JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (18 page)

In fact, Boris did not as yet have a family. He did, however, have a wife and consequentially, his accommodation and other allowances were substantially increased. From then on, he had a reputation within the
Telegraph
for being a hard negotiator on pay. After finishing off her law exams, Allegra followed him over the Channel in the summer. It was a difficult time to be moving abroad as her family back home was breaking up. After 28 years and three children together, Willie and Gaia were going their separate ways. Boris, now sensing that his career was finally motoring, seemed incapable of providing
the emotional support she needed. He seldom, if ever, did household chores such as shopping or washing up, and according to her friends paid scant attention to his beautiful wife. After a while, he was rarely at home at all.

Boris had entered into a transformative new phase of his rise to fame. For some time, Brussels had not been viewed as a particularly interesting posting on the paper – news from the bureaucratic Belgian capital tended to be lacking in drama. But Johnson serendipity struck again. Six months before his departure, Margaret Thatcher had drawn the battle-lines with Europe in her notorious speech in the Belgian city of Bruges, in which she declared: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ Then, just six months after Boris arrived in Brussels in March 1989, the Berlin Wall fell – and communism swiftly with it.

Thatcher summoned an emergency summit at Chequers to try and halt what seemed to be inevitable German reunification. As the geopolitical map was radically redrawn, with Britain’s role on the continent also in flux, Europe and European politics took centre stage. Meanwhile, at home hostility to a newly invigorated Germany began to harden into full-blown Euroscepticism, widening the rifts in an increasingly divided government. Boris – after just 18 roller-coaster months in journalism – had landed in the midst of a perfect storm.

Boris likes to make a dramatic entrance and as the
Daily Telegraph
’s new man in Brussels, his arrival was no exception.

Geoff Meade, the experienced reporter from the
Press Association
wire service, and his first wife Sandra had been invited to Sunday lunch one warm April day in 1989 by Boris’s father Stanley and stepmother Jenny. The two couples were chatting over aperitifs at the Johnsons’ grand house with tennis court in the wealthy Brussels enclave near Waterloo when there was the crunching sound of a taxi pulling up sharply on the gravel driveway outside.

‘We hadn’t been led to expect anyone else so it was a surprise to see this outstandingly blond chap jump out in the loudest pair of Bermuda shorts possible. I’ll never forget it,’ recalls Meade. The scene was made even more memorable when a striking young woman followed him out of the cab – they made an attention-grabbing pair. ‘It turned out to be Boris and Allegra, of course but it was Johnsonian cliché not to mention that they were coming,’ continues Meade. After all, it added to the theatrical effect. ‘But it became clear over lunch that I had been invited there as the established hand to meet and help Boris – and I duly did drive him round for the first few weeks, as was expected of me.’

In the early days, Boris certainly seemed to need the help that his father so deftly arranged and with characteristic selflessness, Meade provided for his new rival. As a family, the Johnsons have developed a useful knack of enlisting loyal helpers, whenever needed.

At the age of 24, Boris had been – through his father – steeped in the ways of the EU since childhood and knew many of the key characters personally, having holidayed with some of them. But while he did not let on about his ‘insider’ knowledge, it was clear after working on the
Telegraph
for barely a year, he still knew very little about news reporting. He was now confronted with a fast-moving, wide-ranging and fiendishly complex story without the journalistic tool-kit to deal with it, although it was quickly apparent that the newcomer was quite different from the established ranks of Brussels’ reporters. ‘Boris didn’t immediately shine,’ is how Meade gently puts it. In fact, his arrival in Brussels coincided with the first major cracks in the Thatcher government over Britain’s role in Europe back in London, leading to Nigel Lawson’s dramatic resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer just six months later, on 26 October 1989. So, it was undoubtedly a leap of faith to send over someone so green to cover events now driving the domestic political agenda – a gamble that very nearly failed to pay off.

As a fellow reporter and rival who also lent him a hand explains: ‘Boris said that Max [Hastings, the editor] had told him to come over to Brussels to see what was going on. As a reporter, he was shite. As a writer of intellectual ability, of course, he became something else.’ Apart from goings on at the EU, Boris was also expected to cover general news stories, in and around Belgium, but his lack of experience in straight news reporting left him vulnerable. ‘I remember the story in 1990 when some Australian tourists were mistaken for British soldiers by the IRA in Roermond, in Holland,’ says one broadcast reporter. ‘We all had to scramble from Brussels to do that story as the Dutch police chased the IRA. Boris was out of his depth and survived only by relying on the others.’

Boris’s charm, unruly custard coiffure and apparent bumbling meant that his erstwhile rivals were happy to lend a hand, however, and in those early days, he greatly furthered his cause by cultivating this image of intelligent helplessness. Even his Brussels home suggested a modest, slightly impoverished man who cared little for the material life. Unlike his father’s resplendent residence, Boris and (reluctantly) Allegra made do with a flat above a dentist’s practice in
Woluwe-St-Pierre, an unfashionable district known for its petit bourgeois distrust of outsiders. More accustomed to the grandeur of the family seat in Shropshire and a gilded life in Oxford, Allegra disliked the place but it suited her husband’s purpose well.

‘Boris was very clever at creating an image and downplaying expectations so that colleagues thought he was way off-beam, and didn’t know what he was doing,’ recalls Michael Binyon, then working for
The Times
in Brussels. ‘He put rivals off the scent and then would come up with a cracker of a story; the others then wondered where that had come from. He seemed like a bumbler to us to begin with, but his news desk back in London always knew what he really was. He used to infuriate colleagues in Brussels by persuading them to take pity on him, help him and then find themselves completely outsmarted.’

Another former rival notes how Boris was fond of combining artful bumbling with a craving for an audience. ‘He exploited everything to get noticed. He would ask questions in comically bad French [the language in which EU business was then conducted]. Yet I discovered by chance that he could actually speak it very well, with a very good accent – it was part of the act.’

Even his driving proved ostentatiously eye-catching: Boris became legendary for Mr Toad-like frantic darting through the congested Brussels highways in his beloved flame-red Alfa Romeo, heavy metal band AC-DC blaring out unsociably through the wound-down windows. As well as a certain flamboyance his cars usually showed signs of strain – doors were tied on with string, wing mirrors had long since been lost. But they complemented his equally ragged wardrobe well.

His unusual appearance caused a particular stir at the Commission’s daily press briefings, attended by the media from all member states. He would wait for the other journalists to take their seats at midday precisely – with the Brits traditionally occupying the centre front rows – before making his own belated, but scene-stealing entrance. When not dressed for a Malibu beach party, he favoured soiled and frequently whiffy jackets with ripped pockets and trousers with fraying seams – this in a city where the work uniform was one of sober European
elegance and polish. An impeccably attired
grande dame
of the French press corps once famously leant over to the comfortingly urbane Michael Binyon to enquire, ‘
Qui est ce monstre
?’ Soon, he cut such an infamous figure of intelligent hopelessness that no one, not even from other EU countries, needed to ask. Boris was notorious across the different national press packs: from the Italians to the Danes, they recognised a star when they saw one. He was known to all and sundry as just Boris, his writings as the ‘English position’ and he lapped up the attention.

David Usborne of the
Independent
, another knowledgeable old hand, gives further insight into the Johnsonian ‘winning friends’ and ‘getting noticed’ technique: ‘He was very young and in a slightly deranged way, he looked up to me.’ However, with hindsight, Usborne recognises he was being worked. ‘At least,’ he says, ‘he was very good at
flattering
me.’ Flattery is another cunning family tactic – making others feel good while simultaneously making use of them and what they know, at least until they tire of the game. Like many of his ruses, Boris honed the art to perfection in Brussels. As soon as he had recruited an army of sympathetic helpers – or as his critics, remembering his Oxford antics, would put it, ‘stooges’ – he began to focus on a strategy that would pluck him out of obscurity, seize the glory from his generous cohorts and in turn elevate him to become both Margaret Thatcher’s and the nation’s favourite journalist. In taking a different stance from his peers, he would eventually, at least in his own estimation, alter the course of history and earn himself fame and fortune in the process.

Boris’s genius lay in recognising that Brussels reporting had become a cosy cartel, in which the various correspondents produced broadly sympathetic accounts of the EU’s activities. He spotted a commercial opportunity – the chance to make his name by doing what he does best: being different. He has subsequently obliquely confirmed that this was his Brussels game plan in the afterword of a collection of his journalism,
Lend Me Your Ears
(2004). Indeed, it’s a telling insight into how strategically Boris thinks: ‘Because it is a free market, there will always be someone to buck the conventional opinion, ready to buy
when the market is low. If someone spots that gap and starts to offer another stock, there will be one of those tipping points. Suddenly, everyone will stop selling and start buying.’

At first, his was a relatively lonely Eurosceptic voice in Brussels, but by the time he left after five years there were only a few brave souls left who still felt it safe to present themselves as unquestioning pro-Europeans, at least in public. The ‘tipping point’ had emphatically been passed and that was in part down to Boris’s early and consistent investment in sceptic stock. Of course, Boris did not invent Euro-scepticism – there were others who had long been hostile to the Euro-project – but he helped to take it out of the hands of its traditional proponents from the Left, such as veteran Labour MPs Tony Benn and Peter Shore, and make it an attractive and emotionally resonant cause for the Right.

A spokesman from UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), which campaigns for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, says that Boris’s writings ‘helped to pave’ the way for the rise of his party. Its leader Nigel Farage goes further by saying that before Boris made them a fashionable cause, Eurosceptic leanings were ‘something that would only be shared amongst close personal friends. They were a minority pursuit.’ After Boris, there were few on the Right who did not join the Eurosceptic bandwagon. Of course there were other writers, mainly based in London, also starting to peddle the anti-European cause but Boris whipped up Eurosceptic fervour in the most devilishly clever way, using a potent cocktail of humour and gross exaggeration. quickly realising it was imperative to become an amusing, as well as hostile writer, to stand out, he could already see that humour was perhaps his most devastating weapon.

‘EC CHEESE ROW TAKES THE BISCUIT,’ was the headline on one of his
Telegraph
stories. Another noted, ‘the Italian rubber industry has fallen foul of EC rules by making undersized condoms.’
¹
His copy was full of ‘plots’ and ‘traps’ laid by the dastardly French against the ‘limp-wristed’ English with their ‘shy grins’ and ‘corrugated soled shoes.’ Within a couple of years of his arrival, Boris had developed a whole new mode of journalism, one that the rest of the media were swiftly compelled to adopt. The ‘straight banana’
school of Eurosceptic reporting saw fishermen made to wear hairnets, prawn cocktail crisps banned and a two-mile high Eurocrat folly built at taxpayers’ expense, all under the auspices of an insanely grandiose and imperialist European Commission.

‘He was very inventive and creative. What he would say would never be simply untrue, but would be on the edge of what might happen,’ says Michael Binyon. ‘The skyscraper story, for instance, was based on just a hint that such a building would be nice. It was hard to deny these stories outright so we were all forced to follow them up. It was good to be a leading Eurosceptic in a consensus of Europhile correspondents. Everyone was then mocking Maggie and cheering [Jacques] Delors [president of the Commission]. Boris played a brilliant spoiler card by following the reverse stance.’

Journalists chasing the same story frequently resort to hunting in packs but Boris, despite his convivial air, was still a loner at heart. ‘He wasn’t the best of the bunch, but one of the most likely to cause a stir, to get a good story,’ recalls a distinguished rival. ‘He always had a different line, angle, or piece of information. But was that because he had better stories or was he just better at showcasing them? Or perhaps it was that he was simply better at making them up?’ Boris’s energy, his inventiveness, opportunism and dogged self-belief combined to make him an unstoppable force. As a close friend of the Johnson family recalls: ‘Everyone in the Brussels press bought into it, this Euro-loony thing; there came about a basic assumption that if it came from the EU, it must be loony. Even the BBC were doing it, and that was down to Boris.’