JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (36 page)

Meanwhile, political commentators and politicians alike saw it differently and shook their heads. Practically to a man they predicted that Boris would either be forced out of the
Spectator
or fail to build a career in the Commons – or possibly both. But Boris continued to keep all his plates spinning. Just. His life at this point was full to overflowing; few could have stood the pace. One associate remarked that even thinking about Boris’s huge range of commitments at this time made him feel ‘physically sick.’ Boris himself would admit sometimes to being down and overwhelmed. Occasionally, he would be found asleep on the sofa in his Commons office. With four children, the youngest only two years old, he got very, very tired indeed. He is rarely ill – and does not tolerate illness in others – but he does enjoy his food and now in his late thirties was finding it harder
to avoid the consequences. Boris’s weight is linked to his state of mind and the stresses were beginning to tell. ‘There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge,’ he wrote.
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This was when he discovered the benefits of a half-hour jog. He has been a devoted runner ever since, often making it a theatrical event with an array of colourful surfer shorts. He also began to cycle around London to save time in the congestion, making phone calls with one hand while steering with the other. No moment went unused. His mobile ‘office’ occasionally gave rise to rows with pedestrians who thought it was dangerous but he knew all too well the public relations dividend of being photographed regularly on two wheels. It re-aligned him with liberal, good, caring, free-spirited people with a life rather than boss-eyed right-wingers obsessed with fighting EU sub-clauses, who needed to get one. (Boris, with neat hair in his own Jaguar, for instance, conjures up a very different image.) It was another, but important stage in the gradual Islingtonian rebranding but amid all this activity, it is hard to imagine how he ever made time for the everyday needs of a young family. ‘The fatal thing is boredom,’ he explained, ‘so I try to have as much on my plate as possible.’
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It is therefore not surprising that he did not work the tearooms and bars of Westminster – a convention observed by most ambitious MPs intent on building up support. In any case, Boris finds making genuine conversation with people – and particularly women on an equal professional footing – difficult. Indeed, one female assistant talks of how she dreaded car journeys with him because of the long, awkward silences. He is better talking
at
people in performance-mode than talking
to
them over a coffee table. To this day, he struggles with private dinner parties, for instance, often offering to make a speech rather than be cornered in the agony of a personal ‘cosy’ chat. Clubbing up with possible future ‘Johnsonites’ was therefore never going to be his forte. Nor did Boris, like many of his contemporaries, ‘keep in touch’ through email – ‘I don’t believe in it,’ he said. Meanwhile, Cameron, having been a special adviser, already knew the
place ‘to his fingertips’ and was busy establishing his credentials in the tearooms and elsewhere as a very modern, professional, ‘in-touch’ politician and the emerging leader of a like-minded group.

When in Parliament – as opposed to the
Spectator
– Boris was frequently to be found in his office, alone. It was not a room where other members felt welcome if they dropped in – with the occasional exception of fellow Tory MP Andrew Tyrie – despite the fact that there was plenty of room. A former aide explains: ‘I think Boris would have gone completely mad if he’d had to share his office. He liked being on his own for significant periods of time.’

The then accommodation whip (responsible for doling out desk space to new and existing MPs according to rank) insists Boris was granted no special favours. And yet, for a brand new member he was allocated a particularly generous office with a fireplace, green sofa and yet another capacious desk. Even more unusually, he bagged a smaller, but separate annexe room for his staff on the floor below in the Norman Shaw North office building and so was left in sole occupancy upstairs. In contrast, despite all the important jobs Peter Mandelson had already done for the Labour party when elected in 1992, he was allocated a ‘narrow and rather dark room’ in an adjacent block and had to share with another MP.

Boris appointed Melissa Crawshay-Williams as his secretary after meeting her at a Conservative dinner. From the off, she had to cope with the enormous workload such a well-known and multi-tasking MP generated. ‘I worked very long hours for Boris,’ she recalls. ‘There was a minimum of 200 emails a day, plus quite often 200 letters. His mailbag was twice the size of a normal MP’s. Sometimes I’d be up to four in the morning dealing with it all; sometimes other secretaries would have to help me. Eighty per cent of the time, working with him was wonderful.’ But in common with other former colleagues, she also remembers his temper. ‘The other 20 per cent was terrible – Boris would swear a lot when he was frustrated, but it was quite contained and then he’d move on.’ She remains loyal to her boss but his temper is still an issue with many he has worked with: he frequently bangs the table in anger, on at least one occasion so hard that he nearly broke a bone.

Despite this frantic activity, Boris was making little impact in the Commons. With his bonhomie, charm and quick wit, he was widely expected to become an instant star yet he gave only two speeches in his first five months. By convention, new MPs heap praise on their predecessors in their maiden speech but in his, on 12 July, Boris chose an oddly comic – and perhaps disrespectful – way of ‘honouring’ Michael Heseltine. He compared himself to Simba (the cub in the Disney cartoon,
Lion King
) to Heseltine’s regal Mufasa. It was a puzzling comparison, despite the obvious reference to the former deputy prime minister’s celebrated locks. The movie sees Mufasa killed and Simba forced into exile after a coup involving his treacherous uncle and a pack of hyenas. Unlike Cameron in his maiden address a fortnight earlier, Boris was not able to draw on any deeper political experience – or observe some of the finer Parliamentary niceties.

In his first four years as an MP, Boris managed to attend only slightly over half of the votes and he was ranked 525th out of 659 MPs on attendance. By his second Parliament, from 2005 to 2008, this had slipped further still to just 45 per cent, a cause of resentment among his colleagues and party whips. It perhaps did not help that within four months of being elected to Westminster he had followed the first Johnsonian rule that all life’s events must be exploited for financial gain in publishing the first of his political memoirs.
Friends, Voters, Countrymen
was a slight volume, covering merely his selection and election as there was nothing else to say, but it was fun and pacy. At the launch party in Politicos, the Westminster political bookshop, Boris secretly teased his publishers and mocked his own insubstantial volume in ancient Greek – repeatedly saying ‘
mega biblion, mega kakon
’ or ‘a great book is a great evil.’ No one could imagine, even so, how he had found the time to write it. No doubt it helped that he was given more ‘slack’ by the whips than other, less glittering MPs. ‘We didn’t see that much of him,’ confirms the former MP and whip Andrew Mackay. ‘He had a pretty full-time second job. But because he looked so different from everyone else, when he was here everybody noticed it. A drabber backbencher might have to be here full-time to be noticed as much as Boris half-time.’

For a maverick, he rebelled against his party a puny five times in his seven years as an MP. When he did so, it was usually taking a more liberal line than the leadership (and, indeed, his own previous positions), such as backing the repeal of the infamous Section 28 ban on the promotion of homosexuality and voting in favour of giving legal status to change of gender for transsexuals.

When he did appear in the chamber, Boris’s style seemed particularly unfit for purpose and he came over as awkward and exposed. He would annoy rather than amuse by addressing other members as ‘old boy’ rather than the ‘honourable gentleman’ that etiquette required. What’s more, he looked fidgety sitting on the Commons’ green benches for more than a few minutes, once acidly noting, ‘It is a great pleasure to follow Dr Palmer. I congratulate him on speaking for more than half an hour.’ Labour MPs took delight in taking shot at his divided loyalties and the rumours soon circulating about Boris’s ‘other’ interests: ‘I am happy to follow Mr Johnson, who is glancing at his watch. Clearly, he wants to go and put the
Spectator
to bed and I am sure that he will do it very well,’ said one, back in February 2002.

Unwisely, Boris once peppered a long speech about holiday entitlement in 2003 with classical references to Hammurabi, Moses, Plato and Cicero. ‘He’s definitely a credit to Eton education,’ said the Labour MP Anne McGuire in a tone that suggested this was not necessarily a good thing. Indeed, in the days before Old Etonians came to dominate the Tory front bench, Boris’s schooling was frequently commented on by the other side and used regularly to taunt him. The old Labour Parliamentary warhorse Dennis Skinner passed comment on Etonians being ‘educated beyond their intelligence.’ Eye-rolling and bumbling routines did not pass muster in this environment; on the Commons floor, there was no indulgence of the golden boy.

Still he persisted with his buffoonish bag of tricks, including the hair mussing. ‘It’s the Hair behind the Chair again,’ chortles Mackay. ‘When a young David Owen was about to come into the chamber as foreign secretary in the [1970s] Callaghan government, he was seen combing his hair behind the Speaker’s chair. It showed a vanity, just like with Boris. The only difference was that he was seen
ruffling
his
hair. It’s designer scruff!’ But the barnet routine did not allay the nerves, and after 18 months Boris conceded that he was still to ‘land any blows’ on Blair – in Parliament, at least. ‘The Speaker won’t call you unless you stand up every time. Your heart is thudding and you try to remember your question. I asked Patricia Hewitt a question on nuclear energy, but I wrapped it in so many subordinate clauses that she was able to knock it straight back,’ he told an interviewer in 2002.
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No wonder he found it easier to score political points in the familiar territory of the pages of the
Spectator
.

Sensing something not quite right, the newspaper sketch-writers, who can define MPs’ careers with putdowns or praise, began to watch him with care. The cult of Boris had built him up as a showman par excellence, but somehow one audience that perhaps really mattered to him was left cold. Quentin Letts, sketch-writing doyen and a former colleague of Boris’s, explains why he failed to shine.

‘He was terrible in the chamber, an echoing parody of himself. The Commons sees through you in a way that other institutions don’t. So they could see through the accent, and the fact that he was trying to ventilate false anxieties about matters in which he wasn’t really very interested. The reaction was quite often silence. You see, Boris isn’t angry. You’ve got to be angry: you’ve got to feel things as an MP, but there’s no soul, no church in him. No belief. Most people don’t just go into politics out of vanity, but maybe he has. The only good speech I ever heard him give in Parliament was not even in the chamber but in a minor debate in Westminster Hall that nobody attended. It was on pig slaughter and – because he has a slight resentment against the big state – he was outraged on behalf of his constituents about the regulatory burden and so had actually done the research.

‘It’s not a class thing. [The new MP] Jacob Rees-Mogg, who’s similar in some ways, holds the Commons. He’s very clever, he’s done his homework, and he
feels
it. Labour MPs stand up and ask for more. Boris can make very good party conference speeches but the Commons is a different arena. You’re being challenged. You’re quite often playing to an empty house, which is difficult, or you’re looking straight at your opponents. Boris was obviously good on
HIGNFY
but then that was as a show-business character. He’s not very good when
he’s up against an audience of real people, looking at Labour MPs from places like Mansfield and Nottingham with whom he has no affinity at all. You can’t suddenly start making wisecracks in a Bertie Woosterish manner – it doesn’t work. Gravity is unavoidable in the House of Commons and he didn’t have it.’

Boris’s difficulties in adapting were all the more marked because of the contrast with his predecessor, Michael Heseltine. The fact was that Boris’s style – so brilliant on TV – lent itself, when it came to the Commons, to local or esoteric detail better than to national-stage policy. He was becoming stuck in a side role. James Landale of the BBC observes: ‘MPs like the crisp, efficient wit of William Hague, not the bumbling of Boris interspersed with the occasional one-liner. He is a much better writer on paper than in person. He can be too slow and elaborate in speech.’ Even Andrew Mitchell, who had done much to propel Boris into politics, is guarded about his ability as a Parliamentary performer. ‘The House of Commons is a tremendous leveller. Boris was best either when he was being incredibly funny or when he was standing up for his constituents,’ he says. After he had resigned his seat in 2008, even Boris described his own performances as ‘crap.’

Eager to win more favourable reviews, he would on occasion offer some of the more critical journalists such as AA Gill the chance to write on the
Spectator
. He won over Matthew Parris – who already wrote for the magazine and whose good opinion was particularly invaluable – by accident or design another way. ‘There is a side of him which is possibly calculating or just humanly generous or a complicated alloy of both, but is capable of doing very big favours for people in circumstances where it is not immediately obvious that there is a return for him,’ says Parris. ‘I once made a Boris-style cock-up of forgetting that I was speaking at a book launch. I realised only 25 minutes before it started and I simply couldn’t go. In despair, I rang Boris, who happened to be in the area and he dropped everything and did it for me. True, I was a
Spectator
columnist but I had never done him any particular favour. True, it was no skin off his nose. But because of that one incident, I’ve always stayed my hand when I’ve been contemplating attacking him in anything other than a routine
sort of way. This is the corruption of journalism – he purchased my goodwill.’