Did Boris really think she would go quietly!
THIS week the bell rang for Round Two of what promises to be a thrillingly addictive punch up between Boris Johnson and the mad scientist’s splice of Baby Spice and Kerry Katona that is his alleged ex-paramour Jennifer Arcuri. Consider me fully draped in Team Arcuri livery, sitting in the front row with a blood-spatter shield in one hand and a large box of popcorn in the other, for this one.
The 34-year-old American’s first foray into public life a few weeks ago was apparently in reaction to his cessation of contact with her – apart from the one time he picked up her call and then, she claims, promptly handed the phone to someone who mysteriously began speaking in a Chinese accent.
In response, Arcuri came out swinging with the tale of how a ‘magnetic energy’ around the then mayor of London drew her to introduce herself to him in 2011.
This encounter apparently led to several years of him speaking at events for her IT company, her companionship on three of his mayoral trade missions – in between ‘tech lessons’ at her flat – and the award of £126,000 in public grants to her business.
This time around we were gifted an entire documentary and follow-up interviews in which, with the delicate touch of a skilled torturer, Jennifer tightened the noose one utterance at a time.
Her final words in the documentary were delivered straight to camera.
‘You know that I’ve been nothing but loyal, faithful, supportive and a true confidante of yours,’ she said, quivering like Julia Roberts in Notting Hill just asking her boy to love her, yet managing to maintain a basilisk stare down the lens throughout.
‘I have kept your secrets and I have been your friend… And I’m terribly heartbroken by the way that you have cast me aside, like I am some gremlin.’
A bit of a left-field choice of word at the end there, but I like it. It reminds viewers (one in particular) that things could veer off in unexpected – and even worse – directions any time.
The next day the gloves slipped a little further off.
‘Is this the price of loyalty?’ she asked Victoria Derbyshire on her TV show. ‘To be hung up on, ignored and blocked?’ And then – ‘Why would I remain silent if you can’t even speak to me?’
Why indeed? I await the answer with no little interest. But the question I am most intrigued by is this: what did Boris think was going to happen? Because you don’t need to be a sophisticated reader of human nature to guess Arcuri wasn’t a woman likely to take being dropped and humiliated lightly.
But then the answer comes to me – nothing. Boris thought nothing was going to happen because that is what he wanted to happen. And because, if you are a creature born of privilege and suffused with narcissism, what you want is generally the thing that happens.
SO YOU find a woman, enjoy her companionship and her technological know-how, and you assume you can continue in this vein for as long as it suits you and then stop, without consequence. Because everyone knows that you don’t then give a man – an Eton-educated, Balliol-buffed man! – a hard time, right?
To imagine otherwise would require you to be able to place yourself in others’ shoes. To have an understanding of people and sense of judgment about the world that extends beyond your own ambitions and urges.
To appreciate that it does not, despite all appearances, revolve round you.
Arcuri is clearly a piece of work. But true nemeses are rarely perfect themselves. It requires an extra something to bring about a reckoning.
And it looks to me like, in every sense, Arcuri has the goods.