JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (17 page)

The status-conscious Hastings’ regime on the
Telegraph
was far more suited to Boris’s editorial strengths than the Wilson administration in Wapping. He was moved straight onto the leader-writing desk, staffed almost entirely by public schoolboys similar to himself and collectively known to colleagues as ‘Club Class’. Here, he was spared the rough and tumble of the newsroom – where state-school products then predominated – and was able to spread his wings in civilised calm next to the font of power, the editor’s office. At long last, Boris seemed to have found his niche. Finally, he had been identified as a ‘brilliant mind’ and began to be treated with the indulgence he sought.

‘Boris suited the
Telegraph
and the
Telegraph
– full of eccentrics, sub-edited by Marxists, read by Middle England – suited him,’ says the distinguished journalist Mark Law, who by now had also made the switch to comment editor after a stint on
The Times
. Individuality, even eccentricity was positively encouraged, or at the very least easily tolerated. ‘Middle England might have been surprised at what went on in its favourite paper,’ adds Law. ‘I know that I was. At the end of my first day at the
Telegraph
, the chief sub-editor of my section put away his papers and lit a joint.’

At first, Boris was seen as yet another clever eccentric who could be
left alone to get on with the job of crafting leaders. But with time to make up, he set out with single-minded determination to reboot his faltering career; there was little time for office socialising or collaboration. Quentin Letts, then editor of the
Peterborough
diary column and another rising star, recalls the arrival of Boris – whom he described as ‘quite good-looking then, with a certain Nordic ruthlessness about him’ – after
The Times
’ débâcle. ‘Boris turned up at the
Telegraph
offices, then in South Quay. He sat in the leader writers’ bit on the other side of the pot plants from
Peterborough
, but he never used to come round and give us stories. He was not a natural newspaperman, actually. He would never come to the pub – even though we were all the same age as him, for God’s sake. He’s not clubbable. You would think given he was in disgrace, he might come and wag his tail at us, but he didn’t. I don’t think it was a question of scorning the diary for being a downmarket, sleazy news-getting operation although there was an element of that.’

Rather, Letts thought Boris might be shy – he certainly did not appear to be chatting up any of the several attractive young women around the place. ‘He’s not a leaning-against-the-lamp-post type,’ he observes. But Boris was evidently ferociously driven and Letts noticed that he viewed the world from the other end of the telescope to the typical journalist. ‘He was already part of the establishment, friends with Lord Spencer and so on and consequently he saw journalists as birds of carrion rather than fine upstanding, investigative types. He never did the investigative thing or proper news. And he was always alive to money – money was very important to him. He was mixing with bankers, who saw the world as a business opportunity. So it was clear that he was never going to be just a passive observer, which is what the rest of us are. I think there was always in his mind the idea of going and doing something, to try to be part of public life. He was therefore very careful not to upset important people in the land.’

Colleagues were given the clear impression that Boris was very keen not to get on the wrong side of the wealthy and powerful friends he had collected since his time at Eton. On Saturday, 16 September 1989, his friend Charles Spencer married his first wife Victoria Lockwood in a grand ceremony at which Prince Harry served as a
page and his parents, the Prince and Princess of Wales, were also guests. The next day, the
Peterborough
column got wind of a story bound to be of interest to
Telegraph
readers: the word was that disaster had only been narrowly averted when the best man – the other of Boris’s two closest chums from Eton, Darius Guppy – failed to deliver his speech. Another guest had had to stand in at the very last moment with a few off-the-cuff words.

Boris was in the office that Sunday writing leaders and knowing he must have been at the wedding, the
Peterborough
staff approached him for confirmation of the story. It was totally normal newspaper procedure but it seemed to put Boris in a difficult spot. ‘He just blustered, did the wobbly blancmange act,’ recalls one of the diarists present. ‘So we went with the story without his help and Darius phoned us a few days later and told us very charmingly that we had got the facts right.’

Boris soon made a good impression, however, on the important people on the paper – either by making them laugh (such as one humorous piece he wrote about skiing etiquette) or his increasingly sophisticated political leaders. His desk was appallingly untidy, sprawled with piles of papers, letters, empty sandwich boxes and old coffee cups but he would simply sweep them all to one side when he needed to write and after some heavy pacing up and down the corridor, he would produce a beautiful piece of writing, virtually without hesitation.

Bernice Davison, a senior colleague who sat on the features desk nearby, was taken aback. ‘I’ve seen only a few other people – Max Hastings, A.N. Wilson and Robert Fox – write like that under pressure. It’s an amazing feat of concentration, being able to produce 1,200 or 1,500 flowing words without a trace of the angst it would cause most of us.’ But while Boris’s star was finally in the ascendant, his ruthless focus earned him something of a reputation among the junior staff. ‘I do remember people saying that Boris Johnson was very demanding of the editorial assistants or young undergraduates on work experience, or even colleagues, in fact anyone who was around,’ adds Davison. ‘He somehow expected them to fall into a “servant” kind of role, producing drinks, food, research, whatever.’ He would then win
some of them round again, of course, with carefully timed dollops of charm. One remembers feeling very grateful when on one occasion Boris offered to “do the tea round.”’

He also had a reputation for displaying an extraordinary self-confidence – some would say arrogance – in senior editorial meetings, given he was still only in his mid-twenties. ‘He was well known for “talking over” people. Boris was so sure about his own point of view that he’d often not let other people have a say, or would cleverly, possibly even cruelly, insinuate, or just state that their viewpoint was either wrong or idiotic,’ recalls Davison. But self-belief is a highly prized asset in a leader writer and did Boris’s reputation no harm at all among those who counted. He was competing for his ‘place in the sun’ against other ‘brilliant minds,’ such as his great rival Simon Heffer. One former colleague recalls: ‘I suspect that many of the “Oh God, Boris is so full of himself!” comments current at the
Telegraph
at that time probably came from older staff members schooled in years of stiff-upper-lipness, who did not appreciate Boris’s ability to be very demanding one minute, then very charming the next.’

Boris began to hone his individual writing style, using gloriously old-fashioned phrases, words and humour that set him apart from the other, more earnest young men on the leader writers’ desk. His copy was fun to read; it literally sounded good. One of his favourite words was ‘glutinous’, an adjective he has summoned time and again over the years, variously to describe James Blunt’s singing (‘glutinous aspartame-flavoured schmaltz’
¹¹
); traditional parents (swimming against the ‘glutinous tide of political correctness’
¹²
) and Tony Blair’s poll ratings (‘glutinous and extravagant approval’
¹³
). On his appointment to the editorship of the
Spectator
in July 1999, he vowed to challenge the ‘glutinous consensus’ in British politics;
¹⁴
a decade later he used the same phrase to describe David Cameron’s control over the Tory party.
¹⁵
‘Boris always managed to come up with wonderful fantastically obscure words – I often wondered how he got hold of them, but he knows how to craft them into the text,’ notes Mark Law.

Another Boris trademark was dusting down long out-of-favour vocabulary such as ‘goof’ or phrases such as ‘big girl’s blouse’. He
plays with words, selecting them as much for their pleasing sounds as their meaning. Sometimes he would simply invent a word to fill a gap in the dictionary: the evocative ‘scabophobic’ said everything necessary about the health and safety industry.
¹⁶

He also developed the habit of saying the opposite to what he meant, but somehow letting the reader in on the secret. It’s a clever device that takes the confrontational sting out of controversial opinions while at the same time appearing amusingly self-mocking. For example, when he wrote that he was ‘speaking as an ardent feminist,’ before sternly warning high-flying graduate women that they risked ending up childless and alone, it was pretty clear where his real sympathies lay.
¹⁷
Another effective tool was describing as ‘my friend’ someone who was nothing of the sort. Sparring partners such as the Labour MP Keith Vaz (who has crossed swords with Boris on more than one occasion) and the
Guardian
commentator Polly Toynbee (whose politics he ridicules) have both been subtly addressed in this way. It is an adept technique that unleashes the attack dogs while disguising them as Andrex puppies. However, when he addresses readers as ‘my friends’, another frequent mannerism, it is used as an ingenious device to appear conspiratorially on the side of his audience, almost as if addressing them personally.

In the space of just a few years, he addressed readers as ‘my friends’ more than 70 times in the
Telegraph
alone, and on many other occasions rang the changes with ‘amigos’ or ‘mes amis’. It is a marvellous way of establishing a rapport, giving readers (and now voters) a sense of Boris-ownership that persists to this day. He would go on to adapt this device in his speeches as a politician, particularly to his devoted followers at party conference. The obvious point of comparison is John McCain, who was widely mocked for overuse of the ‘my friends’ schtick in his 2008 US presidential campaign. He failed to pull it off because he lacked a genuine sense of warmth and rapport with his audience, something that has always come naturally to Boris but was honed during these years in his writing.

Another Boris trademark was seasoning his copy with the odd Wodehousian ‘crumbs’ or ‘cripes’ tailored nicely to go with the bumbling persona he was busy perfecting for public consumption.
Double negatives – ‘not unreasonable’ became a favourite – somehow making the point without sounding didactic. ‘Dog-in-the-mangerish’, a classic Boris-ism, has also made an appearance several times – a phrase said to hail from an Ancient Greek fable meaning someone who spitefully prevents others from having something they have no use for, and applied by Boris to, among others, Britain’s perceived attitude to Europe, Scottish MPs and former French President Jacques Chirac.

In full-scale attack mode his language can be both amusing and crushing in a way that few writers of his generation can match (although many may try). He dismissed Michael Portillo as ‘the pompadoured whippersnapper of the right’
¹⁸
and Tony Blair as having a constantly lurking smile in which ‘his lips twitch upwards, waiting to burst open in a glistening crescent of confidence.’
¹⁹
The trademark Latin tags soon began to appear – a Treasury official in Brussels was ‘the locus classicus of British limpwristedness’
²⁰
, while the Christian Lacroix-wearing President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors is described as ‘homo foederalis.’
²¹

Boris appealed brilliantly to the ‘country’s going to the dogs’ traditionalist instincts of the middle-class, middle-aged, middle-England readership of the
Telegraph
, with observations such as, ‘No French politician would dream of succumbing to the mushy-minded inversion that has beset the British establishment since Gladstone, that in any dispute their country is more likely to be in the wrong.’
²²
He was finding a voice, and one that his audience very much wanted to hear.

Between banging out leaders, he would sometimes find time to wind up his colleagues. A favourite target was the ever-affable Mark Law, a dedicated judo practitioner. Although Law omits to mention his name in his book,
The Pyjama Game
, Boris was one of the leader writers mentioned below. ‘I have had to put up with a lot of that narrowing of the eyes and expulsion of the breath from the back of the throat which passes for oriental impersonation. Two
Telegraph
leader writers would sometimes circle around me, singing in its entirety, complete with gong sounds, the title song of
Hong Kong Phooey
in flat, nasal we-are-Siamee-eese voices. ‘Hong Kong Phooey,
faster than the human eye; Hong Kong Phooey, number one super guy.’ I tried to feign laughter, but I was amused to note the point at which my sense of humour failed.’
²³

The amusement stopped entirely, though, when the boot was on the other foot and Law spiked Boris’s work. ‘Getting the copy from Boris was like blood out of a stone,’ he recalls. ‘His pieces were very good, but they were usually very late. We would be screaming at him to file but then eventually when he did, there were times when I wasn’t able to use it. Something big might have happened and we would have to use a piece about that instead. At first he would be very angry but then he’d brush it off with a big jokey number about me taking revenge for him filing late.’

Finally, Boris was making his way in the newspaper business and when a vacancy came up in the
Telegraph
’s Brussels bureau in the spring of 1989, he was the obvious choice. He knew the city and its European institutions extremely well, having been familiar with them since childhood; he also spoke good French and Italian and passed muster in Spanish and German. But before he left for Belgium, he astonished his superiors by asking for more money. ‘I well remember ushering the young Boris in to talk terms with Jeremy Deedes, our managing editor,’ recalls the then foreign editor Nigel Wade, who was to be Boris’s immediate boss. ‘We fixed his salary and allowances, and I thought the meeting was over when Boris asked, “What about my wife and family?” Neither Jeremy nor I had the slightest idea that the young brainbox sent to us from on high was anything but a recent, unmarried graduate.’