My great-grandfather had four wives. Why should I be faithful?
Both Boris’s ex-wives say his womanising mirrors his father’s. ButTOM BOWER says it’s also driven by his loneliness, distrust of men – and constant search for a soul mate
IN THE aftermath of one of his affairs, Boris Johnson told a friend: ‘My great-grandfather had four wives. I don’t see why I should be faithful.’ His dislike of monogamy has long informed his relationships with women. ‘Boris’s adultery,’ says his mother, Charlotte, ‘is just like his father’s. The motives were lack of love for their wives, boredom, selfishness and insecurity.’ According to Boris’s first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen: ‘When we got married, that was the end of the relationship instead of the beginning.’ By the time he and Allegra divorced in 1993, the woman who would become his second wife, Marina Wheeler, was already pregnant. Grounded, happy, secure and intelligent, Marina provided the substance and emotional interpretation of his life that Boris required.
In her, he had found a soul mate. Unlike his instinctive rivalry with men, Boris trusted Marina, a childhood friend, not to cause him any harm. A month after their wedding in 1993, their daughter Lara Lettice was born.
Adding to the Johnson heritage of Muslim, Jewish and Christian ancestry, she was also part Indian through Marina.
As the couple’s young family then expanded, Boris left his EU correspondent job in Brussels and the couple bought a house in Islington, North London. However, he began to feel life at home had become too routine.
Marina, he later confided to one person, was no longer a woman much interested in a close relationship or spirited conversations. She was no longer the full-time, uncritical confidante he required. Too often, she told him the unpleasant truth.
Despite enjoying time with his children, he discovered that fame had attracted other women. He felt waning l oyalty towards Marina. Convinced that their relationship was secure, his appetite fuelled him to risk a new challenge.
Mary Wakefield, a commissioning editor at The Spectator magazine, who would later marry Dominic Cummings, developed a crush on Boris, and he, it appeared, was swooning for Mary, ‘one of the loveliest people’, according to their colleague Rod Liddle.
Jeremy Deedes, a director of the Telegraph group which owned The Spectator, observed that ‘Mary was besotted with Boris. She was like a spaniel on heat. Boris was scratching his head, “What are we going to do?” he asked me.’
In a newspaper interview, Boris gave a hint about his reckless attitude to life. ‘I am a juggler,’ he said. ‘I can have it all.’
AS LONDON Mayor between 2008 and 2016, he appeared to exert a similar fascination over women. In 2009, he joined Marina at Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for her father, the distinguished BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler. To the packed congregation, they appeared united. Yet Boris was in the midst of an affair with Helen Macintyre, a 37-yearold art dealer.
Sparky, sexy and good company, Macintyre had admired him for years. Engaging with her, despite all the risks to his marriage and mayoralty, revealed the paradox of Boris. Although a loner, he craved company. Loneliness plunged him into a deep depression, relieved by a conversation with whoever happened to be his mistress at the time.
In 2010, after she gave birth to a girl, it was reported that Macintyre’s boyfriend, Canadian-born financier Pierre Rolin, left her after taking a DNA test.
Contrary to Macintyre’s assertion, Rolin discovered that he was not the father of the blondehaired child.
‘I was completely snowballed. I think he has no moral compass,’ Rolin said about Boris. ‘He thinks he is completely entitled. One day the truth will catch up with him.’
On the girl’s birth certificate, Macintyre had omitted the father’s identity.
When Boris previously had a brief affair with Anna Fazackerly, 29, a Times Higher Education Supplement political journalist, Marina had decided that for the sake of their children she would accept his apology and move on. But after the Macintyre revelations, Marina ordered Boris out of the marital home and into a rented flat. ‘Kicked out of the house like a tom cat,’ said a friend.
From there, he ordered takeaway curries and, occasionally,
He hinted at his recklessness by saying: I’m a juggler, I can have it all
when Marina was out, returned to the house to see his children.
Later, after Marina had forgiven him, he seemed immune to embarrassment. ‘I now see all these disasters are temporary. You can move on,’ he said, adding: ‘There are no disasters – only opportunities, and indeed opportunities for fresh disasters.’
In 2013, Macintyre lost a legal battle to keep the paternity of her child a secret. The Court of Appeal ruled that in the public interest the electorate was entitled to know the man’s identity. By then, Boris was regularly visiting his youngest daughter, encouraging her interest in music.
When considering Boris’s fitness for office, the judges decided: ‘It is fanciful to expect the public to forget the fact that… a major public figure had fathered a child after a brief adulterous affair (not for the first time).’
The judgment mentioned Boris’s responsibility for ‘two conceptions’. Many wrongly deduced that the judges meant there was another ‘unknown’ child fathered
by him. In fact, the judges were simply referring to his child that his former mistress Petronella Wyatt had aborted. Nevertheless, since he refused to state how many children he had fathered, the hunt for the ‘unknown’ child continued.
ON THE opening night of the Paralympics in 2012, no one spotted the London Mayor slipping away from the stadium to a flat in Shoreditch, East London. It was rented by a blonde 27-year-old Californian digital entrepreneur he had met the previous year. Intelligent and vivacious, her name was Jennifer Arcuri.
Arcuri had settled in London to make her fortune in the tech industry. With sassy humour, she flaunted her looks to ingratiate herself with anyone able to help her build Innotech, her fledging business that introduced aspiring entrepreneurs to policy-makers.
It was during a routine hunt for clients at a British Venture Capital Association reception in 2011 that she had stood among a group of expectant bankers.
‘What’s up?’ she asked.
‘We’re waiting for the Mayor,’ one banker replied. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Boris. If you stand right here he might notice you.’
In her words, ‘a chubby guy arrives with his shirt hanging out and I watched him turn that group of sweaty old men into something on speed. I walked right up to him and said, “You should come to speak to my group.”
“I will,” he said. “Email me.”’ By March the following year,
Arcuri’s business had grown and she needed official endorsement. When Boris was standing for his second term as Mayor, she talked her way on to his campaign bus and sat so close that the Mayor could not help seeing her.
‘She clearly targeted him,’ a Boris aide said later. To Arcuri’s
delight, Boris turned every 30 seconds to look at her. ‘I realised he was interested,’ she recalls nearly a decade later. ‘I was flirtatious. I mentioned Shakespeare. I made him smile, intrigued him and got him to laugh. I had him hooked.’
At the end of the journey, Arcuri gave Boris her card. ‘No, no. I just want to contact you directly,’ he insisted. She gave him her phone number and soon afterwards he called. She filed his number under ‘Alexander the Great’.
About a month later, Arcuri faced a crisis. She had hired an expensive venue to host a presentation and her speaker had fallen through. ‘I used sex to get people to come to my events,’ Arcuri admits.
In search of a replacement speaker she called Boris, who agreed to step in. To her further delight, ‘whenever I called him, he would call me back’. Conveniently, her flat was on his cycle route from City Hall home to Islington.
Arcuri’s presence in Boris’s life could not be kept secret from his closest staff for long. Although he ‘swore blind’ to Marina after his affair with Helen Macintyre that he would be faithful, some could see that while he worshipped Marina as a soul mate, their relationship, they mistakenly
He plodded about in his underwear …eating cheese
speculated, had become strained. Emotionally weak, he would never leave Marina.
Among the first to have scented a problem had been Lynton Crosby, Boris’s political lobbyist. He had extracted a promise from Boris that he would not start an affair until after he stood for re-election as Mayor in May 2012. Thereafter, Crosby was unconcerned.
A year into their friendship, after Boris was re-elected, Arcuri had decided that he was not a womaniser but just after her because, as he said, ‘I feel so horny.’ Instinctive and sensitive, she saw a self-obsessed man for whom relationships were difficult. He lacked close male friends and relied on her, but only on conditions. Until he was certain of his emotions and could trust her, allowing anyone into his personal life was regarded by him as a weakness.
She saw him as an introvert, a depressive who enjoyed solitude, and someone who needed to be alone. Paradoxically, particularly on those days of his greatest public successes, he could decline into an intense depression.
‘Do you want to be Prime Minister?’ she once asked him.
‘I’m a very competitive person, so it’s natural,’ he replied.
In the autumn of 2014, Boris spoke at another of Arcuri’s events, meeting her afterwards at a hotel. Plodding around the room in his underwear, eating cheese, conscious about his looks and his need to lose weight, she felt a bond was being forged.
He was clearly attracted to her interest in power, conflict, intellectual strength, and especially in Shakespeare. Between his expressions of affection, he asked what he could do for her, and how he could make her happy.
Convinced that she wanted to see more of him, Arcuri arrived at a reception later that day to promote his book about Winston Churchill. She found him in a hotel room writing his speech. He spoke about his loneliness and need for her friendship.
That December, Boris hosted a Christmas staff party in City Hall. At 10pm he announced that he had to go to another event. His next stop was Arcuri’s flat. The American’s home had become his haven. As always, Boris trusted a woman as his confidante. First, he was able to talk about the stress of being in a position of authority in City Hall. And second, it was a sanctuary from the sadness in his own home. Marina, he said, was often away. Not only had she become distant, but he feared that his family life was withering.
The cure to his depression, he said, was Jennifer Arcuri. Although the moment he arrived at her flat he would say he couldn’t stay, her direct manner soothed him.
Cool and in command, she never pressured him. The chase was his. The dalliance appeared to have become his only real friendship.
Partly mother figure and partly lover, she claimed to understand his mind, and he felt safe in her company. In return, he expressed affection, but she could never be certain whether he was being truthful.
Despite his ability to quote Shakespeare and Wordsworth, she was falling in love with an unromantic man. He could never love women in the way a woman wanted to be loved. ‘I fell in love. I never admitted how much I loved him,’ Arcuri said.
Whereas his texts were recklessly amorous, and his crazy propositions – such as setting up a ski centre in Bulgaria, or the two of them becoming a political team in New York – were the product of often being alone in the evenings, there was what some might judge to be a foolishness behind inviting her to his empty Islington home.
Despite being surrounded by family photos, he was already divorced from that life.
‘Will you hoist sail, sir? Here lies your way,’ he recited from Twelfth Night.
He no longer concealed the relationship from advisers in Conservative Central Office and City Hall.
With his help, Arcuri was invited to a party at Buckingham Palace celebrating technology. She had also received £15,000 from the international trade department to encourage foreign entrepreneurs to set up in Britain.
Boris’s departure from City Hall in 2016 coincided with Jennifer Arcuri’s exit from his life. Their last meeting was at his house. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said stepping into the street, without revealing her decision to move on.
Wanting a child, she had found her future husband and they moved to Cheshire. Soon pregnant, she decided there would be closure and blocked Boris’s calls.
His last text message was sent on December 29, 2018, two years after their last meeting. ‘I miss you and I need you,’ he’d write. She deleted the text.