JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (7 page)

At times, his father can sound astonishingly flippant about an event that ruptured Boris and his siblings’ remaining childhood. ‘I suppose
Charlotte and I grew apart – it is very hard to say, I never tried to analyse what happened in my first marriage. Look, I have no idea how much the children did or did not suffer, because I never asked them,’ is vintage Stanley.
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Four years later, when asked again why he separated from Charlotte, his stance was even more light-hearted: ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
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And when pressed on whether he had strayed: ‘These questions are not good – I was wholly faithful to Charlotte in all important respects.’
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Such quips could easily drop from Boris’s own lips: seemingly, father and son share the same refusal to take conventional morals seriously or to abide by the same rules as anyone else. Both are fond of laddish banter and crude sexual references. At a book signing, Stanley once boasted to a woman about the frequency with which he had sex. His early novels offered numerous steamy encounters and a favourite game among the young Johnsons was to scour their father’s books for the ‘dirty bits.’ But it wouldn’t take long: ‘You just open one of Stanley’s novels at a random page, and there is inevitably something about sex. Good stuff !’ chuckles Douglas Hurd. ‘We needed only to snigger the words “rubbery nipples” to collapse in merriment,’ recalls Rachel.
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Sex, sexual organs and sexual conquests are Johnsonian mainstays of conversation. Later, Boris infamously told a girlfriend that such was the number of his sexual partners that he hadn’t had ‘to have a wank for twenty years.’
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Pretty much anything must be treated as a Johnson joke; once laughed about, however, it can be forgotten. The surprise must be that the son continues in the same vein after witnessing and being horrified by the intense suffering his father’s philandering caused his mother.

Stanley’s family certainly believe him to have been a serial adulterer. One of Rachel’s close friends relates how she ‘has moaned that Stanley was lecherous towards the au pairs, who were only a few years older than her.’ Indeed, her father has expressed some disquieting enthusiasm for the constant supply of young girls in the house, particularly during the hot days of summer 1976. ‘Our au pairs wore nothing – I do remember them certainly parading down by the river. Oliver Walston [a friend] says they wore nothing in the house, too –
he sent a card afterwards, saying, “Thanks for the mammaries.”’
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The Johnsons frequently took the precaution of hiring two au pairs in the hope both would not leave at once, although they sometimes did.

Even today, at parties Stanley’s eyes constantly rove the room. Fellow guests often notice this unusual flirtatiousness in a man entering his eighth decade. Although there is no suggestion of infidelity to his current wife, Rachel’s close friends – perhaps those with the greatest insight into this generally secretive family – have heard harrowing tales of the effect of his past affairs on Charlotte. Rachel herself has spoken a good deal about it over the years. ‘She is very conscious of the damage Stanley had caused Charlotte through philandering,’ says one of Rachel’s former boyfriends. ‘I don’t think it made Rachel feel insecure, but it has made her feel more appreciative of her mother. She is also very fond of her father. I think he has indulged her and so she has come to terms with it. Maybe all the Johnson jesting is the way they all come to terms with it.’

Boris has told girlfriends that his way of coping was to make himself invulnerable so that he would never experience such pain again. True to form, however, he speaks less of it outside the family than Rachel. He once admitted to an interviewer that he had been ‘upset’ by the split, then immediately tried to close the open door by spluttering, ‘No, it had some effect. They handled it brilliantly.’
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Most acquaintances, even those who have known him for years, would have no inkling of the pain in his childhood: he has the hard outer shell of a child from a broken home, who has also had to deal with grave family illness.

Stanley told the children of the divorce when they were all at Nethercote for the holidays, prompting 14-year-old Boris to ask: ‘Why did you have us?’
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Charlotte, now 36, returned to London with her four children and moved into a top-floor maisonette on Elgin Crescent and Colville Terrace, Notting Hill paid for with the proceeds of the sale of the Regents Park Road house. A bohemian home stuffed with oil paintings, exotic rugs, a doll’s house and flowers, it was close to the fashionable markets and bars of Portobello Road and Westbourne Grove.

At last in her natural milieu, she found herself recovering mentally
and able to live on the sales of her portraits of prominent characters such as Jilly Cooper and Joanna Lumley, worth thousands of pounds each. Compared to what she and the children were used to, however, money was tight as she refused to accept financial support from Stanley. Indeed, the roof leaked for a while and she also recalls, ‘Once I sent the boys to the market to buy a turkey for Christmas and they came back with a capon because turkey was too expensive. So, Christmas dinner was rather small that year. It was like something out of Dickens. So, it’s not true when people say Boris is cut off from reality.’
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Boris and his brothers were banned from playing ball games in the communal gardens but instead made do with cricket and darts in the hallways. They would also hide behind the roof parapet to drop water bombs onto unsuspecting passers-by on the pavement below. Such childish fun notwithstanding, Boris now assumed a key role in the family, acting as confidant and emotional support to his mother. His position as alpha male was thus unassailable, as was his growing aptitude as an emotionally literate companion to women, one who would listen and strike the right note, even if he could not be faithful.

Charlotte makes it clear the marriage had been doomed, whatever her efforts. ‘I couldn’t stay with [Stanley]. He was so inaccessible, not to say completely unfaithful. I couldn’t live with him never allowing anything to be serious. That’s the essential difference between Boris and his father. I can talk to Boris about anything.’
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When her children’s friends meet Charlotte for the first time, usually they are surprised at how different she is from them – and also from Stanley. ‘I thought if there is one woman in this room who is least likely to be Boris’s mother, then it is her,’ recalls one. She is calm, whereas Stanley is excitable; gentle where he is boisterous; quiet where he is noisy; retiring while he likes to be the centre of orbit. ‘She takes the Ma Rothschild view of publicity – that your name should appear in the newspapers no more than three times,’ remarks Le Fanu. And then of course she is genuinely upper class in contrast to Stanley’s more rackety family history.

Charlotte eventually found happiness in 1988 when she married an American academic, Nicholas (Nick) Wahl, a man several years her
senior but with whom she had so much more in common than Stanley. She left for New York again, this time to live with him in an apartment in Washington Square. He, meanwhile, worked as a professor at New York University and toiled away on what he hoped would be the definitive biography of Charles de Gaulle although sadly, this was never finished.

Nick had no children of his own but doted on hers and the affection was mutual. ‘They were all very fond of their step-dad, Nick Wahl,’ says a close observer. ‘He was gentle, and nice – totally different from Stanley, who is a show-off.’ ‘Nick was good to Charlotte,’ recalls Brian Johnson.

The couple spent eight happy years together in New York before Nick’s death from cancer in 1996. Once again Charlotte returned to Notting Hill, alone. Although still painting whenever she can, she has had to contend with Parkinson’s disease for nearly 30 years. When visiting his mother, Boris is a loving son and talks up her painting talents with commendable filial loyalty. However, Rachel’s friends say as Charlotte’s only daughter, the responsibility of caring for an ailing mother has fallen unevenly on her. She will – and does – drop everything whenever there is another medical crisis, although she never reveals the pain and anguish this sometimes causes. In addition, she has also had to deal with her husband’s chronic health problems that necessitated a liver transplant. Illness has stalked her family, it seems. ‘I have never seen Rachel break down,’ reveals one of her closest friends, ‘whatever life throws at her – it is not the Johnsonian way. She doesn’t want sympathy, but she does crave recognition.’

While home life leading up to the split was painful for Boris, school was not that much better. All four siblings attended Ashdown House, which Stanley describes in the following way: ‘… as far as I could tell – a very happy ship.’ Boris’s own recollections of his time there seem rather different and are a subject on which he becomes unusually emotional. Now a happy, highly successful establishment, the school has indeed played a large part in creating the Boris we know today.

Rachel was the first girl boarder, but was later joined by another. However, used to mixing with boys – and sometimes even requesting to be called ‘Richard’ – she completely ignored the other girl. Perhaps
she may have decided she was the ‘wrong sort’ after learning her father drove a Rolls and lived in a mock Tudor house in Surrey. Rachel also believes her presence there finally persuaded the headmaster to give up beating pupils. Stanley is insouciant – supportive even – of corporal punishment as a means to impart a valuable lesson in how not to ‘blub’, but it deeply troubled Boris. In fact, his contempt for the beatings and the masters who administered them is very revealing of the hidden, softer side of his personality frequently lost in the heat and noise of everyday existence.

This concern impressed his future proprietor Conrad Black, who noted that Boris’s schooldays were one of the few subjects on which he became serious, and a believable and passionate opponent of corporal punishment. He also told Black how he would hear the younger boys crying, in terrible pain, and just how distressing it was. ‘He was outraged at the physical cruelty inflicted by the faculty. He never gave me the impression that he had often been the victim of such treatment, but I would not doubt the depth of his revulsion at the thought of small boys being terrorised and battered.’ Lord Black also observes Boris’s haunted, angry tone on the school beatings in contrast to the typically joking one with which he is more associated.

Boris has also written of his experiences, using the word ‘idyllic’ below in his characteristically ironic manner. ‘It seems amazing that in our lifetimes otherwise humane teachers would roll up their sleeves, flex the Malacca and – with or without a pervy Terry-Thomas glint in the eye – administer violent corporal punishment to the children they were supposed to be instructing. My memory of an otherwise idyllic 1970s English prep school is that masters used virtually any weapon of discipline they could lay their hands on.’ He goes on to reveal an uncharacteristically heartfelt conviction: ‘I remember being so enraged at being whacked for talking at the wrong moment that it has probably given me a lifelong distrust of authority.’
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Away from home, his mother ill, the family’s future uncertain and now confronted with the misery of beatings (and possibly worse), it was at this point that Boris came up with a formidable method of self-protection. It may not be irrelevant that he – and his siblings – had
already read a great deal of PG Wodehouse at home. In any case, family observers detected a startling change in him not long after he began attending Ashdown House. One noted: ‘I heard he had hard times at school for his Turkish lineage, coming under fire for being a foreigner and coming over the Channel from Brussels. So he created a dishevelled look and persona, this 1930s-style English eccentric who appears to be bumbling, but is actually fantastically well read. It was a survival tactic and it worked brilliantly.’ The experience also equipped him with another of his most endearing qualities: a genuine empathy for outsiders of whatever national or racial origin that he has demonstrated throughout his life. Indeed, it’s an important element of his popular appeal.

Whatever antipathy he might still harbour against some of his former masters, it was at this ‘idyllic’ prep school that Boris won a King’s Scholarship to Eton, reinforcing his position as Johnson top dog. Then headmaster Clive Williams rated all the Johnson children very highly, but added Rachel, ‘was not as brilliant as Boris.’ Leo later became head boy at Ashdown, but narrowly missed out on an Eton scholarship. For all his distractions, Boris excelled in Greek and Latin, quickly outclassing boys who had studied the subjects far longer. He was also an enthusiastic, if not brilliant rugby player. By now, he was physically, intellectually and emotionally tough – and an impressive figure of remarkable assurance.

There was, though, another challenge for the four children, who had already endured so much. A year after his divorce came through (and following his election in 1979 as Conservative MEP for Wight and Hampshire East), Stanley met his future wife, Jenny. He married her on 27 February 1981 when Boris was 16. Doubtless happy that their father had found new contentment so quickly, nonetheless it is never easy for the children of a first marriage to deal with subsequent nuptials, particularly when they lead to further siblings.

Jenny, nine years Stanley’s junior and the young widow of the theatre director Robert Kidd, is widely hailed as a charming, poised and intelligent woman. Before meeting him, she worked as editor at the publisher Weidenfeld and is considered a good hostess but she is also known for being reserved, someone who ‘doesn’t give much
away.’ (She is also said to lean to the Left of Stanley, leading Rachel to observe: ‘My father tends to marry socialists.’) Inheriting a large, cohesive troupe of wilful children cannot have been smooth sailing for her either. A year later, she gave birth to her own daughter Julia, followed three years on by a son, Max. Both share the Johnson blond trademark, as well as drive and confidence but observers say there have been tensions. A friend of the older Johnson offspring remarks: ‘It was very difficult for them when Stanley had more children – they felt Jenny didn’t want anything to do with them. They felt she treated them like visitors to her house rather than making it another home for them.’ Even today there is competition between the two sets. At one of Stanley’s book-signings in 2010 – attended by both his daughters – friends of Rachel recall her distress that Julia had a more prominent seat. Later on, she was sitting in the chair closest to Stanley and defiantly placed at right angles to Julia and Jenny.