JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (20 page)

Most days, just before copy deadline, he would do this by a tried-and-tested method known as the ‘four o’clock rant’. Cannily, he would first wait for Thérèse, the motherly Flemish secretary who spoilt her youthful charge with Lion d’Or chocolates, to go home. After locking his door, he would then work himself up into a frenzy by hurling repeated four-letter abuse at a ragged yucca plant near his desk. Indeed, he still bears a scar on his hand where the force of his emotions snapped a biro he was holding at the time. Formerly the drawing room of a grand parquet-floored apartment, his office overlooked a normally peaceful scene of fountain and lake ringed by weeping willows and presided over by a statue of Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting, in the centre of the belle époque Square Marie Louise. Yet anyone passing by around teatime could not help but be alarmed at the torrent of guttural roars and full-volume expletives from the bay window above. His outburst spent, he would settle down to his keyboard to dash off at hurtling speed – and with a violent fist-handed typing style – another brilliantly damaging and inventive thousand words. This bizarre ritual, to those who witnessed it, was an insight into the torrent of focus and drive that lies beneath Boris’s affable exterior. When relaxed, he would gossip with colleagues and counterparts on other papers and would be amusing and stimulating company. (Although strangely, more than once, a jokey comment from these sessions would later appear in a story, immediately after the words: ‘One Brussels source said …’) At his keyboard, however, his mood would alter. He would brook distraction from no one. ‘If you ever interrupted him when writing on his grubby Tandy 300 [the antiquated brick-like laptop he favoured], he got incredibly angry,’ reports a senior European Parliament source. ‘He would literally yell at you to leave him alone – he never lost focus on what he was trying to do.’

These frenzied stories on the threat the EU apparently posed to the British way of life began to dominate the domestic news agenda. As
Boris later recalled on BBC Radio’s
Desert Island Discs
(in October 2005), he was ‘sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party. And it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.’
⁶
Indeed, Boris’s Brussels’ despatches were widening existing splits in the Tory party over Europe into great yawning chasms – rendering the frenetic attempts of Thatcher’s successor, John Major, to create unity futile and his government ultimately unelectable. It took Major what he described as a ‘year of gruesome trench warfare’
⁷
to win the narrowest of votes in the House of Commons for the bill that finally ratified the Maastricht Treaty in July 1993 – and Boris’s antics had undoubtedly played a part in the pain the Prime Minister experienced. His Government was repeatedly taken to the point of collapse by Eurosceptic rebels and at one point he did not sleep for more than 60 hours as he tried to restore order.

Major was frequently infuriated by Boris and had ‘cross words’
⁸
about the political fallout from Boris’ writings with an unreceptive Max Hastings. The Prime Minister also liked to make his point – perhaps rather more successfully – by publicly teasing Boris at press conferences about becoming EU obsessive. In contrast, Major’s many critics among the Eurosceptics adored and applauded the havoc Boris was wreaking on their behalf. As Major knew only too well, however, it all came at a price – rendering the very party that Boris professed to support political pariahs for over a decade. Major would never square the circle with the anti-Europeans in his party; their divisions would see the Conservatives dumped by the electorate at the 1997 general election, ironically paving the way for a more Euro-friendly Labour administration under Tony Blair. For fuelling the rift Boris continues to be regarded as ‘suspect’ by many pro-European, moderate or loyalist Tories to this very day.

*

Until the end of his five-year stay in Brussels, Boris continued to satisfy the British appetite for stories of sinister continental plots. Just as his marriage to Allegra began to fray under the pressure of his obsession
with his career – which made him both distant and intolerably selfish at times – so did his professional fortunes take off and his influence grow. His reporting gradually progressed from the dangers of EU interference with Britain’s favourite crisp flavours to what he portrayed as a direct and broad-based attack on the very essence of the nation’s sovereignty and soul.

The ferocious fighting over the closer European integration introduced by the Maastricht Treaty, constant rows over Britain’s half-hearted involvement and its ignominious exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (a precursor to the single currency) on 16 September 1992 (known as ‘Black Wednesday’) gave him plenty of material to cast Delors in the role of über-villain. And the plaudits poured in – not least in the form of ‘herograms’ – notes of congratulation – from Hastings. Most journalists quietly place such professional
billets-doux
in a drawer, but Boris pasted his large collection up on the wall as a triumphal arch over the office doorway for all to see.

Guilford recalls once reading the ‘herograms’ at a drinks party at the
Telegraph
offices. ‘There was one from Max, saying, “we all think you’re doing a wonderful job if only you’d learn to be a little more pompous.” I think he was pompous enough already.’

Boris’s writing was becoming so prolific and so eye-catching – both in the
Daily
and
Sunday Telegraph
plus their stable-mate, the
Spectator
– that by 1991 he had truly become a star. Meanwhile, other journalists on rival newspapers were instructed to follow up his stories, even when there seemed to have little basis in fact.

‘When they discovered asbestos in the Berlaymont [the Commission HQ], Boris wrote a colourful story that teams of sappers were going to mine the building and blow it up,’ recalls one long-suffering EU official. ‘The story really took off. Another paper made their poor correspondent ring up to see whether they could press the trigger for the dynamite but it just wasn’t true. There was asbestos and there were various options to deal with it, including removing the asbestos or destroying the building, but there was never any suggestion of sappers – it would have been done by specialist demolition men, piece by piece.’ For the record, the star-shaped Berlaymont is still there, asbestos-free and now coated in a smart new
glass-and-steel façade. Boris’s thrilling image of soldiers and explosions never made it into reality.

‘He consequently set the pace, even if the stories weren’t exactly right,’ says a well-known broadcaster also in Brussels at the time. ‘The others had to play catch-up – it made them very cross.’ Another highly diligent journalist remembers a comment from Boris around this time that speaks volumes about his cavalier approach. ‘Some of his stories were simply not true,’ he says. ‘When I mentioned this to him, Boris just wagged his finger and said, “There’ll come a day when you’ll write a story without picking up the phone – we all do.” What he was doing, he was doing by reflex. It was a clear insight into how he was thinking towards the end of his time in Brussels. Early Boris was far better than later Boris.’

It is not clear whether he picked up the phone for his most explosive story, which he wrote in May 1992 at a meeting of European foreign ministers at Guimarães in Portugal. The Maastricht Treaty had been signed but not ratified by the individual member states. Some countries were holding referenda first. A ‘yes’ vote from one of those countries – Denmark – was crucial to the treaty, but although closely fought, was widely thought to be in the bag.

Boris himself likes to revel in the havoc following the Guimarães story. A decade later, he crowed in his
Telegraph
column: ‘All journalists probably delude themselves that they may have influenced the history they are paid to observe. My boast is that I probably did contribute to the Danish rejection of Maastricht. I thought it was quite good stuff.’
⁹

The
Sunday Telegraph
thought it good stuff indeed and ran it as the front-page splash under a banner headline, ‘DELORS’ PLANS TO RULE EUROPE’. Boris reported that Delors wanted to scrap rotation of the EU presidency and to centralise power in Brussels. The Danish ‘Nej’ campaign held up Boris’s story as proof of their long-running claims that the new treaty would deprive small countries such as Denmark of their rights. Boris recalls: ‘With less than a month until [the Danish] referendum, and with mounting paranoia about the erosion of Danish independence, the story was seized on by the No campaign. They photocopied it a thousandfold. They marched the streets of Copenhagen with my story fixed to their banners. And on
June 2nd, a spectacularly sunny day, they joyously rejected the Treaty and derailed the project. Jacques Delors was not the only victim of the disaster; the aftershocks were felt across Europe, and above all in Britain.’
¹⁰

Two decades on, controversy still rages. Arguably, without Boris, the Danes would have voted ‘yes’ to Maastricht (polls before his article pointed to a narrow vote in favour of the Treaty) and the EU would have cantered rather than crawled closer to becoming a superstate. After the piece appeared, the polls dramatically switched to a narrow vote against Maastricht. Charles Grant, author of an authoritative tome on Delors and a man not given to hyperbole, agrees with Boris that his article did indeed change the course of history, derailing the march towards ever-greater integration and stronger EU institutions. The Danish Government even threatened to block Delors’ reappointment to the commission presidency unless he disowned the ideas quoted in Boris’s piece. Delors was seen looking distraught afterwards, ‘the pallor of his skin suggested he had received an electric shock.’
¹¹
Others, including Douglas Hurd and Geoff Meade, believe that Boris likes to overplay his role in the events of Denmark.

The incident certainly raised Boris’s fame to new heights, however, both back in Britain and now across Europe. A despairing John Major observed, ‘not since the heyday of the Vikings had the Danes precipitated such disruption’
¹²
– stirring up Eurosceptics back home and increasing the pressure on a struggling pound being just two unwelcome consequences.

John Palmer, then the
Guardian
’s Brussels bureau chief and loyal Europhile, is incensed to this day. He claims Boris’s story was an inflated and distorted version of his own sober and accurate account, published just a few days earlier. In contrast, Boris had told his bosses on the
Sunday Telegraph
foreign desk that he received the story from EU sources. ‘I have no personal animus against him whatsoever – I’m friendly with his family – but as a journalist he is thoroughly irresponsible, inventing stories. Just before the Danish referendum, I wrote a story about Delors’ thinking on the next stages of political integration in the
Guardian
,’ Palmer says. ‘Boris came up to me when it appeared and asked whether I’d seen the relevant document. He
then rewrote my story and completely distorted it to say “Delors’ Plans to Rule Europe.”

‘In fact, it was all about mere
ideas
on more majority voting, more powers for the European Parliament and that sort of thing. Then what happened was that the extreme Europhobes in Denmark took Boris’s inaccurate version and produced it as a leaflet. Whenever he was challenged about his rubbish, he would never actually defend his corner – he just blamed London, he was quite shameless. But what Boris wrote was taken as gospel by the zealots. It fuelled the whole UKIP phenomenon.’

More extraordinary is the fact that even one of Boris’s own supporters confirms the tale’s shaky foundations: ‘These were not plans, as he said, but merely thoughts and ideas. [But the story] caused the government enormous grief. And he could see what it was doing to the Conservative party, which arguably took a decade to recover. The irony is that Boris is a pro-European at heart. So why did he do it? Just pure opportunism – it made him feel powerful.’

It is essential to note that while these ideas were merely subjects for discussion at the time – rather than plans, as claimed by Boris – many of them, such as more powers for the European Parliament and a permanent rather than rotating Presidency, have now come to fruition through the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. Boris’s instincts – if not his attention to hard facts – were spot-on.

The fall-out at the time, however, was disturbing not only for the London government, but Boris too. Adulation from the European Far Right in countries like Denmark and Holland did concern him, as did the feeling that he was becoming too closely identified with one tribe back in Britain. Boris is the ultimate individualist – he is not a clubbable man, but a secretive one. On his well-trodden route up to the Commission from the
Telegraph
office in Square Marie Louise, he would occasionally point to a street sign. ‘Ah, rue du Taciturne,’ he would smile, tapping his nose. ‘The road of the silent one, quite right.’

Although now a legendary figure, few people in Brussels knew Boris well. He was obsessively silent about himself, or at least the real Boris, rather than the act. Even Allegra was unable to keep tabs on him and
more than once discovered his whereabouts only by reading his articles in the paper from Baghdad, say, or Zagreb. It was doubtless humiliating when she had to phone the
Telegraph
’s London office to ask where her husband was. His career was all consuming, leaving little space for his marriage. ‘You get past caring and you start drinking malt whisky,’ she says of that time.
¹³
In her solitude, she began to fear that, like Boris’s mother Charlotte, she too was heading for a breakdown.

‘There was a feeling that Allegra was a troubled person,’ recalls Peter Guilford. Boris seems to have been insensitive at best, incapable or unwilling to do anything about her increasing unhappiness. Tony Robinson, spokesman for the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, recalls having a drink with him one evening to discuss a potential story. ‘It was the 22
^nd
of March, and after a while I said I had to go as it was my wife’s birthday. Boris said, “Oh no! It’s my wife’s birthday too!” He’d totally forgotten.’ Not long after, Boris told a colleague that he realised he had blown it with Allegra when he asked her what she thought of ‘subsidiarity’ – a piece of esoteric Eurobabble referring to devolving decisions to national or regional governments. It excited Eurobores but no one with anything resembling a normal life. ‘Boris would tell me that that had been the trigger for the whole breakdown in the marriage,’ the colleague says. While this seems unlikely, another obfuscatory joke, it is clear that Boris’s ruthless focus on his war with Delors came first.