After confessing to an affair with Petronella, he handed Marina his life- savings
PETRONELLA Wyatt, Bori s ’s vivacious deputy when he was editor of The Spectator – at that time dubbed the ‘Sextator’ because of the numerous affairs between staff – found out about his passion for her by accident. Rummaging through his untidy desk one day for a lunch guest-list, she found a handwritten love letter to her from him. The mutual attraction for two vulnerable people was companionship. ‘You are the first woman friend I have ever had,’ Boris later said to Petronella.
She said: ‘He was a loner with few friends, and like many loners has a compensating need to be liked… he wants to be loved by the entire world.’
After their affair started in 2001, he revealed intense jealousy about Petronella’s friendship with two famous historians. Convinced that she was unfaithful, his rage exposed insecurity, especially about his own intellectual inferiority, his stretched finances and what he perceived were his inadequate looks.
During their first summer together, Boris told Petronella he wanted to marry her. About eight months after their relationship began, she was pregnant. Attracted by the idea of a
He encouraged her to have their daughter – not an abortion
second family, Boris urged her to have the child. She was torn. Unwilling to be a single mother, she insisted that they should marry.
Boris saw a divorce lawyer and confessed the situation to his shocked wife Marina, who persuaded him to end the affair. He agreed, and as a guarantee of his promise, he wrote a cheque for a large amount, handing all his savings to his wife. The next morning, after looking at his four young children eating breakfast, Boris was faced with reality: his family’s certain disapproval, the prospect of confrontation and poverty, too. Remembering his own horror of his parents’ divorce, he retreated. His marriage, he decided, was not over.
Petronella had an abortion. But the affair was not over. In summer 2002, Petronella was suffering from the pressure of the relationship. If Boris refused to marry her, she said, they should stop seeing each other. ‘He threatened suicide and cried – buckets full,’ a close friend of Boris revealed.
Petronella headed for a holiday in Tuscany. Boris was with his family in Sardinia. Abruptly, he left Marina and his children and flew to the Italian mainland.
He climbed the wall of Petronella’s villa and declared that his impulsiveness and bravery proved his love. But again he returned to Marina.
Exhausted by all the lies, Petronella moved to the US with an American she had met, but the chance of a permanent relationship was shattered by Boris’s constant phone calls. She returned to London and the relationship was reignited. In September 2004, Petronella, now 36, discovered she was pregnant again.
Boris was forced to make a decision. While he refused to divorce Marina, he did not urge Petronella to have an abortion, instead encouraging her to have their ‘daughter’.
Trusting Boris would be a good father, Petronella decided on a fullterm pregnancy.
But she had a miscarriage. In disguise, Boris arrived at the hospital and together, in genuine misery for their lost child, they sat grieving. Humiliated, Marina changed the locks to their house and took off her wedding ring before allowing Boris to return a week later. It was at this point he revealed to her his secret about his father hitting his mother.
‘ Boris is a home- body,’ wrote Petronella, ‘who would prefer to be at home with Marina.’
In 2016, after his affair with Jennifer Arcuri ended, Boris asked Petronella if she wanted to revive their relationship. She declined.