JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (32 page)

Earl Spencer was invited to pen a diary (and hosted
Spectator
cricket matches at Althorp), Boris’s brother Leo wrote a few times, Rachel a great deal, and on occasion her husband, Ivo Dawnay; Stanley wrote about the environment and brother Jo contributed on a variety of subjects. His father-in-law Charles Wheeler was also a contributor. Paul and Frank Johnson (neither related to each other, nor Boris and his clan) were also frequent contributors, adding to the general Johnsonian confusion but Boris was shrewd enough to leaven this abundance of Johnsons with an unlikely but winning combination of younger lad-mag journalists, the angry Leftie Rod Liddle, Joan Collins, Anna Ford and Nicky Haslam.

He avoided long, worthy or turgid pieces by instructing at least one contributor that no
Spectator
piece should take more than three calls and a total of 45 minutes. The result was a wisecracking, pistol-paced magazine that was provocative and funny though perhaps not terribly serious – or in the purest meaning of the term, ‘political’. Pompous discussions of –isms did not interest him. In February 2001, Matthew Parris wrote a piece that might have been Boris’s personal manifesto
when he declared ‘the correct approach for a sound fellow is a faintly amused disinterestedness. [The] importance of not being earnest is, among the Right, hard to overstate. [And] we [should] never be personally rude to one whose persuasions we described in print as poisonous.’

Boris took great care about whom he ‘described in print as poisonous.’ His targets were those in no position either to champion or to block his ambitions. One such was the former prime minister and arch Europhile, Sir Edward Heath – a figure of scorn for Eurosceptics and a spent force politically. Just before the 2001 General Election Boris let rip, referring to how Heath’s ‘belly [was] cantilevered between us like some decked whale.’ ‘It would be utterly magnificent,’ he went on, ‘if I could tell you, my friends, that Sir Edward, at 84, has got over his Incredible Sulk and become a piping geyser of optimism about the party under whose banner I am about to fight. Alas, amigos, it is not to be, he wants to gloom me out. Here we are, two fat Balliol Blonds, and the older one wants to rock the confidence of the younger. Well, I won’t let him.’
¹⁴

But sometimes his laid-back approach meant that his writers got him into trouble anyway. One such occasion was when Petronella Wyatt described Fawley Court, a Polish religious order on the borders of the Henley constituency, as resembling ‘an inverted bus shelter’, where the resident monks dressed like ‘narcotics abusers.’ Worse still was her declaration that a list of Polish achievements would ‘not cover a cheeseboard.’ The ensuing deluge of complaints from Poles and Catholics included a particularly angry missive from the Duke of Norfolk. Realising the gravity of the offence and the appalling timing (it was September 2000, a few months after his selection in the run-up to the 2001 election) Boris went to apologise in person and sent dozens of grovelling letters.

Sometimes the darts were carefully targeted, however. In November 2002 he ran a piece by Mary Kenny that gave an insight into his thoughts on so-called self-appointed moral arbiters to the nation. Dubbed the Mothers of Morality, the piece named a group of fierce and forthright journalists such as Melanie Phillips and Janet Daley who it said saw themselves as embattled voices against a loose-living
liberal establishment.
¹⁵
Although as an anti-abortion pro-marriage Catholic, Kenny was naturally one of the group, it was pretty clear that Boris did not share (or care for) their moralising.

Sarah Sands, a journalist and friend of Marina’s whom the article claimed was ‘showing promising signs’ of Moral Motherhood, was horrified to be included. ‘For Boris, it was the rudest thing he could say about anyone,’ she says. Perhaps this was merely a warning shot across her bows that he would not take kindly to any ‘moralising’ about his own life.

Boris also liked to joke that ‘scoops are us’ but in fact the
Spectator
did not break many stories, with two honourable exceptions. The first was Peter Oborne’s revelation in April 2002 that Tony Blair had tried to ‘muscle in on the mourning’ for Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother
¹⁶
which although strenuously denied was widely believed. Its gist was later confirmed by evidence from Black Rod but before then Boris was treated to the full fury of Downing Street, which brought in the Press Complaints Commission. Then director Guy Black first tried to make an informal resolution by going to see Boris at the
Spectator
.

‘I think it was Boris’s first difficult PCC complaint. He was in a bit of a panic about it, asking me, “What should I do?”’ recalls Black. Never having met Boris before, he felt obliged to take the apparently struggling young editor through the routine process of establishing with the writer the strength of his material and sources. ‘My impression was that he was slightly scatty and in need of help and advice to get through it but now I don’t believe that to be the real Boris at all. In essence, it’s all done to get you onside. His behaviour didn’t affect the outcome of the complaint or the dispute, but it is true that I came away with a sympathetic feeling for him. The act is very effective. And that was the first time I’d seen it in action.’

The second scoop came from Boris’s sister Rachel, who in July that year, revealed that the Blairs were hiring private tutors, teachers from the local top public school, Westminster, to help their children through A-Levels. It was a good story. Both revelations took their toll on Labour’s body politic but did they make the
Spectator
a true power
in the land? Did they establish Boris as a political sage or thinker? They undoubtedly showed up the failings of the Conservative leadership of the time, which was struggling to land any punches on the government; they also attracted oodles of publicity for Boris and his writers but they were accompanied by a series of unfortunately inaccurate predictions that undermined both his and the magazine’s status as consistently reliable political pundits.

Boris predicted, for instance, that Peter Mandelson would survive his first political saga in 1998 over a mortgage (which he didn’t) and that there was no way back in 2001 from his second, Hindujagate (which there was, in 2008). He forecast a swift Tory revival after 1997 (which there wasn’t) and then in 2001 promised to eat his hat if Tony Blair did not go to the country during the foot-and-mouth crisis. Well he didn’t (the election was delayed, for the first time since the Second World War, until the disease was on the retreat). Four years before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, he also predicted there would never be another Scot in Number 10. Fortunately, no one much noticed because of the ever-present lashings of humour – and according to his critics, no one took Boris seriously anyway. One said he had created an ‘ideological vacuum’ on the magazine, another claimed
Spectator
leaders were regarded as so insubstantial that even leader-writers on the sister
Telegraph
newspaper did not bother to read them.

A
Telegraph
writer herself, Cristina Odone wrote when Boris left the
Spectator
in December 2005, shortly after David Cameron became Leader: ‘A weekly political magazine ought to have more than circulation in its sights: it should have an impact on the life of the nation. The
Spectator
, hijacked for nearly six years by an editor who saw life as a big joke, instead sidestepped the serious issues of the day and missed out on shaping the most important transformation of the Tory party since Margaret Thatcher.’
¹⁷

Long after leaving the
Spectator
, Boris continued his record of poor punditry when he predicted the Conservatives would win outright in 2010, and of course they didn’t.

Odone’s judgment may have been harsh but it is fair to say she was not
the only one to consider Boris short on gravity. One of his many sidelines was presenting BBC Radio 4’s
The Week in Westminster
, which was meant to be a fairly weighty analysis of political events. In October 1999, a few months after he took over at
the Spectator
, he was sacked from the job. Such a dismissal might have tarnished the golden boy’s reputation, but Boris deployed his formidable public relations skills to turn an evident negative into a glowing endorsement. Oh, and at least one column. If ever there was proof all publicity is good publicity, this must be it.

The ‘brutal sacking’ had, he told his readers, been due to his irredeemably posh accent, which had offended the egalitarian ears of the BBC and Radio 4’s boss James Boyle. He had thus, Boris argued in the
Spectator
, been fashionably elevated to become a victim of discrimination ‘just because I lacked the chameleon skills of Tony Blair, who knows just how to perform a perfect glottal stop and drop an aitch on
Richard and Judy
.’ Knowing his audience to a tee, he went on: ‘Of course he is right to sack me. What is this voice but the inherited result of aspiration and education, acquired in the belief that it would invariably speed the advancement of its user? [But] if any of us are so lazy and complacent as to refuse to accept the tyrannical voice correctness of our new masters, then we only have ourselves to blame.’
¹⁸

This was splendid stuff – irony, wit and doubled-edged mockery pouring out from the page. Once again, Boris did not mean what he said, certainly not blaming himself. But now readers could be in no doubt but that his dismissal was unjustified on the grounds of talent or commitment but rather the outrageous result of a virulent outbreak of vocal tyranny. There is only one problem: it may not have been true. Boyle actually rather liked his voice, but wanted to make changes for reasons of ‘tone and adaptability.’ ‘I’m afraid Boris just made that up,’ says Boyle, who has now left the BBC. ‘The only correspondence as I recall (on the matter) was a subsequent letter of apology from him to me. It’s all part of the game.’

And Boris loved the game even when it involved turning on those who had helped him most. That included Dominic Lawson, who had given him his first political column and tolerated his foibles. Based on
the testimony of a renegade spy called Richard Tomlinson, in January 2001 Boris outed him on the front page of the
Spectator
as Agent Smallbrow of MI6. Lawson, who was by then editor of the sister title, the
Sunday Telegraph
, was not impressed at this gross disloyalty, not least the fact that Boris failed to warn him.

‘He knew me, we were friendly – it was intensely annoying. And apart from anything else, if you’re running a newspaper with foreign correspondents in strange parts of the world, as I was then, it’s potentially a physical threat to them if it’s believed that they’re working for British intelligence. You can imagine how angry I was. I rang him up, but there was just this sense of “Never mind, Dommers, I just did it for a laugh.” And the thing about Boris is that because in some strange way he is adorable, one forgives him. It’s not just women; men too fall for that charm. He is not at all a malicious person, and he was on the make as editors are, and he wanted to sell his magazine. He exudes a general bonhomie and it’s contagious. After a week of being furious, I didn’t give it another moment’s thought.’

Boris also repeatedly upset Charles Moore, then editor of the
Daily Telegraph
and arguably his most ardent long-term supporter. The well-known rule within the
Telegraph
group was that any article published in the magazine would also be offered to its sister newspapers without charge, before being made available to other publications for money. ‘The
Spectator
was a huge beneficiary of the
Telegraph
’s generosity,’ explains Dan Colson. ‘But one day I got an hysterical call from Charles Moore. He was incandescent with rage. “That’s it, he’s done it again! He’s sold a piece to the
Daily Mail
for £1,000! We wanted it for the
Telegraph
!” I phoned Boris, who was perfectly aware of the arrangement [on making articles available]. Of course he wasn’t there, so I left a message. Half an hour later, Boris rings and starts straight off, “I cannot believe I’ve been so monumentally stupid. I should be immediately sacked, my pay confiscated retrospectively, marched out to the square outside Canary Wharf, hung, drawn and quartered on the flagstaff.” I hadn’t had the opportunity to say a word. Well, what could I say after that? I just said, “Let’s see if we can retrieve the situation but don’t plan any major expenditure in the next 48 hours.”’

Again, the ‘sack me!’ defence worked. It was, rather charitably, decided that Boris had simply ‘not been thinking.’ The
Mail
was duly warned off and did not run the piece. Boris lived for another day, and the storm, as always, passed. But how did he get away with it that time and so many others? ‘I did threaten to sack him at least a couple of times,’ admits Colson, ‘but he’s like a mischievous child. You want to wring his neck but somehow you never do. You still love him. It’s like dealing with one of my own kids. His buffoonery is an act, but it works for him. He puts you on the defensive. He’s brilliant at it, and he knows he is.’

It was not the only time Moore was driven mad with fury by Boris’s pursuit of cash. Although he paid Boris well for his column on the
Telegraph
, which was also the paper that had rescued and promoted his career, in September 2001 Boris sold the serialisation of his political memoirs
Friends, Voters, Countrymen
to the paper’s deadly rivals at
The Times
. Sarah Sands, then Charles Moore’s deputy, remembers, ‘Charles being furious that Boris had done that. I saw Boris with his head in his hands, saying that the
Telegraph
had simply not made a good enough offer. But I thought he’d behaved disgracefully. Yet Marina was very robust in his defence. I’ve no idea what her argument for doing so was. Perhaps it was just the fact that she loves him, or perhaps pride, or perhaps just the idea that it was nobody else’s business.’