JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (27 page)

He also defended ‘sickeningly rich people’ on the grounds that ‘if British history had not allowed outrageous financial rewards for a few top people, there would be no Chatsworth, no Longleat.’ (This may be one view Boris has not fundamentally changed – he has been one of the staunchest defenders of the bonus-earning bankers in the City – but he now cites the more democratic benefits, notably jobs and tax
revenues.)
¹⁰
In another claim of questionable wisdom he once wrote that Silvio Berlusconi towered above the ranks of ‘bossy, high-taxing European politicians.’ Echoing the narrator’s verdict on Gatsby and the complacently rich in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, Boris decreed that Berlusconi, who was later charged with, among other misdemeanours, sex with a minor (which the Italian president denies), was ‘better than the whole damn lot of them.’
¹¹

Looking back, even Boris occasionally winces. He has admitted to embarrassment about a particularly tasteless piece in May 1999 on the Serbian warlord Arkan, in which he treats the ‘famous thug and mass killer’ as ‘if he were some buffoonish backbench rebel.’ However, he was also capable of executing sharp handbrake turns once he realised he had called it wrong. On George Bush for example, in 2001 Boris wrote that he found ‘a cheer rising inexorably in my throat’ whenever he saw the President’s ‘buzzard squint and his Ronald Reagan side-nod.’
¹²
Three years later, he started to waver: ‘It’s just maddening that when asked to form a simple declarative sentence on child literacy the leader of the free world is less articulate than my seven-year-old.’
¹³
When Bush was re-elected shortly afterwards, the U-turn was complete and Boris was happy to admit it in typically amusing style: ‘Not four more years of a man so serially incompetent that he only narrowly escaped self-assassination by pretzel, and also managed to introduce American torturers to Iraqi jails. Who on earth, I moaned, can conceivably have supported this maniac? And then I remembered. I backed him, come to think of it. In fact, not only did I want Bush to win, but we threw the entire weight of the
Spectator
behind him.’
¹⁴

Boris’s references to women suggest he thinks of them as either wet or power-crazed. He once tacked a Pirelli calendar above his desk at the
Telegraph
in a gesture of defiance against the ‘
Daily Mail
women’ he said were running the paper but when mentioned at all in his writing, women were portrayed as rather feeble ‘blubbing blondes’
¹⁵
or ‘collapsing with emotion, disappearing from the ranks like a soldier shot in a Napoleonic battle.’
¹⁶
Even the ‘generally tough-minded American,’ Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the
Spectator
(somewhat implausibly) appeared to be brushing away a tear when the ‘suave’
and ‘sorrowful’ Stephen Byers was dispatched from the Cabinet by Tony Blair
¹⁷
and Bianca Jagger, ‘the hot-lipped disco queen from Managua’ weeps on a sofa about Bosnian atrocities – ‘and I don’t think she’s faking.’
¹⁸

‘We live in an age where feminism is a fact, where giving vent to emotion in public wins votes,’
¹⁹
he writes, appalled at the grief fest after Princess Diana’s death. It is clear whom he blames: ‘The Princess is a symbol for every woman who has ever felt wronged by a man.’ Women who held opposing views or did not sufficiently appreciate Boris were in contrast inevitably written up as bossy or harridans, or both, such as the commentator Polly Toynbee and a high-flying Swedish Social Democrat and pro-Euro minister Anna Lindh, a rare female figure on the international stage, who was later assassinated.

Meanwhile, other ‘blubbers’ included the ‘tank-topped bumboys’ distressed by Peter Mandelson’s first departure from government.
²⁰
(In the same vein, Boris referred to the new Labour government’s attempts to repeal the notorious Section 28, as ‘Labour’s appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it.’
²¹
)

This period of his life also saw Boris’s fixation with sexually charged language revealed in his motoring column for the men’s magazine
GQ
, which he added to his growing portfolio in 1999. It provided him with a list of ‘babe magnet’ motors, from the Bentley Arnage Red Label to the Lotus Exige S2, to test drive at his leisure. The reviews relied on words such as ‘filly’, ‘chicks’ and ‘flapping kimonos’ and were garnished with plenty of ‘gearstick’ gags. Read now, the
GQ
output comes across as the outpourings of a sex-obsessed cross between Jeremy Clarkson and Toad of Toad Hall. There is talk of blonde drivers ‘waggling their rumps,’ his own superior horsepower ‘taking them from behind,’ aided by tantalising thoughts of the imaginary ‘ample bosoms’ of the female Sat Nav voice.

On driving a Ferrari F430, he wrote: ‘it was as though the whole county of Hampshire was lying back and opening her well-bred legs to be ravished by the Italian stallion.’
²²
Overtaken while driving an Alfa Romeo 156 Selespeed by a beautiful blonde in a ‘poxy little Citroen or Peugeot thing,’ Boris described how his ‘whole endocrine
orchestra said: “Go. Take.” You can’t be dissed by some blonde in a 305.’
²³
He also enjoyed the virile superiority of driving the Nissan Murano, a sort of fat-lipped SUV on steroids. ‘Tee-hee! What was it saying, with the plutocratic sneer of that gleaming grille? It was saying “out of my way, small car driven by ordinary person on modest income. Make way for Murano!”’
²⁴
Later, even Boris was to admit these pieces suffered from a ‘sprinkling of desperate sexual metaphors.’

His then editor at
GQ
, Dylan Jones, believes the column to be probably the most expensive in magazine history. Boris was certainly paid handsomely for his work but he would hugely increase the cost through majestic indifference to the normal rules of car use. He collected dozens of parking tickets and fines by casually double parking the cars outside the likes of New Scotland Yard or the Royal Festival Hall. Penalty notices were, in Boris’s own words, ‘building up like drifting snow on the windshield’ and more than once an underling had to be dispatched to rescue the car from the pound. Boris would never dream of paying these fines himself, of course.
GQ
paid up, one of the reasons why Jones recalls that Boris managed to reduce three managing editors to tears during his association with the magazine. He would revel in what he describes as ‘my crass sexism,’ exchanging smutty jokes with the handful of men he had known for a long time. Before his political ambitions taught him otherwise, he was often shamelessly chauvinist in public and no doubt this was at times embarrassing for Marina. He wrote in the
Spectator
about developing his own Tottometer, ‘the Geiger-counter that detects good-looking women’
²⁵
and the wife of the editor of the
Economist
, Boris proudly announced, had cancelled her subscription in protest. He also devoted almost an entire leaving speech for a departing female colleague to the proportions of her embonpoint.

But at a time when it was fashionable to rail against political correctness what was certainly crude sexism to some was seen as mere jolly banter by many others in his readership, not to mention the wider Conservative Party. He was courting fans beyond, in his words, the ‘foam-flecked’ ranks of Eurosceptics, reaching out to more mainstream right-of-centre opinion. Boris was on the verge of something
big. Then, on 16 July 1995, an article appeared in the
Mail on Sunday
that would have finished off the careers of most aspiring politicians.

It involved his Eton and Oxford chum Darius Guppy, who had got himself into deep trouble following a brief stint as a bond dealer after university. In March 1990, he arranged to have himself and his business partner tied up in a New York hotel room to make it look as if they had been robbed of jewels worth £1.8 million. They then claimed the money under an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London. Later that year, Stuart Collier, a reporter at the
News of the World
, began to annoy Guppy by making inquiries into the affair. Guppy decided to frighten him off by having him beaten him up and phoned Boris in Brussels for Collier’s home address and phone number. The 21-minute conversation was taped by an accomplice, Peter Risdon, who had been paid £10,000 to tie up Guppy in the hotel room, but had then turned against him. Risdon co-operated with the police and became chief prosecution witness when Guppy was tried for the fraud in 1993. The hugely incriminating tape, however, was kept secret from the public for five years.

The conversation begins with friendly greetings, in which Boris makes it clear that he is expecting Guppy’s call and tells him that he has been going ‘through his files.’ He also leads Guppy to believe that he has arranged for a number of contacts to try and get Collier’s details. Boris, by now a married man of 26 with a promising career, seems most concerned at the possibility of being found out. He also talks as if he is fully aware of Guppy’s plans, asking for assurances that the ‘beating up’ would not be too severe. In return, Guppy explains why he wants violent revenge on Collier and how important Boris’s help is to his plan. Guppy’s tone ranges from exclamatory to cajoling, explaining all the while that he cannot afford to ‘look stupid’ by delaying the attack. He gives Boris ‘his word of honour’ that his role in the assault will remain undetected. Boris repeatedly asks how severely Collier is to be injured. Guppy tells him ‘not badly at all.’

Boris: ‘I really, I want to know.’

Guppy: ‘I guarantee you he will not be seriously hurt.’

Boris: ‘How badly will he …’

Guppy, interrupting: ‘He will not have a broken limb or broken
arm, he will not be put into intensive care or anything like that. He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a … a cracked rib or something.’

Boris: ‘Cracked rib?’

Guppy: ‘Nothing which you didn’t suffer at rugby, OK? But he’ll get scared and that’s what I want … I want him to get scared, I want him to have no idea who’s behind it, OK? And I want him to realise that he’s fucked someone off and that whoever he’s fucked off is not the sort of person he wants to mess around with.’

Boris’s greatest fear appears to be detection: ‘If you fuck up, in any way,’ he tells Guppy, ‘if he suspects I’m involved …’

Guppy: ‘No, no, he won’t.’

Boris frets about the fact that he has used four contacts to track down information about Collier and is worried one of them ‘might put two and two together, if he heard that this guy [Collier] had been beaten up.’ Guppy reassures him that he will have an alibi as he will be in Brussels on the day of the attack. Guppy insists: ‘As far as I’m concerned, I have never told you what I require this number for. You do not know at all so you are totally off the hook.’ By the end of the conversation, Boris is volunteering to do what he can to help.

Guppy: ‘Well, do it discreetly. That’s all I require – just the address: the address and the phone number … all right?’

Boris replies: ‘OK, Darry, I said I’ll do it and I’ll do it. Don’t worry.’

When Guppy was convicted of the insurance scam and jailed for five years in 1993, the pair remained firm friends. Back then, Boris described Guppy in the
Telegraph
as living, ‘by his own Homeric code of honour, loyalty and revenge’ and praising his ‘ascetic, contemplative intelligence.’ Shortly afterwards Boris’s editor Max Hastings, considered by reporters a harsh disciplinarian, received a copy of the tape through the post. Hastings’ response was to fly Boris back to London from Brussels ‘for a serious discussion.’ Anyone might have expected a dramatic showdown – and even a resignation or a sacking at the end of it. But it appears from Hastings’ account that the ‘interrogation’ brought out ‘all [Boris’s] self-parodying skills as a waffler. Words stumbled forth: loyalty … never intended … old friend … took no action … misunderstanding. None of us seriously
supposed that Boris was a prospective assassin’s fingerman. We dispatched him back to Brussels with a rebuke.’
²⁶

And so Bumbling Boris won the day. That was the end of the matter as far as his employers were concerned, the affair was kept under wraps and Boris appeared to have got away, Scot-free. But someone was determined to get the story out. Two years later, in the spring of 1995, an unnamed police officer handed a transcript of the tape to a
Daily Telegraph
reporter. It was passed on up the line to Hastings, who had already heard of it, of course. No further action was taken. ‘I stood back for the fireworks,’ says David Sapsted, Boris’s former mentor at
The Times
and now the
Telegraph
’s news editor, who had sent the papers to the editor. ‘But none came.’ Parts of the transcript were finally published in the
Mail on Sunday
in July 1995, however, prompting a furore – not least because Boris was beginning to position himself as a prominent voice on law and order. He had just written a
Spectator
piece attacking the legal system titled ‘Law unto Themselves’. And in that month’s edition of
Vogue
magazine he was championed as one of the new leading commentators, popular for his ‘geniality, humour and lack of pomposity’. The geniality was now in question. One apt description at the time of the overall tone of the tape is ‘ludicrous, but chilling.’

Boris’s defence was that he had never supplied Collier’s details to his friend. ‘I certainly did not attempt to find the address,’ he told the
Mail on Sunday
. ‘He’s obviously in cloud cuckoo land. It was all a bit of a joke. It was all rather harmless. It was – just Darry.’ Indeed, he dealt with the whole affair as ‘a bit of a joke.’ Max Hastings’ right-hand man at the
Telegraph
(and subsequently at the
Standard
) Don Berry (‘Uncle Don’) remembers teasing him the day the story was published and ‘he just made a rueful face, as if the beaks at Eton had just caught him raiding the tuck-box.’