JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (5 page)

But success and glory eventually arrived in the shape of the University’s top poetry prize, the Newdigate – once won by Oscar Wilde. With this came other trophies. On 27 June 1962 he met the tawny-haired Charlotte Fawcett at the Encaenia, an Oxford ceremony, where he had been invited to read an extract from his winning work, ‘May Morning’. Stanley, whose love life at Oxford by his own admission took a while to get going, could not have failed to notice the Newdigate Prize bestowed not just academic stardust but also a certain sexual glamour (this is a lesson in prizes begetting prizes that has also served Boris well). After a while, Charlotte – who wore a rabbit-fur waistcoat – invited Stanley to her room at Lady Margaret Hall for tea. Eight months later, in summer 1963, they were married in the Register Office in Marylebone Road, London (Stanley was just 22). As a honeymoon, they went potato picking on a friend’s farm in Kent.

Boris’s brains certainly did not come from Stanley alone. On Charlotte’s side, he draws on an inheritance from a family who can justifiably claim to be genuine intellectuals, as well as leading lights in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Known to be unassuming, even shy, and imbued with an impeccable left-wing pedigree, the Fawcetts have long taken a lead in championing human rights, such as for unmarried mothers and their children. At the same time they have
fought against judicial corporal punishment and racism. Charlotte’s brother Edmund – Boris’s uncle – started his career with the publishers New Left Books before joining the
Economist
, where his elegant prose meant that his Leftist views were tolerated. According to Rachel Johnson, Charlotte was the only Labour voter in the Exmoor village of Winsford, the nearest to Nethercote. In her youth she went on CND marches and anti-apartheid rallies, and before Stanley (a staunch Conservative since school), dated left-wing boyfriends. Unsurprisingly, her parents were somewhat shocked when she married a Tory with traditional shire-ish views. And although Boris has followed his father’s party loyalties, it is also clear that he has absorbed much of the Fawcett liberal agenda, including a genuine abhorrence of racial discrimination.

Charlotte’s father, Sir James Fawcett, served as bursar at All Souls College, Oxford in the 1960s but was previously a prominent barrister and member of the European Commission of Human Rights, where he did much to promote the cause of equal citizenship, and the first legal counsel to the International Monetary Fund. Her mother Beatrice was a Catholic convert of partly Jewish extraction. First to translate Thomas Mann, she was the daughter of a distinguished American palaeographer, Professor Elias Lowe. The distinguished Fawcett Society, which campaigns for women’s equality, is named after a nineteenth-century forebear, Millicent Garrett Fawcett (her daughter – Philippa Fawcett – gave her name to the teacher training college where future London Mayor Ken Livingstone would study in 1970). A leading suffragist, Millicent was married to the Radical MP Henry Fawcett, Postmaster General under Gladstone.

Charlotte’s parents were also connected to many of the great liberal intellectuals of their generation. They were close friends, for instance, with the campaigners Lord and Lady Longford, whose novelist daughter Rachel Billington is godmother to Boris, Charlotte’s closest friend and yet another Left-ish member of his extensive kith and kin.

Although Charlotte is much less frequently mentioned than Stanley, family friends acknowledge her enormous input into the children’s development. They insist it is her warmth, creativity and wit that in large part account for Boris’s subtleties and psychological insights,
qualities that have marked him out from the crowd, as well as his own father. ‘She is the genius,’ remarks the writer and doctor James Le Fanu, a family friend married to Rachel’s publisher. ‘Boris is not the carbon copy of Stanley that many people believe, there is a great deal of his mother in him. She is the more interesting character, the ironist – like Boris.’

It is true that so much of Stanley’s early life has contributed to the Boris the world knows today that many describe him as a ‘chip off the old block’ and it is possible, though not certain that Stanley invented the ever-popular Johnson bumbling old buffer schtick. Even if he did, he has never perfected it with the panache and Fawcett subtlety of Boris. Probably the more accurate assessment of father and son is that Stanley is the early factory prototype to Boris’s refined, and more advanced, road model. As Douglas Hurd, who knows them both, puts it: ‘Stanley and Boris are quite similar, but Boris has a sharper edge – both in his intelligence and his ambition.’ Boris has learned, perhaps through Charlotte, how to conceal his ruthlessness – using bumbling, self-deprecation or humour, as needed. He is funnier, and more discerning than his father. Perhaps Charlotte rounded off some of his squarer edges by reminding her exceptional brood: ‘It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.’

Raised a Roman Catholic, she did not enjoy her own strict convent education, but is said to be both a moral and a spiritual person, if not overtly religious. When she had a knee operation, she came round from the anaesthetic to see a vision of her late mother standing over her at the side of the bed. ‘She saw her clearly and talked about it afterwards in a matter-of-fact way,’ says Le Fanu. ‘It’s just one way she’s very special.’

When Stanley returned to Nethercote with Charlotte and the kids in 1969, his single-minded social and intellectual ambitions for their children were already clear. From an early age, the family atmosphere was decidedly highbrow and literary: children’s arts programme
Vision On
, story slot
Jackanory
and
Blue Peter
were the only TV programmes permitted. The Johnsons were BBC, rather than ITV children, and Irène expected Rachel to read out leaders from
The Times
from the age of four. Always, the need to achieve was thrust home.

Later, on trips up to London to stay with her parents in Cavendish Avenue, Charlotte would educate her eldest three. Each child had an exercise book and would be taught a variety of different subjects. It was here that Boris displayed an early talent for painting, which he still enjoys today. (He loves painting cows. Indeed, he once vowed to do to the cow what Stubbs did for the horse, but confesses to being artistically challenged by the animal’s ‘odd, square bum.’
²⁹
). Inside Cavendish Avenue was a cosy, yet inspiring education and one few children are privileged enough to enjoy; sadly, it could not last. Charlotte cherished it as much as her pupils, describing those days as ‘one of the happiest times.’
³⁰

With his father’s dynastic hopes resting on him, Boris soon scooped up academic prizes like rosettes at a gymkhana but he himself admits probably the single most galvanising event of his life – and the incident to install the formidable driving ambition we know today – was when Rachel, his younger sister by 15 months, learned to read before him. To this day, he can still feel the agony of her triumph. And the siblings acknowledge how much they spur each other on. ‘At my 40th, he made a speech saying something like unless I had been born a year after him, he would never have done anything because by nature he is quite slug-like and contented,’ says Rachel.
³¹
‘The pushiness, the forwardness, the cheekiness, Rachel just wanted to get on,’ recalls her long-term boyfriend at Oxford, Sebastian Shakespeare. ‘And always, always, she is competitive with Boris.’

With Stanley, the emphasis during those early years was placed on encouraging such competitive activity, whether it be running, jumping, eating the hottest mince pies at Christmas or possessing the blondest hair. If Boris, as the eldest, did not secure his rightful place by winning, he would erupt in anger. He once took his frustration out on a wall after losing a point to Rachel at table tennis, kicking it and breaking a toe in the process. To this day, he will invest an almost indecent ruthlessness into what is supposed to be an enjoyable game of what he calls ‘whiff whaff’ and frequently seeks to assert his superiority over employees or visitors by thrashing them in games of ping-pong over the Mayoral desk at City Hall. Of course this was a boy whose earliest recorded ambition was to be ‘world king.’
³²
His
ferocious passion for supremacy in any contest has never waned, but appreciating the dangers of appearing over-ambitious in a self-deprecating country like Britain, he has become better at concealing it.

‘Boris has always been very competitive, but that’s what they teach you when you go to a very good school – to be the best,’ explains Stanley. ‘The children were competitive with each other – good, healthy sibling rivalry is what I would call it.’
³³
Others might deem this ceaseless struggle for domination, which makes the Johnsons not exactly relaxing company, more of a blood sport. Coming second would never do, it was emphatically
not
about merely taking part. ‘There were always high expectations of all the kids,’ explains a close friend. ‘They are a family where you definitely felt there was a culture, not put into words maybe, but an awareness of themselves as interesting people going to do big things.’ Indeed, like a bunch of hyper-active boy scouts, the Johnsons are inveterate badge wearers, prize-baggers and point scorers. Sebastian Shakespeare recalls visiting Nethercote in the holidays: ‘Mealtimes usually meant Stanley holding forth and him and Boris powering against each other. It was alpha males constantly sparring, with everyone else looking on. The other younger siblings would join in only occasionally from the sidelines – the hierarchy was clear.’

This rivalry sometimes gave rise to ‘really violent fighting’, which once saw younger brother Leo accidentally shooting Boris in the stomach with an air gun. Leo was supposed to have been shooting tin cans but had seen: ‘… a richer target nearby. Fortunately [Boris] survived [although] since it happened, he has always been very wary of me,’ he says.
³⁴
The incident is treated with the same hilarity as other Johnsonian ‘antics’, even though Boris had to be rushed to hospital for emergency treatment. Later, he even came to blows with Rachel after an argument over the identity of the lead singer of the Clash got out of hand.

But to interpret such behaviour as a sign of hostility between Boris and his siblings is to misunderstand the Johnsons. There is tension, yes, but little division among them. Constantly moving house meant it was nigh on impossible to form meaningful relationships with anyone else their own age, had they been urged to do so. In fact,
seeking playmates outside the family who might not strive for such peaks of achievement was not encouraged. Throughout much of their childhood, bar the odd holiday with another suitably high-flying family, they were largely left to amuse themselves for they did not talk to other children. ‘I remember Al had one friend, Carl, and he once went to Carl’s house but I think that was it,’ Rachel remembers. ‘We never, ever, went to play with other children. We didn’t need friends.’
³⁵
Location and local chums could not provide a sense of being rooted and so close family filled the gap, which serves to explain two key facets of Boris’s life. The first is the extraordinary clannishness of the Johnsons, very much an ‘all for one, one for all’ institution. Cross one of them and the others will close ranks. Marrying into the clan, like hitching up with a Royal, is not for the faint-hearted. Only the strongest and most independent survive, as Boris’s first wife Allegra might testify.

Second, Boris has a habit of keeping other men, even those keen to become close friends, at arm’s length. Neither a clubbable man, nor one who has bosom pals, he largely prefers female company. Only rarely in his life has he let down his guard. Men who have, for years, seen him socially say he is impossible to get to know: no real intimacy is ever shared, no male bonding reinforced over a pint. Offers of a companionable trip to the pub are frequently rejected with, ‘I’m just off for a run, dear boy’ – alone, naturally.

Despite Stanley’s love of Nethercote, he did not stay there long after the family’s return from America: ambition would not allow it. The autumn of 1969 saw more packing cases and a move to London, to an upmarket address in Maida Vale: 41 Blomfield Road, close to Paddington Station. They rented the house from friends of Charlotte’s parents, thanks to another stroke of good fortune in the shape of a generous Ford Foundation grant for Stanley to do post-graduate research at the London School of Economics. He admits, however, that he ‘didn’t do as much studying as I should have done.’
³⁶

Politics, and the Conservative party in particular, now seized his attention. Stanley claims Douglas Hurd was instrumental in setting him up as the party’s first-ever desk officer for the environment,
although Hurd claims no such recollection. However Stanley secured it, the position was one of a portfolio of jobs held at the time – a multiple employment pattern, replicated later of course by Boris and Rachel. Among many other useful contacts in the Conservative Research Department, Stanley met Chris Patten, who recalls him as ‘absurd, but harmless.’
³⁷

Expecting the Tories to lose the 1970 election, Stanley did not stay long and instead embarked on yet another extended globetrotting mission with the aim of researching a new book. Boris and his siblings moved back to Nethercote with Charlotte, where they attended Winsford Village School, a white building next to the church. Once again, she was left to cope alone. On his return, however, Stanley decided it was time to buy a ‘permanent’ base in town and the result was a ‘neat modern’ house in Princess Road, just off Primrose Hill, London NW1 and near to London Zoo.

The children downed pencils in Somerset and enrolled at Primrose Hill Primary School, a late-Victorian board school, bang next-door. It was the same establishment attended by the future Labour leader Ed Miliband (who, being five years his junior, says he has no recollection of Boris) and his elder brother David (a year younger and so doubtless aware of Boris as a playground presence, but unwilling to discuss his memories). Astonishingly, Boris has managed to attend the same schools as both major party leaders in place in 2011. It is also remarkable that one state primary should have produced three prominent politicians in such a short space of time.