Boris Johnson: A political torpedo

Don't be fooled by the bumbling or the barking; the MP for Henley and editor of 'The Spectator' knows exactly what he wants. But will he get it?

Sonia Purnell
Sunday 07 July 2002 00:00 BST
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Picture the scene. It's 2010. Standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street with his smiling, highly presentable wife and four scrubbed-up kids is the new Prime Minister, fresh from his election triumph.

As he lifts his arm to wave to the jubilant crowds waiting in the sunshine, the shreds of his ripped jacket pocket flap gently in the early summer breeze. A television close-up reveals that his socks don't match, his heavily soiled tie tells the story of that morning's breakfast, and his rumpled, ill-fitting trousers reveal a good inch of goosey white flesh.

Prime Minister Johnson's trademark flaxen mop of wild-man hair has also escaped the influences of image consultants or sharp scissors. The Old Etonian vowels of No 10's first ever Boris – once regarded as too posh for the BBC – have still to surrender to the obligatory estuarine twang of the Blair era. Horrified officials take in the image being beamed around the world. You can just about get away with a genetically modified Old English sheepdog in opposition. But the charity-shop-reject look for a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? Surely not. Amazingly, at just 46, this former quiz-show regular and long-time consort of fraudsters and earls is leader of a resurgent Conservative Party – and now at last a grateful country.

Is it possible? Those who know Boris Johnson well are quietly placing bets on it. For beneath that well-cultivated veneer of disorganisation and dysfunction lies not so much a streak of ruthlessness as a torrent of frighteningly focused ambition. The same determined drive has marked his editorship of The Spectator, the right-wing weekly political magazine whose task, he says, is to "interrogate the glutinous assumptions of Blair's Britain". Just last week it landed yet another bruising punch on Blair's solar plexus, a part of the body politic that Johnson's party boss, Iain Duncan Smith, has notably failed to reach.

A report from Boris's sister Rachel accused the Blairs of paying tutors from Westminster's designer-label public school to provide private tuition to their two eldest sons, who attend the selective Catholic state school, the London Oratory. The revelation was defended as a tit-for-tat retaliation against Robin Cook's criticism of Mr Duncan Smith's decision to educate his son at Eton, and the affair demonstrated the extent to which Johnson is using the pages of The Spectator to do Mr Duncan Smith's government-bashing work for him. The home tutor row followed hard on the heels of The Spectator's triumph in the Black Rod affair when, whatever the unfathomable minutiae of the case may be, Mr Blair emerged suspected of unsavoury self-aggrandisement.

The magazine has become Johnson's own political torpedo, a publication fashioned in his own image following a round of savage sackings after he became editor in 1999. He has also clamped down on the cosy, boozy culture that has characterised the magazine for most of its 173-year history. But true to form, most of the hard graft and day-to-day running of The Spectator is handled by the immensely able journalist Stuart Reid, his lesser-known deputy. But Johnson still manages to pick up the plaudits and the glory.

Johnson first made his name (which is actually Alexander, but Boris sounded more distinctive) with a series of brilliant, if inventive, rants against the institutions of the European Union as the Brussels correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. But Europhobia was not in the blood: his father Stanley was an ardent European who spent most of his working life on the Brussels payroll. Johnson junior nevertheless recognised that in the early 1990s there was a gap in the market for an outspoken critic of "The Project". In his Brussels office, a stone's throw from the European Commission, Johnson would heap four-lettered abuse on an innocent yucca plant to work up the necessary bile for his latest missive from the front line. The resulting stories, much from the "straight banana" school of Brussels-knocking copy, won a flurry of "herograms" from his then editor at The Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings. These were duly pinned on the wall around his office doorway in a triumphal arch of congratulation.

Although there is no doubt that Johnson wishes to advance the Conservative, Eurosceptic cause through his magazine, he is well aware it is doing his personal cause no harm with a party that recognises his star potential, but harbours doubts about his seriousness.

First elected to Parliament at last year's general election, Johnson has yet to make his mark in the chamber. Perhaps too busy building up Boris the television personality, columnist and national editor, he has a poor parliamentary attendance record (voting in just 59 per cent of divisions, ranking as only the 525th most assiduous MP out of 659).

He has had a remarkably successful career as a television wit, often appearing on Have I Got News for You. The show got its comeuppance for embarrassing Boris over his youthful and ill-advised friendship with the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy when he stylishly retaliated by revealing that the programme's much-admired free-flowing wit was, in fact, almost wholly pre-scripted.

While his jokey, eye-rolling, bumbling style may suit a witty exchange with Paul Merton it does not sit so well with the formality of a House of Commons debate. Michael Portillo, the former leadership contender and career politician par excellence, warned Johnson last year he had to decide whether to be a politician or a comedian. He needs to. His predecessor as MP for Henley-on-Thames, the other Tory blond bombshell Michael Heseltine, was still in his 20s when he mapped out his career route to No 10 on the back of an envelope, and still made it only to Deputy Prime Minister.

If Johnson seriously harbours ambitions to go one step further, he will at some point have to abandon the lucrative trappings of a journalistic career. He is paid £50,000 a year for his weekly Telegraph column, at least twice that for editing The Spectator and probably the same again for his televisual and radio appearances.

His wife Marina, the charming daughter of the veteran BBC reporter Charles Wheeler, is also a highly paid practising barrister, with a reputation for left-wing sympathies and a strong dash of Europhilia. At one London dinner party, she is said to have won over Lord Rothermere, owner of the Europhobic Daily Mail, to the European Convention on Human Rights by countering all his arguments against it with her minute knowledge of its sub-clauses and articles.

Home is in Highbury, Islington – Marina's choice – where the four colourfully named Johnson children (the eldest is Lara Lettice) currently attend a local state school. But as Johnson, ever the comic, says: "When I can I will send them to the biggest, poshest school I can find. Or even Eton if I can persuade my wife."

Marina is undoubtedly his intellectual match and must be tiring of the constant insinuations in the press that Boris is infatuated with his "muse" at The Spectator – widely presumed to be Petronella Wyatt, the magazine's former deputy editor. Boris is the first to admit he has made mistakes, not least when he falsified quotes from one of his own relatives in a story in The Times, and was fired as a result. In many respects he embodies all that is supposed to be politically unacceptable in a modern prime minister. He's an outrageous toff and an image consultant's disaster area. What's more, he has no man-of-the-people credentials at all.

Yet, assuming another election defeat, after the disappointment of a decade of William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, the Tories may well be in the mood for a wild card. The electorate will eventually tire of the joyless puritanism of the Blair-Brown regime. If the Tories want to play the joker, Boris could be their man.

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