Just Boris

A Tale of Blond Ambition - A Biography of Boris Johnson

Sonia Purnell

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781845137168
• eBook ISBN: 9781845137410
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A major and controversial new biography of one of the most compelling and contradictory figures in modern British life. Born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, to most of us he is just ‘Boris’ – the only politician of the age to be regarded in such familiar, even affectionate terms. Uniquely, he combines comedy with erudition, gimlet-eyed focus with jokey self-deprecation, and is a loving family man with a roving eye. He is also a hugely ambitious figure with seemingly no huge ambitions to pursue – other than, perhaps, power itself. In this revealing biography, written from the vantage point of a once close colleague, Sonia Purnell examines how a shy, young boy from a broken home became our only box-office politician – and most unlikely sex god; how the Etonian product fond of Latin tags became a Man of the People – and why he wanted to be; how the gaffe-prone buffoon charmed Londonders to win the largest personal mandate Britain has ever seen; and how the Johnson family built our biggest – and blondest – media and political dynasty. The first forensic account of a remarkable rise to fame and power, Just Boris unravels this most compelling of political enigmas and asks whether the Mayor who dreams of crossing the Thames to Downing Street has what it takes to be Prime Minister.

Chapter One

Peter Pan and Wendy

Childhood, 1964–1977

For a boy about to be saddled with such a comically florid name, the birth of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in the early afternoon of 19 June 1964 was a far from grand affair. His mother Charlotte, a 22-year-old student, endured the final stages of labour alone in a low-rent hospital known as ‘the Clinic’ on New York’s Upper East Side. Her husband Stanley, 23, had been persuaded to attend only one of her antenatal classes and was not entirely sold on the idea that ‘real men bothered’ with what he later described as the ‘horrific details’.¹

So, when Stanley chose to ‘step outside’² the hospital near the East River on East 70th Street in search of a hearty lunch, his timing may not have been entirely coincidental. In any case, the pizza he enjoyed on Second Avenue must have been quite substantial. By the time he returned, the baby had entered the world and was safely wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a long row of other arrivals in the nursery. His heels had been carefully dipped in black ink to make footprints, a rudimentary form of post-partum identity check to avoid mix-ups in a busy public maternity ward.

The ‘lusty’ newborn, weighing in at 9lb 1oz, already sported the whip of platinum hair that would help make him a national phenomenon but there was little else to indicate these were the first hours of the most famous member of what has become Britain’s leading – and certainly its blondest – political and media clan. Or indeed, that the little scrap of humanity would later become the first Conservative Mayor of London, with a bigger personal mandate than almost any other elected office-holder in Europe.

Both Boris’s parents are English, but Stanley considered it vital to secure dual US/British citizenship for their son and registered him with the US authorities, as well as the British Consulate. For all his English eccentricities and mannerisms, by birth Boris is pure ‘Noo York’ and, in nationality at least, half-American.

Stanley was in the US on a Harkness Fellowship to study the then newfangled subject of creative writing at the State University of Iowa. Some of his fellow new graduates were perhaps surprised that he had won such a prestigious and generous prize as he had garnered only a second-class degree from Exeter College, Oxford. Charlotte, a bohemian soul from a family of liberal intellectuals, had accompanied her husband back in the autumn of 1963, but when she became pregnant with Boris, Stanley abandoned his studies. He had, in any case, grown disillusioned: his poetry – which had scooped the prestigious Newdigate Prize, back in Oxford – had not won the applause he had expected in Iowa and so he decided to change tack, and town, to a rather more Johnsonian economics degree at New York’s Columbia University. But first, he wanted to get some travelling under his belt and so the couple headed for Mexico, initially by car and then Greyhound bus.

By this time Charlotte was suffering from morning sickness, exacerbated by the altitude in Mexico City. She was dreading the 20-hour slog by bus back to the border and then on to New York, but fortune shone on the Johnsons, as it so often does: in Mexico, they met up with a kindly Russian émigré whose daughter happened to be the girlfriend of one of Stanley’s Exeter College friends. Boris Litwin showered the young couple with baby gifts and provided them with two air tickets, saving Charlotte much discomfort. In return, she gratefully promised that if the baby were a boy, he would take their benefactor’s name.

Stanley could surely have made the gesture himself by buying the tickets, but as those who have known him for decades can testify, he does not believe in unnecessary comfort nor, indeed, in sickness – the Clinic where Boris was born, for instance, was frequented by poor New Yorkers unable to afford full medical fees. It was by no means upmarket and, in a lot of locals’ eyes, not even that respectable but it is not the Johnsonian way to waste money, however elevated their social aspirations. Moreover, Stanley rarely admits to illness himself, nor notices it in others. The same is true of Boris, who is also, in adulthood, seldom known to be ill. As one observer has remarked: ‘I’d never put him in charge of hospitals.’³

Naturally, while lying in hospital as a newborn, Boris would have had no idea how lucky his father had been, or would go on to be. The Harkness Fellowship – and the gift of air tickets – were just two examples of a serendipitous series of events in which freebies, jobs, holidays, houses, prizes and sponsorships have rained on Stanley, ensuring relative wealth even at university, and certainly thereafter. Such impossible good luck as he has experienced has had an effect on his mindset, which does not really register hardship or struggle. ‘I do reject this idea that life is, in any way, an effort,’ Stanley insists. ‘I have, on the whole, found things to be a piece of cake.’⁴ In turn, his redoubtable mother, Irène, thought his double crown demonstrated that he had simply been ‘born lucky.’⁵

Boris’s new home, financed by the Fellowship, was one such piece of luck. A bohemian 60ft-long single-room loft apartment, it was opposite the Chelsea Hotel, the crash pad beloved of rock stars such as Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop and Jimi Hendrix, on West 23rd Street. The bathroom was screened off by abstract paintings, the bath perched on stilts and there was a large yellow piano adorned with a ‘vive la fun’ logo. Above a lively neon-lit café called the Star Bar (where the Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ blared out on the jukebox until 4 a.m.), it was entertaining though hardly suitable for a newborn. The appearance of an intruder (who, one hot Manhattan night, had climbed in through a window left open) would be particularly alarming for any new mother, but Stanley, typically, treated the whole episode as one tremendous joke.⁶

After a few months, the couple decided to return to Britain so Charlotte could finish off the English degree she had interrupted to accompany her husband to America. Stanley says only now does he appreciate ‘what a tremendous sacrifice’⁷ she made in leaving Oxford mid-course. It was the first time that Boris – or rather ‘Al’ – would move house but he would do so a total of 32 times over the next 14 years.⁸ As a whole, throughout his childhood he lived in five cities, five London boroughs, one Somerset village (in at least two different houses), three US states, three countries and two continents. During that time he attended three primary schools in two countries, one prep school and one public school.

Before they left North America in September 1964, Boris and his parents embarked on his first grand tour: of New Hampshire, Vermont and Canada. Not that he had much chance to take it all in – he slept through most of it in a carrycot placed in Stanley’s Chevrolet Bel Air Automatic (which came with the Harkness Fellowship). That summer, the new father proudly wrote to his own parents: ‘I must say, Alexander Boris is fantastically well behaved and I catch myself completely forgetting he exists. He sleeps in the back of the car as we travel hundreds of miles, and sometimes we don’t even stop while C. feeds him.’⁹

Charlotte also remembers Boris as being an ‘incredibly good baby’¹⁰ who rarely cried. In the new home, a modern flat in Summertown, Oxford, he would amuse himself with a saucepan or cardboard box while she continued with her studies. And just as well because she was already seven months pregnant with her second child (Rachel) when she took her Finals in the summer of 1965. At the time, she was bemused when in apparent denial of her marital status and patently obvious condition, her Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall, continued to address her as Miss Fawcett, her maiden name. She went on to secure a respectable second-class degree.

Boris’s self-containment today may be due in part to quite severe deafness until he was about eight, leading to a series of operations to insert grommets. No doubt feeling detached from the world because of his poor hearing during those early years, it was some time before he became the rumbustious character he appears today. ‘Glue Ear’ can give rise to prolonged and painful infections, and Boris occasionally makes reference to how illness confined him to bed as a child. Even now, he attributes ‘evasiveness’ in his character to not being able to hear what people were saying when he was very young and therefore fearing he might say the wrong thing himself.¹¹ He was indeed a subdued, reflective small child and it was not until his teens when he could hear perfectly well that his present character emerged. Old friends of the Johnson family still marvel at his adult persona, barely recognisable from the young Boris they knew 40 years previously.

‘As a child he was a quiet, studious chap, who worked very hard,’ recalls Oliver Tickell, who knew Boris from family skiing holidays in Courchevel. ‘He was rather modest about his ambitions then, or at least showing them. The flamboyant personality, big impression and self-projection came later.’ ‘He was very quiet, always with his nose in a book,’ confirms Brian Johnson (no relation, but one of Stanley’s closest friends), ‘but he already had a sardonic sense of humour.’ Photos during this period regularly show Boris as a serious, even solemn young boy, not the cheeky little rogue one might expect.

The transformation can probably be timed to his Eton years when he chose to morph from ‘Al’ (or Alex) into the more distinctive Boris. Even in adulthood, though, there are moments when he appears to retreat into an inner Al, far away from the commotion and distractions of life around him. Sometimes only a forceful and repeated direct question can pull him back from this private world, his re-entry into reality accompanied by much eye-rolling, hair-ruffling and frequent ‘aaarhs’ and ‘grrrrs’. This detachment can be a somewhat disarming trait in such a physically large man with an even bigger personality, but it’s a characteristic he shares with others who have suffered hearing difficulties and subsequently created their own internal worlds.

Boris’s placid nature was doubtless a blessing for his mother, though, as she led a taxing, itinerant life. Stanley and Charlotte left Oxford in July 1965, this time moving to Crouch End in north London, while he struggled to launch a career that would put food on the table for his new family. He had tried his hand unsuccessfully at teaching and studying for a Masters in Agricultural Economics before apparently being recruited as a spy and offered, according to his own account, ‘the most intensive training in clandestine techniques known to man.’¹²

Finally, in October 1965, Stanley was offered a plausible job – at the World Bank. He was due to start four months later in Washington DC, but the couple decided not to stay put until it was time to emigrate. Instead they decamped to a rented cottage high up on the snowy slopes of Exmoor for a long, hard winter with two small children and a wood-burner for heat. It suited Stanley as he could use the time to write his first novel, Gold Drain. Such a remote, rustic life was a far cry from Charlotte’s urbane London upbringing in a large house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood. It was also one of several episodes in Boris’s early years where he and his sister Rachel led a rather isolated existence, rarely seeing anyone outside the family.

When the time came for Stanley to take up his contract at the World Bank, in February 1966, cases were packed for the fourth time in 20 months in preparation for the move back to the land of Boris’s birth. Such a nomadic lifestyle was not only testing for the children, however: with a busy husband rarely at home, Charlotte was forced to cope with the practicalities of shipping around two youngsters under the age of two, mostly on her own. Throughout their marriage, it was not uncommon for Stanley to be away for up to six months at a time: Charlotte once claimed he was absent for a whole year writing one of his books, although he himself disputes this.

Only after camping out in the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Washington DC for a month and staying at other temporary accommodation did the family finally acquire their first real home for the price of $25,000. A white clapboard house on Morrison Street, just off Connecticut Avenue in the northwest of the city, it came complete with a garden, front and back, where the children could play (Boris says his earliest memory is his beloved Washington tree-house). For the Johnsons, life seemed to be settling down at last. Charlotte was helped by a string of young au pairs – even though, mysteriously, they tended not to stay very long – and was finding happiness in her burgeoning painting career. By now, she also had three children, having given birth to Leo in London on home leave in September 1967. ‘They were quite a handful,’ she admits.¹³

Soon the family had made a large circle of friends, many of them members of the British press corps. Perhaps best known were Charles Wheeler, the distinguished BBC correspondent, and his Indian wife, Dip. It was at this very early stage in his life that Boris met their younger daughter, Marina.

But in April 1968, Stanley brought this golden, more rooted existence to an abrupt end. As an April Fool’s joke he submitted what appeared to be a serious application to his employers at the World Bank for a $100 million loan to build three new pyramids and a sphinx to promote tourism in Egypt. Alas, the former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, who headed up the loan committee, was not amused. Stanley was forced to seek alternative employment, which with his ever-present serendipity he quickly found. But the new job – as project director to a national policy panel on population control chaired by the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III – meant moving his family back to New York.

With three small children, Charlotte was packing up again just two years after landing in Washington and only four years after leaving New York the last time. Moreover, she had been keen to make any future upheaval a return to England as she was badly shaken by the growing turmoil in the US. The assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968 had been followed by that of Robert Kennedy, the late President Kennedy’s brother, two months later; there had also been increasingly violent riots over race relations and the Vietnam War. With an enormous sense of longing for her young family to be safe back at home in England, Charlotte told Stanley she had, ‘had enough. Why don’t we go back to England?’¹⁴

In June, however, the Johnsons duly moved north to New York, although Stanley did promise his long-suffering wife that they would all be heading back to England within a year. In the meantime, they rented a house on Harbor Island, Norwalk, Connecticut, with its own jetty looking out over Long Island Sound. Although helped by Vreni, a Swiss au pair, Charlotte was once again left alone for long periods of time with the children while Stanley travelled a total of 35,000 miles with his glamorous new job. After 12 months, and with the panel’s report on population complete – which resulted in the formation of the United Nations Population Agency and acclaim from President Nixon – Stanley was at last able to keep his promise about returning to England. In the summer of 1969, the Johnsons packed up their belongings yet again and headed for JFK airport for a flight ‘home’.

But where was home? For now it was to be Nethercote, the Exmoor river valley where Stanley’s parents lived and where he and Charlotte had bought a cottage while still in the United States. As the eldest, Boris was given a small box-room of his own, where his early doodles (‘Boo to grown-ups!’ among them) may still be seen pinned to the wall. His aunt Birdie – a shy figure compared to her brother and his brood, as well as one of the few Johnson brunettes – still lives in the cottage today.

The main farmhouse, West Nethercote, was where Stanley’s parents, Johnny and Irène, had lived since 1951, when they bought the farm for £4,500 with financial assistance from her wealthy father. A ramshackle series of buildings, with no proper bathrooms or electric power, it was a real-life version of Cold Comfort Farm. It also came with 250 acres of hill land, much of it rough grazing. Irène’s father (also Stanley) had paid for his namesake grandson’s school fees too as the farm was struggling and money was tight. When the younger Stanley later won a scholarship to Sherborne, a traditional public school in Dorset, the £150 saved was not given to the boy, as his grandfather suggested, but invested in three much-needed new cows.

The young Stanley’s home life was shaped by Johnny’s drinking, his sudden explosions of temper and a lack of cash. Irène, meanwhile, was both an incurable optimist with a strong sense of humour and a font of uncomplaining support and tolerance in the face of adversity. Fortitude and loyalty, it seems, are requisite in Johnson women if they want to stay the course. Boris has undoubtedly inherited his grandfather’s temper in moments of frustration or pressure but not his bibulous habits or opinion of politicians. ‘All scoundrels,’ was Johnny’s decisive view.¹⁵

When Stanley and Charlotte first returned from America, his sister Hilary and her family inhabited the middle house, East Nethercote. The overall effect was of a rather ramshackle Johnson family compound, hemmed in by the steep sides of the valley and down a couple of miles of bumpy track. Irène regarded the place as something of a prison. It does seem rather cut off and basic – no doubt Charlotte, with her troop of small children and a frequently absent husband, often felt isolated here. Sometimes damp, often cold, even now Nethercote is an acquired taste (a ‘bad case of self-conscious Londoners and over-done rustic,’ complains one visitor). Back then, the ever-changing cast of au pairs accompanying Johnsonian family life would complain of bats in the bedrooms (they would swoop about at night, even get tangled up in their hair). Boris’s grandmother would advise the young women to sleep with saucepans over their heads but this counsel was rarely sufficient to encourage them to stay.

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 g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Peter Pan and Wendy: Childhood, 1964–1977
• 2. ‘Hey, Hey, ABJ’: Eton, 1977–1982
• 3. Toffs, Tugs and Stains: Oxford, 1983–1987
• 4. World on Speed Dial: Starting Work, 1987–1989
• 5. I Fought Delors . . . and I Won: Brussels, 1989–1994
• 6. M’learned Wife: Islington Life, 1994–2008
• 7. Untouchable: Boris the Celebrity, 1994–1999
• 8. ‘Sack me!’: The Spectator, 1999–2005
• 9. On Yer Bike!: MP, 2001–2004
• 10. ‘Busting with spunk’: The Sextator, 1999–2005
• 11. ‘Cynical self-interest’: 2005–2007
• 12. Too Funny to be Mayor?: 2007–2008
• 13. State of Wonderment: First Days at City Hall, 2008
• 14. The Politics of Power: The Mayoralty, 2008–2012
• Epilogue
• Sources
• Endnotes
• Index
• List of Plates
• Copyright