MY ‘AMITIÉ AMOUREUSE’ WITH BORIS
Petronella Wyatt breaks her silence on their affair
A substantial affection can arise when two people are thrown together – it happened to us. Like many loners, he needed to be liked... ‘He has decidedly Eastern views on monogamy’
IT WAS the affair that sullied Boris Johnson’s reputation – and cost him his job after his claims that reports of his infidelity were ‘an inverted pyramid of piffle’ proved to be a lie.
Now, 12 years later, the woman who had an abortion and a miscarriage as a result of the scandalous relationship, has spoken out.
Petronella Wyatt was Mr Johnson’s deputy at The Spectator magazine he edited when she fell for his charms.
Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday she talks for the first time about what she calls their ‘amitié amoureuse’, or ‘amorous friendship’.
When the affair was exposed, Tory leader Michael Howard fired Mr Johnson as Shadow Arts Minister for not telling the truth.
Today, Ms Wyatt reveals intimate details of their relationship – and gives a fascinating insight into the character of the man tipped to become our next Prime Minister. She says:
Johnson’s character has ‘more eddies than a whirlpool’; he suffers from debilitating bouts of depression and has no friends;
His ‘duplicity’ stems from his fear of confrontation;
He thinks it is wrong for men to ‘be confined to one woman’;
He was devastated by his parents’ divorce because his father Stanley promised he would never leave Boris’s mother Charlotte;
He wants to become Prime Minister because of the insecurities that mean he desperately wants to be loved.
Ms Wyatt’s intervention came after Mr Johnson’s fitness to become Prime Minister was questioned in a blistering attack by former Tory MP Matthew Parris, who called the London Mayor ‘dishonest and reckless’, and said it would be a disaster if the Tories chose him to succeed David Cameron.
In a newspaper column, Mr Parris said Mr Johnson was defined by ‘casual dishonesty, the cruelty, the betrayal; and the emptiness of real ambition to do anything useful with office once it is attained’ – and spoke of how he ‘impregnated two women, one of whom had an abortion and a miscarriage (she had believed he would marry her); the other bearing his child.’
Furthermore, The Mail on Sunday can disclose an angry Commons confrontation last week in which Rail Minister Claire Perry towered over Mr Johnson, and called him a ‘f****** disgrace’, after he criticised George Osborne’s cuts to disability benefits. ‘This is all about your ego!’ Ms Perry added.
Describing her relationship with Mr Johnson, Ms Wyatt writes: ‘A substantial affection can arise when two people are thrown together. It happened to us... we had what French call an amitié amoureuse.’
Offering insight into his personality, she adds: ‘Like many loners, he has a compensating need to be liked. There is an element of Boris that wants to be Prime Minister because the love of his family and Tory voters is not enough. He wants to be loved by the entire world.’
She adds that ‘on the surface, he epitomises Englishness… but by blood and outlook he isn’t really English at all. He has French and Turkish ancestry.’ It is one of the reasons that his ‘views on matters such as monogamy are decidedly Eastern’, claims Ms Wyatt, whose late father, Lord Woodrow Wyatt, was one of Margaret Thatcher’s confidants.
She adds: ‘Boris never sets out to lie. It is just that he will do anything to avoid an argument, which leads to a degree of duplicity.’
Mr Johnson also fathered a love child with art consultant Helen MacIntyre in 2009 – with reports his wife, Marina Wheeler QC, threw him out of his family home ‘like a tom cat’ when the affair was revealed.
THERE are few people better qualified than the writer Petronella Wyatt to observe at close quarters the best friends turned bitter Brexit rivals at the top of the Conservative Party.
She was at the heart of a rarefied clique that included the young David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove. Her four-year affair with Boris Johnson, which ended with her having a termination, led to Johnson being sacked from the Shadow Cabinet after famously rejecting reports of the affair as an ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’.
Now, for the first time, Petronella gives her candid character assessments of all four rivals. Her intimate portraits of Cameron, Gove and Osborne come next week, but she begins with a deeply personal appraisal of Boris Johnson, with whom she remains close friends to this day...
IFIRST met Boris in the early 1990s when we were both working for The Daily Telegraph. It was raining and I was getting into a taxi with a colleague. Boris asked if he might ride with us. Although he didn’t know me, he called me ‘Petsy’.
His bonhomous manner on such a dreary day was what the Italians call troppo forte, as were his clothes. His shirt resembled a Victorian nightdress and he had omitted to tuck it into to his trousers, which were rather baggy, like pantaloons.
If anyone had told me then that I would become a close friend of the eccentric gentleman seated opposite me, I would have thought them insane.
I did not meet him again for several years. In 1999, I was working at The Spectator when Boris replaced Frank Johnson as editor. I was the deputy editor and one of Boris’s first acts was to reduce my salary. The chief executive of The Spectator, a close friend of its then proprietor Conrad Black, had told me that if I wished to keep my job, I should ‘stick to Boris like glue’. This wasn’t hard, as the new editor’s desk seemed to have a thick film of it.
He had been having trouble with his Post-it notes, and appeared to have glued them on to every item of furniture. ‘You, er, don’t mind my reducing your salary too much?’ he asked. He seemed more upset about it than I was.
‘Well I do a bit.’ He was nonplussed. ‘Right, ho, brill,’ he said.
I continued to distrust his perpetual affability and Wodehousian affectation of speech. ‘Do you have to say ‘brill’ and ‘right, ho,’ all the time?’ I asked him one morning. ‘Right ho,’ he replied affably.
I stayed, on a reduced salary, though in an attempt to recoup a small portion of my loss I would pretend to have lost my credit card and ask him for the taxi fare home (which was a good £15) or the cost of a sandwich and a coffee.
He was quite amenable to these requests and I began to change my mind about him, particularly when I found myself in trouble with The Telegraph. My publishers had refused to give them the serialisa- tion right to a book I had written. The Spectator was part of The Telegraph Group and pressure was put upon Boris to have me sacked. To my surprise, he refused.
He was wheeling his bicycle down the street when I ran out to thank him. He still wore his shirt hanging out over his trousers and he had caught some of the material in a spoke. I tugged at it and the shirt made an awful tearing noise. We were silent for a second, and then we laughed and were friends from that moment onwards. He dropped the clownish mask and we began to talk of serious things. We started to lunch together, until one day he said: ‘Don’t call me Boris. People I like don’t call me that.’ His Christian name is not Boris but Alexander. Boris is his second name and his family call him ‘Al’.
Very few people understand Boris. For all his Falstaffian frankness there is something remote about him. But, outside of Boris’s immediate family, I came to know him as well as he can be known, and saw a man whose character had more eddies than a whirlpool.
His company can be riotous. He is neither a pedagogue, a bigot nor a bogus man of the people and he has a healthy disdain for convention. I remember an occasion when we were driving down a motorway. I had gone down to Henley to support his candidature as a Tory MP, and I had been drinking from a bottle of champagne. ‘It’s empty,’ I said. ‘What shall I do with it?’
‘Chuck it out the window,’ he said.
BUT the key to Boris lies in his concealed and sometimes agonised personality. He is Wodehouse with tears. He is a man who loves jokes, but he is not a joker. He is a performer who is an introvert, veering between ebullience and self-doubt; a happylooking man for whom happiness can be precarious.
On the surface, he epitomises Englishness, or the old-fashioned David Niven-style Englishness. One of his favourite films is the 1958 Niven tour de force Around The World In 80 Days, but by blood and outlook he isn’t really English at all. He was born in New York and has French and Turkish ancestry. Nor would a real Englishman dress like Boris. He liked to wear a bandana that made him resemble a corsair. It had a skull and cross bones.
He had few domestic skills. Cameron and Osborne have both told me of their prowess with a recipe book. Boris cooks, but his recipes are not ones that any chef would recognise.
He had rented a cottage in Henley and I had brought down some copy for editing. There was an odour I couldn’t quite place coming from the kitchen. ‘This is my signature dish,’ he said. I stared at the pan, tryingly vainly to make out its contents. All I could ascertain was that they were black. ‘It’s egg, potatoes and sausage with chilli.’
‘Oh,’ I replied, faintly. ‘Do you have any tinned food? A can of baked beans, perhaps?’
He possessed some cans of diet Coke and one glass. I opened one and asked if I might light a cigarette. ‘I approve of smoking because I approve of freedom,’ he said. ‘But I don’t like it. I’ve tried to like it, but I can’t. Perhaps I should try again.’
I gave him one of mine. The cork tip was white and he placed it in his mouth the wrong way round. He lit the cork tip and looked pleased when it turned black and shrivelled. ‘You see,’ he observed, ‘cigarettes taste horrible.’ Our foolish, hysterical laughter was a bond stronger than anything that came in later friendships I have known. It was part of my youth.
A substantial affection can arise when two people are thrown together first by knowing the annoying sides of each other’s character and not the best till later on – the friendship growing in the interstices of prosaic reality.
This camaraderie, usually occurring through similarities of interest, does not often happen between the sexes, but it happened to us.
We became close friends, in our
say, ‘and now I have to write another chapter of my book. It’s just got to be done, hasn’t it?’
The notion of retirement, of doing nothing, appals him, though he seldom scolds others for laziness, taking a laissez-faire attitude to inclinations he does not share.
A large man in every sense, Boris is entirely without malice, and cannot understand people who are angry, so the conclusion is sometimes drawn that Boris never seems to feel things deeply. It is true that his speeches can tend towards levity and, in the House of Commons, he remains a mediocre performer. He lacks the requisite choler, leaving commentators with the impression that he is indifferent.
The sketch-writer Quentin Letts wrote: ‘The Commons sees through you… It could see through the fact that Boris 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 feel things as an MP, but there is no soul… no belief.’
Letts is wrong, however. Boris is both soulful and a man of strong beliefs, but like many who think deeply, he is not always sure what they ought to be, particularly with regard to Europe. He never sympathised with early ‘outers’ such as Bill Cash, or John Major’s cabal of ‘bastards’. He is multi-lingual and by nature cosmopolitan. Until recently, he has taken a rather favourable view of immigration. Yet he is deeply and genuinely patriotic.
We once had a conversation about what it meant to be English. It was a summer afternoon and we were sitting in an outdoor cafe drinking wine. He began to recite the poets of the First World War. There was nothing phoney in this; there was no performance. It was so obviously felt that we both succumbed to tears. On the other hand, some of his beliefs are so eccentric he is rightfully wary of airing them in public.
Boris is a pagan. He can be spiritual, but he has no church. He is an agnostic, obsessed with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Like the 18th Century political philosopher Edmund Burke (who was a Whig, not a Tory), Boris has no belief ‘in the infallible wisdom of the common people’. In an ideal world, he would aspire to a benevolent tyranny, or the meritocracy of Periclean Athens.
He is inordinately proud of his Turkish ancestry and his views on matters such as monogamy are decidedly Eastern. ‘I find it genuinely unreasonable that men should be confined to one woman,’ he has grumbled to me, and cannot understand the media’s reaction to his personal affairs.
The only genuine reservation one would have about a Boris premiership is his sometimes erratic judgment. His newspaper articles have not always been accurate in their predictions or careful of the true feelings of his countrymen, evinced by his attack on the burghers of Liverpool, which resulted in an embarrassing apology. Boris lets the dice fly high. His intervention for Brexit is the gamble of his career. But, in this instance, it was no spur of the moment throw, but the result of months of deliberation.
If his call is correct, Cameron’s resignation may destroy the already fading hopes of Osborne. And if the result is ‘Brexit Cameron, pursued by some hair’, Boris looks increasingly well-placed.
Private polling shows that among Tory Party members, 70 per cent of whom are ‘Out’ supporters, Boris is now the favourite in a future leadership election, and it is the ordinary Tory members who have the deciding vote. Moreover, Boris has an irresistible history of winning and the great gift of luck.
Would he be a good Prime Minister? During the past few weeks he has shown a mature dignity, eschewing the juvenile hysterics of his rivals. He has the charm and moderation to heal the divisions that have riven his party, and not having been in Cabinet, has fewer enemies.
He is liked by the Remainers as well as the Brexiteers. And if Boris is a phoney, he is a real phoney. Besides, which of us, in our hearts, are content with the lot life has given us? We all play a part, as every poet since Shakespeare has noted – and as some of our greatest premiers have done, including Winston Churchill.