JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (28 page)

It is true that Collier, who has since left journalism, was never attacked. But was Boris right to dismiss ‘Guppygate’ as merely ‘a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’?
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He must also have told Marina that it was inconsequential and like an indulgent parent confronted by an adored child, she clearly wanted to believe him. Marcus Scriven, author of the
Mail on Sunday
piece, recalls meeting her – and re-encountering
Boris, whom he had met when working at the
Daily Telegraph
– two years later. All three were among the guests invited to a corporate hospitality box at a Newbury race meeting; their host was Max Hastings, by then editor of the
Evening Standard
. During the course of the afternoon, Boris approached Scriven. ‘I’d been tipped off that he was going to be there,’ recalls Scriven, ‘so I’d taken the tape just in case he chose to mention it or Guppy. He came up and said, “Why do you keep writing about me?” I said that anyone who wrote apologia for Guppy, as he had, was fair game and that if he really wanted to be a good friend to Guppy, he wouldn’t indulge him by having conversations in which he asked how badly people were going to be beaten up. He said, “I’m sure I didn’t say that,” then Marina said that, yes, she was sure Boris would never say anything like that. So I got the tape out and said, “Let’s listen, shall we?” She and Boris took off.’ Later in the afternoon, Boris quietly suggested: ‘Let’s call it pax, shall we?’ ‘It was all very Johnsonian,’ Scriven recalls.

For years, Boris was nicknamed the ‘Jackal’ by Matthew Norman on the
Guardian
, but it seemed the Guppygate file had otherwise been closed. Hastings moved on and Boris moved up the ladder at the
Telegraph
, where he became comment editor under new editor Charles Moore, who remembers him performing the role with ‘maximum idleness.’ Three years on, Guppygate must have been far from Boris’s mind when he was invited in April 1998 to appear on
Have I Got News For You
, the BBC programme that was to bring him to the attention of vast new audiences beyond ‘Planet Telegraph.’ The ensuing celebrity could only help his ever more glorious journalistic career – and surely his chances of landing a safe Parliamentary seat.

Ian Hislop, editor of
Private Eye
, who captains one of the teams on the quiz, decided to spring a nasty surprise on Boris, however, by digging up the by-now largely forgotten Guppy tape. Boris responded with: ‘Ha ha ha, richly comic’ but his facial expression, despite the fixed smiles, suggested he thought it anything but. He was forced into admitting that the plan to beat up a journalist ‘did come up’ but to raucous laughter insisted, ‘I am not ashamed of it.’ Hislop has since described just how angry Boris was at the show’s ‘elephant trap.’ He
even took his revenge with an article in the
Spectator
under the headline ‘I WAS STITCHED UP’, in which he claimed the show constituted a ‘fraud’ on the watching public because all the apparent ad-libbing of amusing lines was in fact meticulously prepared.

The affair might have ended up with Boris in deep trouble. He risked looking a bad loser – and making enemies of both
Private Eye
and the
HIGNFY
teams. But he is far too canny to enter into feuds with people with such influence over popular opinion. Hislop recalls how Boris’s apology, which came soon afterwards, was so charming it was irresistible. Together with his fellow regular panelist Paul Merton, he realised Boris’s value as a ratings draw and forgave him. Hislop suggested Boris must have been drunk when he wrote the
Spectator
piece and as ever with the subject of drink, Boris allowed him to think so. The spat became a national talking point and if anything, it was Boris who benefited most. He had escaped the confines of the
Telegraph
and
Spectator
to reach millions of viewers with no Tory instincts at all. Some were even too young to vote but they would now remember him as a full-throttle celebrity. And if they lived in London, based almost entirely on Boris’s total of seven
HIGNFY
appearances, not a few would later support him as mayor.

Whenever Boris was invited back, he disarmed Hislop and Merton by his cheerful willingness to play the hapless fall guy, mercilessly lampooned but always coming back for more. On his third appearance, when he introduced himself with the words ‘My name is Boris Johnson,’ the host Angus Deayton corrected him by reeling off his full moniker ‘Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’. But Boris took all the relentless teasing in good humour, giving the impression of being an easy target while actually handling it all with aplomb. It was a compelling masterclass in how to win over your audience while making it all look effortless. ‘It’s like watching someone about to fall off the high wire but somehow they always stay on. He’s very, very good at that,’ says one admirer. Audiences thought him unusually game and somehow authentic; and that his monumental ineptitude when he became guest presenter – fluffing his lines on the autocue and awarding points to the wrong team – was endearing. His phone went off on air and he answered it with the words: ‘I can’t talk now,
I’m on the television.’ Just a handful of cynics questioned whether the timing was purely coincidental.

Hislop and Merton deliberately upped the mayhem factor with their usual quips, while Boris shamelessly plugged his books. It was win, win all round. Boris ceased being Boris Johnson: from here on in, it was Just Boris. No one could believe this jolly fellow could have been caught up in anything sinister involving professional beatings and cracked ribs. He may have come over as a 1930s upper-class twit, but he was box office. He lapped it up – and the TV bosses did, too. Soon he was on
Top Gear, Parkinson, Breakfast with Frost
and
Question Time
. There was no one else quite like him. In an age of airbrushed, politically correct, classless sound-bite merchants, he was literally a class act. Tony Blair may have beaten him to become arguably Britain’s first celebrity politician (the early Blair was certainly influential on Boris), but Boris was the first one to make people laugh – and they loved him for it.

It was an act, but a brilliant one. The haystack hair would be artfully arranged in a mess just before the cameras started to roll. He would turn up outrageously late. But
HIGNFY
rendered the Etonian Bullingdon Club product a man of the people, someone who appeared to belong to the masses. He was high-fived in the street by students, hailed by white van man and let off failing to buy a ticket by the train inspector because ‘You’re that Bozza off the telly.’ Failing to take life seriously was no longer a flaw – it was his most valuable asset.

He continued these appearances after he eventually became an MP, although he drew criticism from some quarters who believed such antics to compromise the dignity of his position. Charles Kennedy, the former leader of the Liberal Democrat party, had endured the unflattering tag ‘Chatshow Charlie’ after putting in a good
HIGNFY
performance but Boris just retorted that the £1,000 fee came in handy for paying for ‘approximately’ two of his children to go skiing and suggested it would be cowardly not to use the opportunity to reach a wider public. Realising the importance of popularity if you want to govern, he was unapologetic. As so often, his stance on going on a TV quiz show was the Borissian ‘Why Shouldn’t I?’

Max Hastings was one who counselled caution, suggesting in a
letter published in the
Telegraph
that Boris’s ‘mania for publicity threatened to turn him into a latterday Rector of Stiff key, who earned undying fame for his sexual dalliances in the 1930s, but was eventually eaten by a lion.’ In classic style, Boris rounded on his old boss. He first lauded his target – whom in this case he described as ‘one of my journalistic heroes’ – before twisting the knife. Hastings, he said, was guilty of ‘rank cowardice’ for not going on
HIGNFY
. In hardly the most generous display of loyalty to the man who had rescued his career at least twice, he mocked him in the
Telegraph
of all places (after Hastings had left): ‘I do not know whether the Liberator of Port Stanley went all yellow-bellied as he contemplated an hour of tart rejoinders from Ian Hislop. I do not know whether his knees knock. Only the great war reporter can tell us if he secretly trembles at the idea of coming off second best to Paul Merton.’
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Boris now had an adoring public, but there was not quite such universal veneration among colleagues back at the
Telegraph
and
Spectator
. While basking in the lights of the TV cameras, he was spreading himself thinly to the point of invisibility in his day jobs. He left his commitments to write major sections of the newspaper and magazine, for which he was being paid handsomely, to the last minute. ‘He was a complete nightmare on timing,’ recalls Dominic Lawson. ‘He took things right to the wire, and beyond, and beyond and beyond. He was always absolutely the last to file. He always had this rather disarming thing of saying when I berated him, “Oh, Dommers, come on!” But I used to get incredibly cross with him. With him, it was a pathological problem. There was that sense of entitlement, he’d been President of the Union and won the glittering prizes at Eton. That’s bound to give you a deep sense of self-belief.’

But again, Boris was forgiven, as one would a wayward child. ‘I’ve always felt that Boris was like a hyper-intelligent two-year old,’ observes Lawson. ‘You know that thing about very young boys, it’s immensely charming and lovable, they do genuinely believe they are the centre of the universe. As you grow up, you realise that the world does not centre on you. Boris, I think, has not escaped that two-year-old mentality but there is a strange charm to it.’

Indeed, Boris became notorious for filing late – keeping section heads, sub-editors and even editors themselves tapping their fingers and counting the seconds before the presses had to start rolling. Charles Moore recounts how he would phone his star at 5.30 p.m., half an hour before the deadline, to find out how he was getting on. Quite often, Boris would not have even started writing then. Or even know what he was going to write about. Each week Boris would apologise with humour and bravado, and so it would go on. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been so disgraceful again,’ was a favourite apology. ‘He would say sorry, admit he was wrong and make a self-deprecating joke. You felt unable to say any more because you didn’t want to lose what you thought was his friendship,’ recalls one of his ‘handlers’.

His charm and fame were bewitching – he had a curious hold over people. There were clearly plenty of other public schoolboys who secretly wished they possessed the same freewheeling, serendipitous, unbelievably charmed and charming life as him. Some tried to copy Boris and his style but of course they could not pull it off; one or two even blushed when he talked to them. A couple of senior editors thought that Boris’s behaviour was simply unacceptable and believed it was time to get really tough, but this was not the predominant view. ‘I was one of the few journalists – male or female – not in love with Boris,’ says one. ‘I saw too much and I knew how much he was being paid and was in awe of it.’ Another recalled: ‘I told Boris we couldn’t run his column because it was simply too late, but he got straight on the phone to Charles Moore, who came round to my desk to instruct me to put it in. I felt powerless to do anything about it – he always got special treatment.’

Week after week, people were staying late just waiting for Boris, asking him politely to file on time and being ignored. If they ever threatened not to use his copy, he would ‘get very nasty.’ So sometimes they lied and told him the deadline was an hour earlier than it really was but he would still be late for the real deadline. Such was his fame, Boris was by now virtually untouchable. ‘I didn’t want him flouncing off on my watch and me getting the blame,’ explains one executive of the paper, who did not wish to be named. ‘Boris knew he had us where he wanted us so regretfully we put up with it.’
And publicly, Boris liked to make a joke of it. ‘Dark Forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power,’ he quipped to a newspaper in July 2000.
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On only one occasion did an editor actually dare confront the superstar and carry through his threats. Boris’s sub-editor Mark Stanway had complained bitterly about the delay yet again. Others had young children waiting at home; the entire newspaper was in danger of missing its slot on the presses. Charles Moore, one of his greatest fans, realising that Boris had exhausted his handlers’ patience, decided he would spike (or discard) his column unless it arrived on time. The copy was even later than usual, so Moore took the decision that if it hadn’t arrived by 8.30, it would not be used. At the allotted time, there was no sign of it and the section editors ran another piece instead.

‘Boris went completely ape,’ recalls the long-suffering Stanway, who was kept late into the evening by Boris for years. ‘He phoned me, f-ing and c-ing. I said it wasn’t my decision. He came back ten minutes later full of apologies. But Boris has a ferocious temper – he is not a cuddly teddy bear all the time.’

Boris started to file on time for a couple of months but soon afterwards, slipped back into his old way. He was angry, however, about what he saw as an outrageous slight. ‘Boris would have been unhappy about Charles spiking his column,’ remembers Paul Goodman. ‘His way of getting his own back was to refer to Charles in print as the Greatest Living Englishman. Charles will have seen the flash of the stiletto at once, but many readers would have missed it – an example of Boris’s capacity to exact revenge without anyone much noticing other than the victim.’

Yet Moore is forgiving of his fellow Etonian and he explains why: ‘[Boris] is an original. And he is exceptionally bright and exceptionally gifted and exceptionally imaginative. And so that does make you forgive a lot and that’s just as well because there often is a lot to forgive. But, of course, he knew that he could more or less get away with it because, again, it’s the genius – it’s different, it’s unique. He has a way of turning a thought upside down in an illuminating manner. In a funny way he does have the interests of, if you like, ordinary
people at heart – by which I mean he has a completely non-bureaucratic, non-party way of looking at things. He gets a sort of intuition about what it is like to be someone on a bicycle in the streets, what it is like to have a problem about getting your child into a school. He’s actually remarkably good at that for someone who you might think of in some ways as an elitist. It’s very funny, of course, but the funny-ness is to do with the fact that in some weird way he’s on your side.’
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