JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (46 page)

But while he clearly enjoyed the attention and described the position of rector as ‘a fantastic opportunity to be an ambassador for a world-class university,’ it was still an odd decision to stand. Perhaps it reflected a restlessness, an unsatisfied hunger, even with his return to front bench politics. Or was it a practice-run for something bigger? In any case, his charm and fame – combined with a New Boris seriousness of tone – were simply unable to swing him the vote. He came third to Mark Ballard, a 34-year-old Green member of the Scottish Parliament and former student. Link later, a fellow Old Etonian, came second. It was a lesson in how an unpopular policy can derail a popular politician’s best efforts. Most London commentators, his team – and perhaps most particularly Boris himself – had been certain he would win.

He had better luck with his other pet project of the time. In fact, the timing, though accidental, could not have been better. In January 2006, his two-part series,
Dream of Rome
(shown on BBC 2) and followed by an accompanying book in February, displayed Boris at his best. Enthusiastic, funny and inspiring, he used all the senses, startling comparisons between ancient and modern – and of course, sex – to educate through entertainment.

So, the baritus noise made by Barbarians in victory against the Romans was a giant roar ‘like a chorus of Rolf Harris didgeridoos.’ We also learned, ‘it was standard for the [Barbarian] wives to bare their breasts in a kind of
Sun
Page 3 exhortation to the troops.’ Indeed, these sexy Barbarians were ‘clad in nothing but the kind of fur accessories you might find in a fetish shop.’

He drew beguiling comparisons between the Roman Empire and the EU – people who rejected toga-wearing as a revolt against control from Rome, for instance, were ancient versions of today’s Euro-sceptics. But whatever the flashes of fun and ingenuity, there was also a flick of laziness, a sense that the book at least had been rushed.
There are key details missing, arguments not fully backed up with facts. A colleague from the
Telegraph
remembers Boris grumbling that it was ‘bloody hard work, this book thing.’ Asked how long it had taken, Boris replied: ‘Bloody hell, two weeks!’ At the launch in Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street, he revealed a similar impatience with politics: ‘I occasionally wonder what people like me are doing in public life. It is because we hope to become shadow spokesman for higher education!’
⁵

The experience had, however, given him a taste for television presenting – and not just the knock-about style of
HIGNFY
. He quickly realised that it was almost certainly the most lucrative way of flexing the Boris brand – and would provide an escape route from politics, if necessary. Charles Brand, director of history at Tiger Aspect (the TV company that made
Dream of Rome
) remembers Boris as an onscreen ‘natural.’ But it was Tiger Aspect who came up with the arresting idea of comparing ancient Rome to the modern EU.

Next, Brand wanted David Jeffcock to come on board as director. ‘David had recently worked on the
Spectator
programme and he also loved that period of history,’ remembers Brand. ‘He is an old school, died-in-the-wool Leftie, who is very principled and extremely hard working. [But] he was very sniffy, saying he didn’t want anything to do with Boris. We tried very hard to persuade him to do it but clearly something had happened on the
Spectator
film.’ Fortunately, at the last minute Jeffcock changed his mind and then worked flat out, ‘which was very important indeed as Boris is not an old-school grafter.’

Boris could provide something invaluable, though – a certain wit and sheen to ‘give the prose a real lift.’ Jeffcock would complain about his lack of preparation and getting him to turn up for filming was arduous in the extreme. ‘I would be told I had to shout at him, but he would always be unbelievably apologetic,’ remembers Brand. ‘He would roll over just like a puppy, saying it was his fault, how he would never do it again – until the next time. He got away with it because he was good at what he did – eventually. But what Boris was not doing was the source stuff [the research] – although he would, on occasion, question it. Boris hadn’t done anything about Rome for 20 years: he
would start reading like mad about it, but never before he got on the plane to where we were filming. It was David who would sit until four in the morning writing the script and Boris would then spend half an hour adding a few words and making it great.’

Despite the tribulations,
Dream of Rome
was well received. Brand began searching around for another project. But Boris had other ideas. In the greatest of secrecy, he lured the hard-working Jeffcock away to help him set up a rival production company to make a follow-up series. The idea was specifically to cut out Tiger Aspect so that Boris could make a bigger profit. ‘When David told me, he was very embarrassed,’ remembers Brand. ‘Nine months earlier, we’d had to beg him to work with this “charlatan,” and it was irritating as
Dream of Rome
had been our idea and our hard graft.’ Perhaps Boris felt some guilt. Not frequently one for buying lunch, he took Brand to the Cinnamon Club, an upmarket Indian restaurant in Westminster, and played on his sympathy. ‘He wanted to keep the bridges open between us,’ says Brand. ‘He confided in me that he thought he had gone down the political pecking order since the Liverpool saga and other “events.” He said he was not sure he had a future career in Parliament, so to provide for his family he needed to get into TV and make more money from it. He flattered and charmed me into not thinking ill of him, but the result was we were cut out of the follow-up to our own series. It was annoying in the extreme, but what could we do?’

About a year later, Boris’s new company – Finland Station – duly made the less successful follow-up
After Rome: Holy Wars and Conquests
on the rise of Islam up to the time of Crusades. Boris was later found guilty by the Parliamentary authorities of failing to register his shareholding.

Charles Brand need not have felt too sorry for Boris or overly concerned about his bank balance. He might have given up the
Spectator
and the editor’s considerable salary and stock options, but Boris had certainly not given up journalism. It was during these early weeks of 2006 that he was able to take advantage of turmoil at the
Telegraph
to negotiate a pay increase for his column – which he had refused to surrender. As one of its biggest stars, Boris persuaded the acting editor John Bryant to raise his yearly fee from £200,000 to
£250,000 on the understanding that he would also write a column for the
Sunday Telegraph
. That has never happened – Boris has claimed to be too busy to honour the deal or to be ignorant of it – and the £5,000-a-piece rate has remained. (Indeed, according to figures lodged with the Parliamentary authorities he brought in up to £540,000, or nine times an MP’s salary, over the following year, making him the third highest-paid MP after William Hague and David Blunkett.)

The rate of £5,000 a column in particular is a hefty sum, even for someone of Boris’s journalistic stature. Over the years, he has become proficient at writing his column at a speed that would leave others gasping. Typically, he would ask one of his brightest members of staff to do the homework. ‘He used to want a maximum of three facts for his column,’ recalls a former Boris staffer. ‘The researcher would find some good ones and then he would bash it all out in an hour and a half.’ Boris’s greatest challenge, though has often been finding the right subject. In those days, the column appeared on Thursdays. On Wednesday afternoons he would typically seek inspiration by visiting his Westminster staff in the annexe room, where he would play a game to find the best idea. On occasion this would descend into a competition to suggest the theme most likely to produce catastrophic consequences for his career. One of Boris’s favourites was: ‘Why David Cameron is a complete c**t’ – indeed, he was so enthused, he even started to compose an introduction beginning: ‘One thing that has become apparent to me in my years of Parliamentary service is that David Cameron is a complete c**t’. Another time, it was, ‘Why I believe in a European superstate’.

From the way he talked during the fun and games, it was clear that Boris preferred the views and company of those inhabiting the more pro-European and Left-leaning reaches of Toryism rather than the ones at the opposite end of the spectrum. ‘Boris and I got on because we have similar dislike of most members of the Conservative party,’ explains Chris Cook – one of David Willetts’ aides, also based in the annexe room. ‘He’s clearly not on the Right wing, but actually quite Europhile in Tory terms. He liked to come into our office to gossip and bitch about the Right-wingers, particularly
Liam Fox, or indeed anyone else he thought had screwed up the party that week.’

He also came across as being genuinely proud of being, as he called it, a ‘mongrel.’ At several universities he visited, while working on his yet-to-be-published book on Britain, he talked to groups of Muslim students. ‘He told them that we should just all marry each other [as in his own family] and then all our problems would go away,’ recalls one astonished onlooker. ‘I’m not sure they really appreciated that idea.’ But those who worked with him thought Boris genuinely liberal and by no means a racist. ‘He’s unbelievably tolerant, both on an individual level and on a macro level,’ said one. ‘He’s very liberal on the way that people personally lead their lives, as well as being very liberal in policy terms.’ Boris was friendly with his staff and could be great fun, but he did not become friends with them: he remained a detached figure who never quite relaxed or let himself go.

Meanwhile, things were looking up, the disappointments and disasters of 2004 and early 2005 now behind him. True, he had insulted another city – this time Portsmouth – as ‘full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs’ but no Operation Pompey Grovel was really thought necessary. (Later in the year, he offered to go on an ‘apology world tour’, when he upset an entire country by comparing the leadership crisis in the Labour party with ‘Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing’, but he similarly got away with it.) Otherwise in his new higher education capacity, he was making well-received speeches in favour of the study of Latin and Greek, and Ancient and Medieval History. He was earning a lot of money, too – through journalism, books, after-dinner speeches and TV.

Somehow though, it is never enough. Boris’s old friend the ‘death wish’ made a return. On 2 April 2006, the
News of the World
splashed its front page with the headline ‘BORIS CHEATS WITH A BLONDE – MARRIED TORY HAS AFFAIR NO. 2’. The piece continued: ‘We caught the shadow minister enjoying a series of secret trysts with blonde beauty Anna Fazackerley, 29, at her London flat.’ Inside, under the banner: ‘Oh Boris. Not again,’ were some familiar and lurid details. Three times in ten days, Boris had been spotted visiting
Fazackerley’s King’s Road, Chelsea flat. On one occasion he was seen discreetly walking yards behind her, a beanie hat pulled down over his conspicuous blond hair, but then he was photographed furtively nipping through her front door as she held it open for him.

Two hours later, he emerged, hailed a cab and headed off to see Petronella Wyatt at her St John’s Wood home for the next couple of hours (before going home to Marina). On another occasion, he was photographed waving to Fazackerley’s taxi and on another day, she gave a ‘satisfied smile’ as he wheeled his bicycle away from her doorstep. He was also seen dining with her at a Knightsbridge restaurant called Racine – a traditional French eaterie that does Boris’s favourite uncooked steak tartare. Once again, he was spotted getting frisky in the back of a black cab. Plans to take her on his official fact-finding trip to China had been quietly dropped, we were told, because they were too risky – she was instead intending to accompany him on visits to British universities. Anna, it was reported, was ‘smitten’ and Boris found her ‘irresistible.’ Together, they were supposedly ‘head over heels in lust.’ But when the paper approached both for a comment, they separately refused to comply. Boris had learned his lesson – this was not the time for colourful phrases but something plain, blunt and not open to challenge. ‘You’re very kind, but no thank you. Absolutely not! No comment whatsoever. Thanks a lot, bye,’ was what he said. Fazackerley was even briefer: ‘Absolutely not.’

This smart move allowed doubts to creep in that this was not an affair but merely a series of meetings to discuss higher education policy. After all, it was a patch they both patrolled, in their different ways. No doubt Boris, now a master manipulator of the media, was hoping this would be the general conclusion when presented with what was only, after all, circumstantial evidence. When the
News of the World
followed up its revelations with a further piece the following Sunday, there were suggestions that the woman photographed coming out of his room at the Pershing Hall Hotel in Paris (he had booked under his brother’s name on his way back from China) was actually Marina. And after catching the Eurostar back to London, he then spent the next day in Henley, innocently opening a public footpath. So, was Boris having an affair with Anna or not?

While Boris was thousands of miles away on his trip to China, Marina had the press camped outside the family’s Islington home again, trying to find out the answer to that very question. She was grilled on the street by reporters in front of her children and always eager to protect them, lodged a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission. The four children were later driven away from the press scrum to an undisclosed house in the country. Back in London, it was yet another torrid time for Marina, who was seen to have moved her wedding ring to her middle finger. Her father Charles did what he could by arriving to tell the press that the story was ‘rubbish.’ The newspapers began asking whether it was the ‘last hurrah for hanky panky Boris.’ But Boris acted publicly as if everything were normal – and two days later, whisked his wife and family off on a foreign holiday. Press coverage soon dried up – although the questions persisted. When asked about the latest stories by colleagues at the BBC where she worked, Marina’s sister Shirin would frequently shrug her shoulders with apparent resignation and reply: ‘He’s just Boris, what can I say?’