahogany table in a room once repainted over a weekend by Benazir Bhutto and Alan Duncan, both former presidents. He has a staff of 14 and even back in the mid-1980s, an annual turnover of £250,000.
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Such precocious experience of power and the powerful does not, however, grant automatic access to a high-flying political career. Many ex-Presidents satisfy themselves with quieter lives in accountancy or the law. Indeed, no president of the Union has become British prime minister since Sir Edward Heath, who held the position back in 1939. As Dominic Lawson suggests, Boris’s determination to bag the presidency was something of a ‘throwback’ and ‘quite old-fashioned’ by the mid-1980s.

And while Boris had his fans, he was by no means universally seen as a natural candidate for high office in the real world. There was always this question of competence and seriousness, one that was (and in some ways still is) a sore point. Defeated by Boris and a keen observer of his progress ever since, Mark Carnegie never entertained the idea of his old adversary pursuing a career in politics. He admits to being ‘amazed at how successful Boris has been. He’s kept his individuality but he has this measure of Teflon. I never thought at Oxford he was destined for great things – I just couldn’t see how his act would translate to prime time outside Oxford. Of all the political figures at Oxford, I didn’t think he would go this far. His personal political franchise is truly remarkable.’

Neil Sherlock is equally astonished that Boris, however great his showman talents, has gone into politics at all. Most wannabe politicians have a burning mission that drives them – whether it is to reform the NHS, take Britain out of the EU or renew a political party. Boris did not seem to have one then – when politics was considerably more ideological and cause-driven – and does not appear to have one now. As Sherlock observes, ‘Without those passions, it’s not obvious why he would pursue a political career.’

Boris’s flexibility soon meant returning to his true political colours. ‘By the time of the 1987 General Election, Boris was perfectly happy
to be campaigning as a blue rosette-wearing Conservative again. After being President, he could safely start edging back to his party,’ observes a fellow Tory. ‘I guess he didn’t want people to think of him as the SDP person for ever. He’d got what he wanted out of the SDP and its voters.’ After all, Boris had never abandoned his inner Tory instincts – just disguised them.

‘I can remember exactly where I was when I experienced my first spasm of savage Right-wing indignation,’ Boris later wrote. ‘It was 1984, at breakfast time – about 10.40 a.m. – and I had a spoonful of Harvest Crunch halfway to my lips. The place was the Junior Common Room of my college.’
¹⁷
So, what was the issue that stoked such outrage? Being asked to donate to the miners, who were then engaged in a doomed, but hard-fought and painful strike over pit closures.

‘I won’t give any dosh to these blasted strikers because as far as I can see, they are being execrably led, haven’t had a proper ballot and are plainly trying to bring down the elected government of the country,’ is how Boris described his feelings.
¹⁸

A fellow journalist – and an admirer – who has known Boris since Oxford was angered by what he sees as his political cynicism: ‘After his election as President, he became known as someone who will do what he needs to do, say what he needs to say. People came to know that they could like him, but not trust him.’ Others, however, have been less forgiving of what they saw as calculation followed by betrayal. ‘Boris showed then that he was not loyal, that he does not have many real friends, as it is all about him,’ said one Oxford contemporary who now deals regularly – but uneasily – with Boris in her professional life. ‘People were wary of him. He was always fudging
everything
. So I could see that Boris wouldn’t really keep friends because he doesn’t have principles. I knew that bumbling thing was an act – he has a real “economical with the actualité” persona.’

Indeed, some of his so-called stooges who had done so much to help him win the Presidency also felt abandoned now that they were no longer useful. ‘I didn’t recognise the ruthlessness then, although it was clear that Boris was the number one fan of B. Johnson. And it’s true that unless you could do something for him, he wasn’t that
interested,’ says Anthony Frieze. ‘After he had finished being President, he just disappeared into the library and you didn’t really see him after that.’ In fact, a number of Boris’s fellow students believe he did put in considerable academic effort in his final year and paid little attention to the Union after his presidency, whatever impression he might have given to his dons.

When Boris started at Balliol, like his father he had set himself three immediate goals. His were becoming President of the Union, finding a wife and to get a First. He had achieved one and was well on his way to the second with Allegra. A top degree, though, was out of his reach. His dons, though recognising him as clever and amusing and capable of a First, despaired of what they perceived as his work rate. Boris specialised in Ancient Literature and Philosophy, rather than History, as most people believe. Jasper Griffin, then professor of Classical Literature at Balliol, was nevertheless an inspiration to him. A genial fellow, he was tolerant of Boris’s absences and late or non-existent work, but his patience was not universally shared. ‘There was a dividing line between tutors who liked Boris the Great and those who disliked him,’ he recalls.

Jonathan Barnes – brother of the novelist Julian and a don known for not tolerating playboys, however brainy – taught Boris Ancient Philosophy at Oxford: ‘He was clever, enthusiastic, he had excellent Greek and Latin. He was what I probably called in my outdated fashion, a first-class man.’ So why did he not get a First? ‘You don’t get a First on intelligence alone – you also need to work like stink; he miscalculated slightly and left things too late. I guess that had he started burning the midnight oil in March rather than in May (in his final year), he would have made it. He sometimes annoyed the dons – as he sometimes annoyed me – but he was so evidently a good egg that it was hard not to get on with him. He might have written his essay between getting up and his 10 o’clock tutorial, but at least it was stylishly done and usually had some good jokes in it.’

As Oxford undergraduates are expected to read out their essays in tutorial, it gave Boris the opportunity to enhance his work and ad-lib as he went along. Few of his peers would have been so daring but when there was nothing at all to read out, he would simply admit: ‘I
haven’t done it.’ ‘His disarming frankness was his ultimate weapon,’ adds Griffin.

Oswyn Murray, who also taught Classics at Balliol and was at Oxford as a student with Stanley, remembers Boris attending one of his classes on the subject of Thucydides, shortly before his finals. ‘He promptly fell asleep – presumably because of a heavy night at the Union. It was this that caused the event that both he and I remember so vividly, at his last end-of-term report before the Master of Balliol. I said: “Well, Master, if Mr Johnson works very hard between now and finals, he might just manage a third.” He was not, I think, a serious scholar in the academic sense.’