JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (4 page)

One day when Boris was still very young, a hunt came chasing a stag beside the river below Nethercote and the creature was brought to bay by the hounds. After it had been shot, its heart was cut out by the hunters and given to one of his little brothers. ‘We’ve got the heart! We’ve got the heart!’ he excitedly chanted, carrying the still-beating organ up to the house. ‘So, we cooked it up with a bit of flour,’ Boris recalls, ‘and the German au pair girl left the next day.’
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Within a few months, Hilary, her husband, Peter Heanly, and their four sons emigrated to Australia, where they have lived ever since. (The boys have grown up true Aussies and in another departure seem to have been by-passed by the Johnson blond gene as they are all dark-haired.)

Despite, or perhaps because of Nethercote’s testing geography, Stanley adores the place and has now bought the valley in which it sits to add to the sense of fiefdom. Even when they were living abroad, he took his children back to Nethercote every summer holiday and today still spends much of his time there. He exults in hurtling down the narrow, winding Somerset lanes, free from the restrictions of urban life. ‘He and his car were well-known to the police,’ reveals a close family friend. ‘He used to revel in the number of times he had been stopped and let off – it was a badge of pride in a Johnson japes’ kind of way.’

However Nethercote is emphatically not the classic country seat. Despite appearances, on a mathematical calculation Stanley is only three-eighths English. His father (half-Turkish and a quarter Swiss) scraped together every penny he had to buy the place because it represented the first chance to put down roots in his adopted country, as well as being a safe haven from the bloodshed and bitter
disappointment that had hitherto blighted his family. Johnny was desperately trying to put behind him events that have shaped today’s Johnsons, and arguably Boris, in particular. Embedded within the Johnsonian psyche is a surprising sense of insecurity: there is a very real, if well-disguised fear of being ‘rumbled’ and a concern that financial ruin, no matter how healthy the bank balances, is never far away. Deep down, the family still worry that all they have achieved might be taken from them. So, why is this?

Stanley’s grandfather Ali Kemal was an Anglophile Turkish polemicist in the dying years of the Ottoman Empire, before and just after the First World War. Ali’s father – Boris’s great-great-grandfather – was from the blond-haired Turkish village of Kalfat in Anatolia and his mother was a fair blue-eyed Circassian whom, at least according to Johnson family legend, was of slave origin. The story goes that Hanife Fered bought her freedom by becoming Ali’s father’s second wife. Between them, these two ancestors are responsible for Boris’s astonishing white-blond hair.

In a lifetime of trouble with the authorities, the devoutly Muslim Ali – who could recite the Koran off by heart from the age of six – was first arrested, aged 19, in 1888 for setting up a students’ society. Following this, he spent many years in exile. Returning after the First World War, he left journalism for politics and aligned himself with the British and other victorious allies against the Nationalist movement then emerging under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. Appointed interior minister in the Sultan’s last government in May 1919, he was, as one contemporaneous commentator put it, ‘the puppet of a puppet.’
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Ali effectively outlawed Atatürk by instructing government outposts not to provide him with supplies or support. The subsequent row led to Ali’s resignation, although he continued his opposition in print.

But he had chosen his enemies unwisely: Atatürk led the Nationalists to power in 1922, became father of modern Turkey and wasted no time in eliminating his enemies. Ali was then kidnapped by a Nationalist gang during his morning shave at Istanbul’s elite Cercle d’Orient club, denounced as a traitor and attacked with sticks, stones and knives before finally being hanged and, allegedly, his body
parts stuffed into a tree. For Boris, this untimely end to a proud man’s life – recounted to all Johnsons from an early age – has proved a powerful lesson as to the dangers of full-frontal confrontation and inflexible principles. Generally, he avoids open defiance, preferring subtler, yet still effective ways of undermining enemies and rivals. From family history, he knows how ‘sticking to your guns’ can lead to disaster. Even his greatest fans concede that unlike his great-grandfather, he is unencumbered by ideological fixity, a characteristic that has thus far served him well: Boris prefers being liked to being consistent.

Back in 1909, Ali’s half-English, half-Swiss first wife Winifred had given birth to their son Osman (Stanley’s father) in Bournemouth because it was believed she would be safer there than in Turkey. Shortly after childbirth, she died of puerperal fever without having the chance to bid farewell to her husband. Following her death, Ali did not return to collect his son and so little Osman and his elder sister Celma were brought up by their English grandmother, Margaret Brun, and eventually took her maiden name (Johnson). Stanley believes that Osman had no recollection of meeting his father. Certainly, Ali was not much of a parent, paying little towards his children’s upkeep and then leaving them in hardship after his death.

For the next 70 years, Osman effectively suppressed his Turkish roots. Early on in his life, his grandmother dropped the obviously Turkish name and he became Wilfred (his middle name) Johnson in honour of his mother. Bitter at being abandoned, Wilfred forbade any mention of Ali Kemal – but he was still an unspoken background presence throughout Boris’s childhood. Boris’s mother Charlotte once raised the subject with her parents-in-law, but was quickly hushed; she never tried again.

Wilfred, Boris’s grandfather, became increasingly enchanted with the idea of Englishness and the ensuing security, and soon decided he wanted to blend in even more by becoming known as ‘Johnny’. From Osman to Johnny in two jumps, he thus completed the progression from son of a Turkish Man of Letters to English public schoolboy (Boris was to continue the Johnsonian habit of elective changes of name and identity to suit circumstances in his own life). A taciturn
man of little outward emotion, Johnny kept his Turkish ancestry extremely quiet, not least because the Turks had fought on the ‘wrong’ side in the war. Perhaps more importantly, casual racism, particularly among his peers at school, was then the norm. As Stanley puts it: ‘Turks were basically wogs so if you were the son of a Turk, you were the son of a wog.’
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When all maintenance ceased upon the death of Ali, Johnny had to leave school at 13 and ended up working on a farm in the Nile Delta belonging to a Swiss uncle. Here, with great good fortune, he met Boris’s grandmother Irène Williams and married her in 1936. The match was to change his life and prospects.

Half-English, half-French Irène could (and often did) claim a little grandeur. She was born in 1907 in the grand Pavillion du Barry in Versailles belonging to Baron Hubert de Pfeffel, father of her rather stern-looking mother, Marie-Louise. In 2008 the BBC programme
Who Do You Think You Are
? established Irène was the great-granddaughter of an actress and her German lover, one Prince Paul von Württemberg, a direct descendant of George II. This royal connection makes Boris an eighth cousin of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Known to Boris as ‘Granny Butter’, Irène may have been unaware of her royal German blood because of the illegitimacy but she certainly used to amuse her grandchildren with frequent claims to an aristocratic French lineage. At the time, this seemed somewhat implausible, even comic, as Boris and his siblings knew her as someone who worked hard with little fuss or glamour, often laboriously skimming cream off milk, which is presumably how she earned her family nickname. Clearly, Irène yearned for more and viewed rustic Nethercote as something of a prison. Her royal antecedence now proven, Boris no longer laughs at her pretensions. Instead he casts his mind back to the savage contrast between her affluent, early life and the ‘extreme struggle against the elements on Exmoor where everything was covered in lichen. We were wrong to snigger.’
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Certainly, Irène was anxious for the tongue-twisting de Pfeffel (silent ‘P’) to remain in the family, which is why Boris still bears this as his third name today, and she urged her son Stanley (born August 1940 in Cornwall and one of two boys and two girls) to explore the possibility of claiming a French barony through her ancestry. After
all, she had grown up with chauffeurs, housekeepers and a smart red Daimler called Poppy and it was her family money that helped keep the Johnsons afloat and ensured Stanley was educated as an English gentleman with a classical syllabus largely composed of Latin and Greek (Science did not feature, while Maths was a definite weak point – a foretaste of Boris’s own academic inclinations).

Perhaps Irène recognised Stanley, though not the eldest son, was the most likely (and certainly the most driven) to restore her family to its rightful place in society. Those who have known him for most of his adult life remark how it has been his single-handed (and single-minded) ambition to create a new political and journalistic dynasty. He does not talk about his siblings. Indeed, former political commentator Anthony Howard (whose widow is godmother to Leo) once remarked: ‘I’ve known Stanley for 50 years, but I didn’t know that his brothers and sisters even existed – he must be a total egotist.’

Having been toughened up by his hard-knocks, 1950s public-school education, Stanley frowns on public displays of emotion and expects his children to show equal resilience. He admits to being unemotional and his manner can make him seem cold, retreating ‘turtle-like’ as one observer put it, when any kind of emotional topic is raised. He recalls his first night away at boarding school at the age of eight, listening with evident disgust to the ‘snivelling’ of a boy in the next bed – ‘Well, I’m sure I missed my mummy too, but that didn’t seem to me to be the point.’
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And he also refers to the victim of prefects’ repeated beatings as ‘some poor snivelling sod.’
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For Stanley, a joke is the easy answer to any sensitive situation, however inappropriate. Some years ago at a New Year’s Day lunch he bumped into a contemporary from his old Devonian prep school he hadn’t seen in decades. The former school pal revealed how being abused sexually by the co-headmaster almost destroyed his life. In his autobiography Stanley tells how he decided it was best to respond with a flippant quip. “‘He never made a pass at me!” I protested.’ Unsurprisingly, the joke fell flat, his childhood friend retorting: “‘Then you were one of the lucky ones”’.
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It is unlikely Boris would have misread the situation so badly.

Stanley is not renowned for his tact – as he once observed: ‘Human
relationships remain a mystery to me.’
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However, like all the Johnsons, he can also be charming and has got better at holding an audience over the years. The former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd describes him as ‘good value’ and ‘impossible to dislike.’ But as with his son, the act serves to conceal a steely, highly competitive core evident from his earliest time at school. Like many public schoolboys, Stanley seems to look back on his days in full-time education with unlimited affection and pride. A chunk of his memoirs,
Stanley I Presume?
, is taken up with recitations of school and university triumphs, prizes won, scholarships bagged, high marks scored, rugby tack les delivered. As he himself admits, in one of those appealing Johnsonian moments of self-knowledge, after all the glory at Sherborne, ‘it took me quite some time to recover from a swollen head.’
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In perhaps his first sweet taste of stardom, he was also head boy. ‘Whenever I walked through the school, 660 boys stood to attention and took their hands out of their pockets,’ he recalls.
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In stark contrast to his peripatetic adulthood as a boy Stanley led a restricted life, rarely straying off the farm apart from journeys to and from two private boarding schools, where he mixed with boys usually much wealthier than himself and of a certain class. Indeed, he claims that he had never even encountered a grammar school boy before he went up to Oxford in October 1959 at the age of 19 and found himself sharing a set of rooms with one. He appears to have been bewildered by the exoticism of his roommate’s background: ‘Mike told me how his father had once sought work during the Depression,’ he recalls with amazement before adding, rather sweetly: ‘I’m surprised Mike put up with me.’
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Fortunately, the fascination seems to have been mutual. Stanley’s physical and social isolation as a child may well explain the way he brought up his own family, though.

He had gone up to Oxford on a Stapledon Scholarship in Classics despite the fact that in one paper he wrote a short story, whereas he had actually been asked to write an essay. That he not only got away with it but was celebrated for doing so is pure Johnsonia – an illuminating insight into the family philosophy that somehow they are exempt from the restrictions applied to others. ‘What on earth had possessed me, except possibly some kind of adolescent arrogance
that had led me to think it was alright to break the rules as long as you did so in style?’ Stanley asks rhetorically.
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As part of a life-plan he set himself three goals for his time in Oxford: 1) to win a Blue by playing rugby for the University; 2) to become President of the Union and 3) to bag a first in Greats, the Oxford name for Classics. None of these greater goals fell into his lap as he might have expected. He managed captain of the college rugby team, but never membership of the University XV. In the Union, he got no further than the Library Committee. Surprisingly, given the Johnsonian adulation of the ancient world, Stanley gave up the four-year slog of Classics – and had, in any case, notched up only a second in the first set of exams (known at Oxford as ‘Mods’) before he switched to English. ‘Deep down, I knew I had taken the easy way out,’ he says.
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