BEING BORIS
Lovable larrikin or master manipulator? The world’s eyes are firmly on Britain’s new larger-than-life Prime Minister, but should we be amused or afraid?
In the 700-year history of Britain’s parliament, all manner of showmen, scoundrels, seducers, chancers, charmers and crackpots have risen to power – sometimes through villainy, occasionally by accident – but none with the swirl and dazzle of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Plain ‘Boris’, as the new Prime Minister is known to almost everyone, is a big, blond bundle of contradictions – a brilliant mind with a taste for buffoonery, a child of privilege with a common touch, an oversexed connoisseur of talented women who longs for commitment and security.
Boris has been famous for almost his entire adult life, first emerging into the world of glossy magazines and gossip columns as the leader of Oxford University’s ‘gilded set’ in the mid-1980s. Millions of words have been written about and by him, yet few would claim to know what goes on in his head.
On July 24, following a half-hour visit to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen formally invited him to lead
a new Conservative government, 55-year-old Boris sped to Downing Street to deliver a characteristically barnstorming speech, in which he in effective promised to solve all the nation’s problems, including the colossal mess surrounding Britain’s attempts to leave the European Union.
A short distance away, watching from the crowd, was an attractive, 31-year-old blonde wearing a floaty, floral-pink dress and a knowing expression.
Carrie Symonds, daughter of a London media executive, is the latest and perhaps most intriguing woman in Boris’s romantically turbulent life. But why wasn’t Carrie at the new PM’s side as his crowning moment arrived?
Well, things have been slightly tricky since neighbours heard them having a furious late-night row in Carrie’s flat and called the police. It later emerged that Boris had spilt a glass of red wine over his girlfriend’s brand-new beige sofa, and she – as orderly as he is shambolic – tried to throw him off the premises. Carrie rarely speaks directly to journalists but she is a whizz at social media and communicationschannelling, and when the phrase “a source close to Ms Symonds revealed….” appears in a newspaper, it’s not hard to work out where the information is coming from. The current steer is that the pair are still together and in love, but for appearances’ sake have decided to keep some distance between them.
It has taken Boris rather longer than he planned to land the top job. Even as a boarder at Eton, Britain’s most famous school, he assured his friends that he would become prime minister. Yet his path to Downing Street has been littered with setbacks and embarrassments, usually of his own making. Behind the wit and charisma that has made him a political celebrity, Boris is a creature of myriad flaws, whose character violently divides opinion. Not only his political opponents but people who have known and worked with him down the years call him a serial liar, a fantasist, a bully and a con man.
The key to the conundrum almost certainly lies in Boris’s disorderly childhood in an eccentric family headed by his raffish, intellectual father, Stanley, and artist mother, Charlotte. The Johnsons moved house frequently – sometimes twice a year – and Boris, who was born in New York, spent his early years shuttling around the world in the wake of Stanley’s career as a lecturer and writer-in-residence. It was only the steadying, adoring embrace of Charlotte that gave Boris and his three younger siblings any sense of belonging and continuity.
But when Boris was 10, his mother suffered a mental breakdown, forcing her to leave the children and spend several months in a psychiatric hospital. The family was living in Brussels at the time, where the children’s lives were being shaped by an odd combination of their parents’ bohemianism and the traditionalist strictures of their Norland College nanny, Mary Kidd, who quickly spotted the brood’s precocity.
“We were talking about conception,” she recalls, “and Boris said: ‘Which comes first, the foetus or the embryo’, and I thought, ‘oh-oh’.” The children had long hair, ran free and spoke French, but as the seriousness of Charlotte’s illness became apparent, Boris and his sister Rachel were packed off to English boarding schools. It was, in a sense, both the making and the undoing of him. He has never talked of this period of his life, nor of his parents’ painful divorce, which followed soon afterwards, but few doubt that the sudden collapse of his family life profoundly affected him. “The family was in enormous pain,” Charlotte later told a biographer. “I was so, so close to the children, and then I disappeared.”
In the aftermath of this calamity, Boris began to change. Two traits emerged: First a mesmerising cleverness, reflected in school reports describing him as “a fantastically able boy” and “something quite special”. Second, a transformation from a bookish introvert into an outsized adolescent personality who could dominate every conversation and top every punchline. At Oxford, where he read Classics, he was quickly acknowledged as the most glamorous undergraduate of his generation – “a golden-haired Apollo in whose glow the rest of us merely basked,” recalls one contemporary. Here, Boris first discovered his attractiveness to women, pursuing and marrying fellow student Allegra Mostyn-Owen, an exotic, Anglo-Italian heiress, who said later: “My relationship with Boris ended, rather than began, on our wedding day.” The omens were bad from the start. Boris arrived for the ceremony at the Mostyn-Owens’ grand Shropshire estate, having forgotten the trousers of his wedding suit. He then lost the ring, and went on to scandalise the stiffer element of his new wife’s Catholic family with an outrageously risqué speech.
This was Boris the comic turn, the caricature toff straight from a P. G. Wodehouse story, but it was also a precursor to a lifetime of complicated, often destructive, relationships that have raised awkward questions about his loyalty, trustworthiness and decency.
When you meet Boris, as I have a few times, he is exactly as you would hope – riotously funny, erudite and endearingly selfdeprecating. His conversation frequently runs off into riffs of Latin and Ancient Greek, and is peppered with words you think he must have made up until you find them in a dictionary. He loves attention and revels in flattery, and by the time you’ve spent 10 minutes with him you feel you’ve known him for years.
It’s the Boris you don’t know that worries people. The one you suspect may be lurking behind the bluster and bonhomie. The one still carrying the psychological residue of childhood trauma. The one with a worrying ability to be anything the occasion requires.
British TV personality Jeremy Vine tells a revealing story of Boris turning up – late, dishevelled and apparently clueless – to make the keynote speech at a conference of international bankers. He stumbled to his feet, bumbled, blustered, ad libbed a few stories that had nothing to do with the subject in hand, and soon… “Amazing,” says Vine. “The whole room is hooting and cheering. It no longer matters that Boris has no script, no plan, no idea of what event he is attending, and that he seems to be taking the whole thing off the top of his head. I realise that I am in the presence of genius.”
But 18 months later, Vine finds himself at another event where Boris is again the main
“He is funny, and erudite ... loves attention and revels in flattery.”
speaker, and exactly the same thing happens: the same apologies and ad-libbing, the same anecdotes, all accompanied by the same wild applause. “And I realise,” says Vine, “that those two Boris speeches had made me pose the fundamental question, the one that concerns you most when you listen to a politician: ‘Is this guy for real?’ ”
Even his nearest and dearest can’t agree. The Johnsons are Britain’s most colourful, ubiquitous and arguably cleverest family: “Like the rats in inner London,” says Boris’s sister Rachel, a columnist and TV personality, “you’re never more than six feet from a Johnson.” But the majority of the brood, including brother Jo, also a government minister, oppose Brexit and profess bewilderment at Boris’s enthusiasm for it. “Perhaps the only way to settle this issue is to have a second referendum restricted to the Johnson family,” Rachel says.
Soon after his divorce from Allegra in 1993, Boris, by now making waves as a political journalist, married Marina Wheeler, a London human rights lawyer. Although they had been friends since schooldays, they appeared, outwardly, to have little in common. While Boris romped around the gossipy, harddrinking salons of Westminster and Fleet Street, Marina spent her days fighting worthy, but little-noticed cases in courtrooms. Nevertheless, they seemed happy together, had four children and under Marina’s influence Boris appeared to curb some of his more cavalier right-wing instincts.
It seemed that, with Marina, he had found the secure bedrock his life had been lacking, but in 2004 it was revealed that he had been conducting a lengthy affair with Petronella ‘Petsy’ Wyatt, a socialite and columnist on The Spectator magazine, of which he had become editor. He initially denied the story, calling it “complete balderdash … an inverted pyramid of piffle”, but too many people knew the truth, most obviously Petsy, who let it be known that she had undergone two abortions, which Boris had declined to pay for, and his dishonesty only compounded what looked like shameful behaviour towards both his wife and mistress.
Marina took him back, but other affairs followed, including one with wealthy London art consultant Helen Macintyre, which produced a daughter. Astonishingly, Marina stuck with him, even campaigning for Boris in his successful bids to become Mayor of London and an MP. It was when he fell for Carrie early last year that the marriage finally collapsed. The Johnsons are now in the process of divorcing.
This is what the ‘Bad Boris’ looks like: the betrayer, the charlatan, the
man whose undeniable gifts appear to have bred in him the sense of being entitled to everything. Long ago, his Eton housemaster wrote to Boris’s father: “I think he honestly believed that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.”
Has anything changed? Well, he now has the job he always wanted and a woman who just may be a match for him. Although she tends to operate behind the scenes, Carrie’s political roots run deep: one of her forebears is another notoriously rakish PM, Herbert Asquith, who occupied the post in the early 1900s. Her father, Matthew Symonds, is one of London’s best-connected media figures, and she grew up surrounded by the buzz of business and politics.
After a private education at fashionable Godolphin & Latymer girls’ school in west London, whose ex-pupils include Nigella Lawson and actress Kate Beckinsale, Carrie took a history degree and is believed to have first come into contact with Boris while working as a volunteer on his successful 2012 mayoral re-election campaign. From there she rose fast, becoming the Conservatives’ youngestever director of communications, energising the operation but establishing a questionable reputation for favouring certain key party figures above others. No one was more favoured than Boris.
She left the party HQ last year for a job with an environmental pressure group, but her influence on Boris continues apace. She has smartened up his appearance, toned down his clownishness, and turned his powers of oratory towards statesmanship rather than entertainment. Many believe she intends to direct her own ‘kitchen cabinet’ inside 10 Downing Street, using her powerful media connections to push Boris’s agenda and punish his opponents.
In an age of political conformity it isn’t hard to see why Boris attracts so much attention. He has likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to “a more sinister version of Dobby the house elf” and Hillary Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”, and has been accused of sexism for telling a meeting of students that voting Conservative would “make your girlfriends’ breasts grow bigger” .
His fan club is not restricted to the supposedly insular British. Australia’s former foreign minister Julie Bishop says: “I worked with him very closely, developed a good working relationship with him over many years, and I’ve seen him in action in forums around the world. And it would be a huge mistake to underestimate him. He is a flamboyant, amusing, witty character, but he also has a laser-like focus on driving change.”
During a gap year, Boris taught
Latin at Geelong Grammar. The deputy head of the school’s Timbertop campus at the time, Clive Moffat, says: “I found him a wonderful person. I think people underestimate Boris to the nth degree. He was very eccentric, and I think the eccentricity is part of his nature. It’s not put on.”
Political strategist Sir Lynton Crosby, an Australian who has masterminded several of Boris’s campaigns, calls him “a multiseed politician in a white bread era. In politics, people work you out after a while. If you’re not genuine they go off you. With Boris there’s a genuineness. It has its costs, but he is who he is.”
Which revives the great unanswered question: who is he? An answer of sorts should soon emerge, but as the new PM and his girlfriend take over at 10 Downing Street – the first unmarried couple to live there – it is hard to know which of them has the tougher job.