JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (15 page)

Actually, for all his ‘fooling around in the Union,’ as Griffin and others assumed, Boris only narrowly missed the top mark. ‘He was viva-ed for a First, as his marks were on the cusp, but he didn’t have quite enough alphas. It was quite a long viva, and you might have expected him to get through with his charm and dazzle, but it didn’t work that time: vivas are very intimidating, with eight members of staff all in white tie and gowns interviewing you. A lot of tutors saw him as irritating, as they felt he didn’t take their subject seriously. When he didn’t scrape through, the Professor of Latin kept saying, “He was so close,” with a certain gusto.’

Griffin doted on Boris. Even if his former student did not come away with the top-drawer degree he hoped for, Boris’s inspiring education and his passion for Classics have stood him in good stead: for years, his classical allusions were a key element of Brand Boris. He would, for example, draw parallels between the modern and ancient worlds. Casting America as enlightened Athens to the Soviet Union’s harsh and militaristic Sparta was one; talking about how the transformation from idealistic Republic to brutal Empire in the
Star Wars
’ movie series mirrored similar changes in ancient Rome, is another.

Like his mentor Griffin, Boris has that rare talent for making an esoteric subject fun. In an age of relentless dumbing down, Boris can be credited with making learning if not exactly ‘cool with the kids’ then not a deal-breaker either. No doubt Griffin winced, though, when during a 2008 mayoral hustling on the Vanessa Feltz BBC
London Radio Show, Boris appeared to confuse Shakespeare’s Pericles with the Classical Pericles, who rejuvenated Athens.
¹⁹

Ken Livingstone, who had taken it on himself to study the classics in order to understand his opponent better, wrong-footed Boris by picking him up on his error. ‘I think Boris knew exactly what he was doing, but didn’t think anyone else would know and was shocked when I caught him out,’ says Livingstone. In any case, it certainly raised the debate from the usual infantile level of British political discourse.

Boris is well known for inserting classical tags into his newspaper columns and even his speech – since university this has become his trademark, a quick way of distinguishing himself from more mundane politicians (and making himself money, too). The schtick may now have worn thin: Pericles and co. are quoted less often than they were. But for most of his career since Oxford, he has ostentatiously worn his classical learning on his sleeve. Peter Guilford, who knew Boris well after university, once went on a skiing trip and (perfectly innocently) shared a hotel bed with him to save money. ‘He kept me awake all night reading Homer,’ Guilford recalls. ‘Are the Classics some sort of affectation for him, some way of turning up the toff?’

Any pretensions aside, the use that Boris has made of his education has set him apart. It is hard to see him making the same crashing mistake as David Cameron who, just after being elected Prime Minister in May 2010, described Britain as America’s junior partner in the war against Germany in 1940. Or, indeed, needing to ask the same question as Tony Blair when confronted with news of atrocities in Kosovo: ‘Where is it?’

If Eton had seen ‘new Boris’ emerge from his inner ‘Al’, a near-finished version of ‘brand Boris’ was perfected at Oxford. Most importantly of all, his brush with democracy in the Oxford Union had demonstrated the need for the brand to extend its appeal beyond traditional Tory heartlands. Boris had to be much more than a public-school stereotype; he must be a man for all people, as well as all seasons. Now he was to enter the world of work, it was time to put this ever-evolving brand to the test.

When they took their vows on 5 September 1987, Boris and Allegra (both just 23) were the youngest of their Oxford set to marry. The relationship had survived a year of being conducted from either end of the M40: Allegra had finished her three-year PPE degree in 1986 with a 2:2 and returned to London, while Boris stayed on for the fourth and final year of his Classics course in Oxford. It had also lasted through Boris’s undoubtedly bitter disappointment at missing out on a First, which lost him sleep then and still rankles to this day. Now finally, the golden pair were reunited with much to celebrate.

‘They made a very charismatic couple, and it seemed that everything would happen for them,’ recalls Sarah Sands, a friend and former colleague of Allegra’s. On the big day, the smiling bride dazzled in her white veil and flower-strewn hair. But Boris failed to turn up with anything suitable to wear and had to be lent trousers, even cufflinks, by an astonished guest: John Biffen, the kindly and humorous Tory MP. The only reason why Boris wore his own, worn-out shoes was that Biffen’s were too small for him. To add insult to sartorial injury, he lost his wedding ring within an hour of the ceremony.

‘I was standing there when Boris said he had lost the ring,’ recalls Emma Jenks, a tutorial partner of Allegra’s at Trinity. ‘I laughed, but Allegra thought he had done it on purpose. And I can well imagine Boris thinking that he didn’t want to wear it.’ His nonchalance was noted, not least by his bride and her parents. It struck a slight jarring
note on what was a grand occasion, with guests from London, Oxford and Italy all flocking in to a reception at Woodhouse, the Mostyn-Owen country seat. One stylish cosmopolitan note was that the confetti was made of sugared almonds. Another that Anna Steiger, daughter of Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, sang from the
Marriage of Figaro
.

A piece for violin was commissioned from a highly regarded living composer, Hans Werner Henze, entitled
Allegra e Boris – Duetto Concertante per Violino e Viola all’Occasione delle loro Faustissime Nozze il 5 Settembre, 1987
. Henze was an interesting choice, being a gay German composer, avowed Marxist and member of the Communist Party of Italy. He had produced compositions honouring Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara but was now marking the nuptials of a rising English Tory and alumnus of the Bullingdon Club and his wealthy heiress fiancée.

During the ceremony itself, the vicar at St Michael’s and All Angels counselled the congregation at length on the sanctity of marriage and the evils of divorce. Several guests could not help but notice how many broken families were present as the cleric warmed to his theme. Boris’s parents had split, Allegra’s parents’ marriage was also disintegrating and there they were, all sitting in church. ‘I remember a distinct feeling of discomfort,’ says one guest. Not that Charlotte and Stanley would have found it easy to counsel Boris against marrying so young: after all, they themselves had ignored Stanley’s father’s mumbled concern about ‘lambs to the slaughter’ and married straight after university. However, friends of Stanley’s have made it clear that he was privately worried that Allegra was not right for Boris. She was widely considered both beautiful and clever, but some quickly tired of her undoubted sensitivity. ‘I always took Stanley’s side on that,’ said Anthony Howard, a long-standing friend of the family. ‘I think she was a very tricky customer, that girl.’ Another close friend of Stanley’s, the unrelated Brian Johnson, said that Boris’s father simply thought Allegra was ‘nuts.’

In another strange footnote to the day, the guests were presented with a mug decorated with a picture of Woodhouse, but inscribed with the names of Allegra and her brother Owen rather than Allegra
and Boris. On the Johnson side, it was also kept in the family: rather than a friend, Boris’s brother Leo had been chosen to act as best man.

After a honeymoon in Egypt (reputedly paid for by Allegra), the newlyweds bought a flat in Sinclair Road, in Olympia, west London. A scruffy road of large Victorian terraces crudely divided into starter-home flats and bedsits, it was not what either of them was accustomed to, but it was the golden boy’s first home of his own and marked his entry into the real adult world. The direction of travel was not, however, in the slightest bit clear: how could he match, let alone improve on, the glories of his formative years?

A decade earlier, he just might have set his sights – as Classics graduates had done for a century before him – on serving his country as a Sir Humphrey-style mandarin, with a respectable salary, index-linked pension and eventual knighthood. Sir Boris Johnson of the Foreign Office, our man in Caracas, has a certain ring to it. In the end, he chose to follow the lucre, a path trodden by many 1980s Oxbridge products. At the high-tide mark of the ‘Loadsamoney’ 1980s, City banks and management consultants were a more appealing prospect than decades composing memoranda in a Whitehall department: they promised prospects and riches unimaginable in the Civil Service with starting salaries of up to £20,000 compared to the graduate average of around £8,000 at the time. As a result, they sucked in the best brains from the top universities. In any case, public service was out of fashion – it was the age of red braces, sharp suits and Porsches. From his plate-glass palace
Wall Street
’s Gordon Gekko preached ‘greed is good’ while stock markets were soaring.

Boris went for a number of interviews with blue chip companies but he started his working life at one of the smartest management consultancies, LEK (Lawrence, Evans, Koch) Consulting. It is said that he looked the part, even turning up in a smart new pair of red braces on his first day in the autumn of 1987. No doubt the LEK recruitment chiefs realised that they had hired an exceptional young man on what was then a considerable starting salary of £18,000, but it would appear that Boris was not quite so well informed about what his new life offered.

An Oxford contemporary, who managed to stay the course, reveals
the lot of the management consultant as ‘grinding numbers, detailed analysis, and working and socialising for long hours with your team.’ It is difficult to imagine a job description less suited to a free spirit with a dislike of detail and team playing. Whatever the financial rewards, LEK life was a nasty shock and as Boris famously later recalled, ‘Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious.’

Boris bolted after only a week – staying just long enough to collect the joining fee. It was a good time to head for the exit: the twin storms of the great hurricane and the stock market crash were about to hit the Square Mile, sending stocks and shares into a spectacular nosedive and quickly snuffing out the nascent careers of many of the red-braces brigade. Suddenly the City did not look such a great bet after all. Instead Boris’s connections to the world of journalism – through family and his time in the Oxford Union – allowed him to pull off an early and fortuitous career change.

Even at such a young age there were few, if any high-flying circles that Boris did not have on the equivalent of speed dial. Through his mother, for instance, his godmother was Rachel Billington, daughter of Lord Longford, and cousin of the writer Ferdinand Mount, former head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit at Number Ten. Ferdy’s cousin is Mary, David Cameron’s mother. Billington’s sister is Lady Antonia Fraser, whose husband was the socialist playwright Harold Pinter – who had played tennis with Boris. Colin Lucas, one of Stanley’s friends from Oxford and a distinguished academic, was his godfather, while another of his father’s friends was Sir Crispin Tickell, former chef de cabinet for (Lord) Roy Jenkins when he was president of the European Commission. His stepmother Jenny is the independently wealthy stepdaughter of Edward Sieff, a scion of the founding family and former chairman of Marks & Spencer. From school and university, he knew many other blue-blooded types likely to be of interest to newspaper editors such as Viscount Althorp, plus a raft of senior politicians, campaigners, lobbyists and assorted other famous people from his time as President of the Union. In short, he had astonishing access to the drawing rooms of power and his dynastic tentacles went further than almost any young graduate of
his age. Armed with these connections and many more, plus recommendations from established journalistic hands such as the
Daily Telegraph
’s columnist T.E. Utley and its arts editor Miriam Gross, he was swiftly taken on by
The Times
towards the end of 1987 as a graduate trainee.

Although undoubtedly a prestigious title for his first job in journalism, this was not quite the unqualified blessing it might sound.
The Times
was still recovering from the trauma of its bitter battles with the print unions, which had previously enjoyed a destructive stranglehold over the newspaper. The angry and sometimes violent clashes outside its new home in Wapping, east London, had only come to an end in February 1987. Proprietor Rupert Murdoch had secretly hired more compliant print-workers from a different union at Wapping and then sacked the old Gray’s Inn Road printers en masse. There was also bad blood between those journalists who refused to move with the paper in support of the old printers and those who defied their union to do so. Memories of these divisions were painful and still raw. Nor was the work environment inside the new office much better: housed in a windowless former wine warehouse on the News International site known as ‘the Fortress’, it was protected by barbed wire and sat cheerlessly on a traffic-infested four-lane urban highway with few shops or other signs of life.

Overseeing the regime change was Charlie Wilson, a no-nonsense Glaswegian former Royal Marines boxing champion, who became editor in 1985. He had replaced the aristocratic Charles Douglas-Home, who was remembered as a charming boss in the old establishment traditions of what was once dubbed
The Thunderer
. Wilson was considerably less charming and like Murdoch, certainly no respecter of ‘the old ways.’ He was feared and respected by his staff in equal measure. ‘Charlie Wilson replaced the old effete atmosphere of languor and privilege with more than a trace of Glaswegian menace,’ recalls Mark Law, who served under both regimes.

The Times
initially sent Boris to work on the
Express & Star
in Wolverhampton for a three-month baptism of fire in reporting. It was not Boris’s happiest time: already his marriage was coming under strain and the separation prompted by his new career was only
making it worse. Allegra, meanwhile, was struggling to find a life purpose: by the time of their wedding, she had already abandoned journalism and was in search of something to which she was more temperamentally suited. Her experiences of the hard grind of Fleet Street – mostly spent on the
Evening Standard
’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ – had not suited her. She had in any case suffered capricious treatment by some of her superiors, who had resented the presence of someone they unfairly dismissed as a mere well-connected Sloane. Perhaps too it was difficult to follow in the footsteps of her larger-than-life mother Gaia, who at one time wrote so frequently about food for the
Standard
that the satirical magazine
Private Eye
began referring to the editor Charles Wintour as Sir Charles Mostyn-Wintour.