Boris bruiser’s wife and a new twist in Gropegate scandal
FOR a few eyebrowraising weeks a decade and a half ago, its name was on everyone’s lips. The Spectator, on the surface a high-minded political magazine, had become known as The Sextator – a veritable hotbed of intrigue and infidelity, casual affairs and sexual shenanigans.
By the time the saucy storm had blown out, a Cabinet minister’s career had been upended, marriages were wrecked and it had provided the material for a laugh- out-loud farce of the trousers-down variety at a London theatre – written by the publication’s own theatre critics, no less.
Why does all this matter now? Because claims by a journalist that she had been groped by Boris Johnson when he was editor of The Spectator have dominated the Conservative Party conference and sidetracked the Prime Minister’s attempts to set out an election strategy.
In her Sunday Times column, Charlotte Edwardes revealed that she had been grabbed beneath a dining table by the Prime Minister during a private lunch at the magazine. He had, she wrote, squeezed her thigh which made her ‘sit suddenly upright’.
Indeed when she later divulged this to the young woman who had been sitting on the other side of Mr Johnson, she too claimed to have been groped.
Yesterday as gropegate showed no sign of subsiding there was intense speculation about the identity of the second woman. The magazine’s now commissioning editor Mary Wakefield was named on social media. But the baronet’s daughter – who happens to be married to Boris’s top adviser, the Downing Street Svengali Dominic Cummings, vehemently denied it was her.
Of course stories of winedrenched lunches and lavish parties had been a staple of The Spectator long before Boris became editor in 1999. But under previous editors such as the austere Charles Moore and Frank Johnson (no relation), the magazine maintained an almost High Church propriety.
‘All that changed when Boris attracted a lot of younger journalists whose entire lives revolved around the magazine. Basically, they had no homes or families to go to,’ one former member of staff said. A loucheness was now added to the editorial mix. It was a dangerous cocktail.
According to Miss Edwardes, the incident took place not long after Boris took over as editor at the magazine’s former offices in Doughty Street, central London. She was then 26.
Describing the moment, she writes: ‘Under the table, I feel Johnson’s hand on my thigh. He gives it a squeeze. His hand is high up my leg and he has enough inner flesh beneath his fingers to make me sit suddenly upright.’
Yesterday the disclosure – denied by Boris – was shining unexpected light on the explosion of libido at the distinguished weekly under his editorship. Even now, years later, there are those who say his legacy at the magazine remains more top shelf than top drawer. Mr Johnson, who
‘Wine-drenched lunches’
was married, had already been the focus of considerable tut-tutting over his on-off affair with one of the magazine’s columnists, Petronella Wyatt – known at that stage only to a close circle of Spectator colleagues and a few gossipy hacks – that had resulted in two terminated pregnancies.
But Boris wasn’t the only one. For weeks the goings- on at the magazine had been infinitely more exciting than anything its writers commented on at Westminster.
It all began with an astonishing disclosure in the now defunct News Of The World that Kimberly Fortier, The Spectator’s well-connected publisher, had been the alleged lover of the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett. She had met Blunkett at a Spectator dinner and is famously said to have asked him: ‘I always wondered what it would be like to have sex with a blind man.’
Her own discomfort over the News Of The World revelation was compounded by the fact she had a two-year- old son by her husband, Stephen Quinn, the popular and respected publisher of British Vogue.
Within weeks it was revealed that the coquettish Los Angeles-born Miss Fortier had also been enjoying the attention of the magazine’s wine writer and chairman of Radio 4’s News Quiz Simon Hoggart.
Mr Hoggart, who died in 2014 and who had repeatedly used his column in The Guardian to deride the deceitful behaviour of such flawed characters as Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, found himself battling to save both his career and his 21-year marriage.
Media speculation concerning Miss Fortier’s alleged indiscretions followed quickly on the heels of the muddled love life of The Spectator’s then associate editor, the pugnacious Rod Liddle. Mr Liddle, a father of two and former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, left his wife, Rachel Royce, for Alicia Monckton, 23, a pretty assistant on the magazine who was 21 years younger than him and who later became pregnant with his child. The two, it has to be said, have now been very happily married for a long time.
Their affair even gave rise to a column in which Mr Liddle’s cuckolded wife took sweet revenge by detailing his failings as a husband.
By now no secrets at the Speccie were safe from exposure and it was just a matter of time before Boris’s affair with Petronella Wyatt, daughter of diarist and former Labour grandee Lord Wyatt of Weeford, was served up to a public eager for every lipsmacking detail.
Mr Johnson first became close to Petronella, then the magazine’s deputy editor, when he was made editor, but he moved her sideways as a columnist. She retained a precious desk on the second floor of the magazine’s offices; Johnson’s grander office was a floor below.
‘Petsy’, then 34, was a wellknown figure in London in her own right: described perhaps unfairly as a ‘pouting socialite’. Her love life has been equally colourful: known to admire older men, she once complained about being pursued by ‘a fat Arab who thinks he’s engaged to me’. Is it any wonder that someone, somewhere would want to turn all this pulsating sexual tension into a stage play – or rather a farce? That it should be the magazine’s own writers, Lloyd Evans and Toby Young, only added to the delicious mix. As Young memorably described it, the play Who’s The Daddy? was a ‘Ray Cooneystyle farce… there’s lots of s******* in cupboards.’
It presented Boris, or at least the actor playing him – naked but for a repulsive pair of silk tiger print boxers preparing to ravish an actress playing ‘Petsy’. Meanwhile ‘David Blunkett’ was seen groping ‘ Kimberly’ and ‘ Rod Liddle’ seducing a comely young secretary.
A comedy it may have been but it was also tragic. In the fallout David Blunkett lost his Cabinet job – though he later returned. To his great credit Stephen Quinn stood by his wife. And Boris? Well, he famously tried to brazen it all out as ‘an inverted pyramid of piffle’ and his marriage to Marina staggered on for a few more years before the couple recently agreed to divorce.
Domestic troubles still follow him. He has been plagued by claims that while Mayor of London he had an affair with businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri. Now he is accused of groping – an allegation he flatly denies.
Will someone write another play about it all? And what would his current girlfriend Carrie Symonds make of it?
‘No secrets were safe’ ‘Described as a pouting socialite’