JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (39 page)

‘My impressions via my ex-husband were that my marriage collapsed after he started working at the
Spectator
,’ says Royce several years later and now divorced. She was particularly concerned about goings-on at the magazine’s notorious parties, which put together herds of powerful middle-aged men with gaggles of impressed – or perhaps that should be impressionable – young women, in a tightly-packed space. Flattery was traded, fuelled by the
Spectator
’s stocks of Ruinart champagne. Boris would invite beautiful young women – including, in 2004, 20-year old Ruzwana Bashir, the then President of the Oxford Union. With long, glossy dark hair and a good brain, she resembled a young Marina. A story in the
Mail on Sunday
suggested he ‘had been all over her’ at the party, but Bashir denied any impropriety, saying ‘he’s a really nice guy. But we have certainly not kissed.’

Royce became suspicious when she was invited to one such gathering a year earlier, but was barred by Liddle from attending any
later events. ‘Rod used to say that wives weren’t invited,’ says Royce. ‘It might have been Rod making it up or the regime that Boris created at the
Spectator
. I felt it was Boris at the time – they were all at it.’ The 2003 party worried her: she had arrived to find Marina and her father Charles Wheeler greeting guests at the door rather than Boris. ‘Marina was as exhausted as I was – she’d been in Birmingham working. The party was heaving and where did I find my husband? He was on this little space outside a window that they were using as a roof terrace. He was agog at this blonde twenty-something. That was my impression of
Spectator
parties, full of young things in short dresses, high heels and lipstick, and the men flirting with them and ignoring their wives. I just felt that Boris was running the whole place like a knocking shop. It was a case of all being lads together, all girls in short skirts, and “phwooar, good on yer Rod.” He was treated like a hero for having an affair, like a new Alan Clark figure.

‘I probably blamed Boris more than I should, rather than my own husband, at the time. But why did he have to have young, gorgeous women on reception and not someone mature or even a man?’

Indeed, Marina is also thought to have disliked the parties – although she attended them out of loyalty. ‘I remember coming to one very late and bumping into Marina standing in the street. She clearly was not looking forward to going at all,’ recalled Anthony Howard.

The Liddle disclosures, however, were soon overtaken by a much bigger story. In August, the Home Secretary David Blunkett was revealed to be having an affair with the
Spectator
’s publisher Kimberly Fortier. Even though a giggling Fortier would steer Blunkett round
Spectator
parties like a living trophy, few if any had guessed exactly what the socialite had been doing with the socialist for the past three years. When news of the affair came out, another
Spectator
writer Petronella Wyatt described its origins: a dinner at Wheeler’s restaurant in St James’s back in 2001 that she had also attended. Fortier arrived at the restaurant and in her flirtatious manner, Wyatt recounted, told the defenceless Blunkett that she had always wondered what it was like to sleep with a blind man. She later found out. In perhaps her best line to date, Wyatt recalled: ‘Mr Blunkett and
I ate Dover sole. Ms Fortier ate Mr Blunkett.’
¹⁷
Later, Fortier also gobbled up the
Spectator
’s wine correspondent, Simon Hoggart.

Blondes, blind men, champagne, American socialites, double affairs, government ministers and wiry lotharios – the
Spectator
, normally a minority-interest magazine, captured the entire nation’s imagination. What fictional soap opera could possibly compete with the magazine they renamed the
Sextator
? Soon those US-based Boris-watching journalists were back to chronicle the goings-on. Some time later,
Vanity Fair
magazine expressed its admiration: ‘Washington should steal a tabloid page from its closest and horniest ally, Great Britain. When it comes to whipping up a political sex scandal into a donnybrook, the Brits have us beat – they really know how to make the bedsheets billow.’
¹⁸

Fortunately for the participants, it appears that Conrad Black and Dan Colson were similarly entertained by the goings-on. ‘The whole tangle of relationships had their amusing aspects,’ says Black. But they may also have influenced their decision not to offer Boris the editorship of the
Sunday Telegraph
in September 2003, as widely expected. ‘We were a little worried that Boris was not quite mature and committed enough,’ explains Colson. To be fair it is likely that Boris would not have accepted such an offer as it would have made continuing as an MP even more complicated. It was probably the last occasion, however, when Boris came near to pursuing a career as a national newspaper editor. The die was now cast.

Moreover, from late 2003, Black and Colson’s influence was waning. Pressures were mounting on Black to step down from Hollinger, the parent company for both the
Spectator
and
Telegraph
titles. The other shareholders were concerned about Hollinger’s performance and there were allegations about payments to Black from the company. As the row intensified, he put his 73 per cent voting stake in the company up for sale in November 2003. The following month the notoriously hard-line US Securities & Exchange Commission called Black in for questioning. On 18 January 2004, the Hollinger board mounted a $200 million lawsuit against Black over alleged financial irregularities and ousted him as chairman a day before he sold his shareholding to the Barclay brothers. The threat of
criminal proceedings was also growing, with Black fighting for his survival.

In the next issue of the
Spectator
, Boris decided to run a two-page article on the man who had done so much to propel him into stardom and who was vigorously protesting his innocence. Entitled ‘The ballad of Connie and Babs’ and again written under the by-line of the political editor Peter Oborne, it accused Black of ‘stolidity, clumsiness and provincialism’ and having ‘murky business origins.’
¹⁹
He had ‘hairy knuckles and paddle-like hands’ and a ‘fondness for ceremony and dressing up [that] was pre-modern in its profound lack of irony and unabashed vulgarity.’ He spoke very slowly, it went on, and his wife Barbara Amiel, although ‘charming, clever and quite ravishingly beautiful,’ was also ‘capable of a definite grandeur of approach.’ This was a breathtaking attack, even though balanced with kinder words such as ‘Whatever sins he may have committed, he ran the
Telegraph
well.’
²⁰

Now that Black was no longer capable of helping Boris’s career, his impersonations became even crueller. ‘Boris took pleasure in mimicking Black’s slow, deep transatlantic drawl and slightly laboured delivery, using clumsy grammatical devices such as “whereunto,”’ recalls a
Spectator
staffer.

Boris, though, was riding high. His name was now regularly bandied about as a possible one-day contender for Downing Street – although each time he was posed the question about his ambitions for the top job, he disguised seriousness of purpose with a variation on the quip: ‘My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or of my being reincarnated as an olive.’

For the first time he also published a novel and when it was launched, Douglas Hurd said admiringly in a review that it read as if it were written in three days and nights ‘flat out.’
²¹
Seventy-Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors
is actually a rollicking read for anyone with a modicum of interest in politics – or rather Boris. It centres on the figure of a middle-aged male Tory MP of such inept self-absorption that his bicycling becomes virtually his only appealing feature. Obsessed by fears that an embarrassing indiscretion is about to be
exposed, Roger Barlow fails to notice a terrorist attack unfolding right in front of him. The similarities between Boris and Barlow are too numerous to dismiss. Other characters are also largely based on real figures. There are many in Boris’s life, including Stuart Reid and most of the
Spectator
staff, who pored over the text in a bid to identify themselves. The names of the characters are instructive – the regally-mannered traffic warden, William Eric Kinloch Onyeama, shares his first three names with Boris’s former Eton headmaster Sir (William) Eric Anderson. Barlow’s beautiful and moralising (female) assistant is called Cameron, the woman police sniper is Nath, the surname of one of Boris’s greatest rivals at Eton, while an ostrich bears the name of Kimberly.

Barlow groans and runs his hands through his hair in a familiar style and his most daring utterance echoes Boris’s own support of any consenting union including that ‘between three men and a dog.’ He even sends Christmas cards to Justin and Nell, the names of Boris’s closest friends. All in all, it’s a breathtaking exercise in self-knowledge and/or self-parody. And as Hurd points out, the book even mocks in turn ‘every possible attitude’ to the Iraq War – ‘which seems in harmony with the official
Spectator
line of supporting the war but impeaching the man who started it.’
²²

Given all the autobiographical teasing, one must assume Boris shares his character’s rather hostile views on the Palace of Westminster. Barlow appears to despise some of the sacred Puginesque adornments – what he calls ‘the whorls and volutes of the Pugin entablature’ – branding them ‘demented’ and guilty of ‘prinking pomposity.’ And there is perhaps also a little Borissian self-congratulation. Cameron decides she wants an alpha male, an authority figure to supplant her father. She has a ‘deep and sexist reverence for men who really knew stuff. It amazed her sometimes how little appearances mattered. He could be bald, he could be spindly or sweaty or tubby, but if that man’s disquisition had enough interest, fluency and authority, it would speak directly to her groin.’
²³

Nineteenth-century commentators had scoured Disraeli’s novels for clues as to the real nature of their author, finding in books such as
Sybil
and
Vivian Grey
‘the memoirs he never wrote.’ Similarly, students
of Boris should scrutinise
Seventy-Two Virgins
. They might well pause over the following two passages in particular for some useful insights into Boris’s life philosophy. ‘We all have in our lives someone who controls our emotional thermostat,’ he writes. ‘There is always someone whose function is to supply the pipette drops of praise, the intermittent goo’boy choc drops of external affirmation that gets us through the day. The story of our lives is essentially the rotation of that person’s identity: mother, father, teacher, girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse and so on.’ And later: ‘To a man like Roger Barlow, the whole world just seemed to be a complicated joke, an accidental jumbling of ingredients on the cosmic stove, which had produced our selfish genes. For Barlow, everything was always up for grabs, capable of dispute; and religion, laws, principle, custom – these were nothing but sticks we plucked from the wayside to support our faltering steps.’
²⁴

There is also something eerily prescient about the book, a notion of life imitating art (not least because it features home-grown suicide bombers who try to blow up parts of London only a year before a similar atrocity takes place). But there is another strand. Here is Quentin Letts in a review in the
Evening Standard
: ‘The Tory MP in the book is terrified that a sex-related indiscretion of his is about to be exposed in the
Daily Mirror
. It is interesting that Johnson should write so convincingly about a politician’s fear of scandal.’
²⁵
Indeed. And in so doing, Boris followed in the footsteps of another one-time Conservative party darling, Jeffrey Archer. Yet at this point it seemed for all the world as if scandal happened to other people, even if they were some of Boris’s closest colleagues on the
Spectator
. In contrast, his own rise as a political celebrity appeared to be irresistible. One big-name American reporter enthused about the ‘inspirational’ Brit politician who was on the one hand ‘arguably the English language’s greatest pundit’ and the natural heir to the charm and good humour of Ronald Reagan, and on the other suffering from a ‘state of dishevelment as great [as any] seen in an employed person.’
²⁶
The Boris brand was going global.

On Tuesday, 12 October 2004, Simon Heffer was showering at the
Garrick Club before dining with a Conservative politician. Heffer is one of that handful of journalists able to put together a cogent piece at breakneck speed and so it was not surprising that Boris phoned him in desperation when the
Spectator
was short of a leader at a late stage in its weekly editorial cycle. Off the cuff, Heffer suggested writing on the minute’s silence requested (but largely ignored) at the England-Wales football match that week for Ken Bigley, a Liverpudlian contractor who had been murdered by terrorists in Iraq. He did not want to write it himself, having neither the time nor a computer. But Boris pleaded, and so early the next morning Heffer ‘banged out’ a piece first thing from the office and filed it. ‘I didn’t have time to check anything, such as the number of people who died at Hillsborough,’ he told friends afterwards. ‘Boris didn’t check it, Stuart didn’t check it and then things got a bit fruity.’

The article appeared on the Thursday and criticised ‘the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood.’
²⁷
For good measure, it continued: ‘The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley’s murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community.’
²⁸

Stuart Reid took the piece in to Boris, suggesting ‘[it] was a bit rough on Bigley. We took out a few bits but it didn’t occur to either of us that the stuff about Liverpool was a problem. We just thought it was common sense.’ Possibly it is a reflection of the attention given to
Spectator
leaders that no one noticed the piece for 24 hours after it came out. It was not until Friday morning that a row started to brew, with calls for Boris to apologise for the remarks. At this point as the leader was unsigned, no one knew who had written it but as editor, the buck stopped with him. To his credit, he did not try to apportion the blame elsewhere. It was unfortunate in the extreme that the number of Hillsborough deaths was woefully understated at more than 50 (the real figure was 96) and that drunken fans were blamed when in fact this had been ruled out as a cause by an official inquiry.