Boris Johnson: ‘Do you want me to be photographed in my Bullingdon Club uniform? With a spliff? Now you’re talking’

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/16/boris-johnson-interview-bullingdon-cannabis

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So, there’s the hair. An unruly thatch of blond fluff perched atop Boris Johnson’s head like a yellow wisp of cumulus. It is jolly hair, schoolboyish hair, hair that apparently refuses to be anything other than it is. It is hair that asks you not to take it seriously and, simultaneously, it manages to be hair which implies there are more pressing concerns in this world than trifling matters of follicular vanity. It is hair that says: why should I waste time with a brush when I have the world to run?

It might seem trivial to start with the hair, given that this is the man who many are touting as a future Conservative leader after he was selected as the Tory candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the 2015 general election, but I suspect Johnson’s hair says a lot about him. I suspect, in fact, he takes a great deal more care of it than he is willing to let on.

On two separate occasions – once at a Conservative party conference, once at London Fashion Week – onlookers have reported that Johnson deliberately ruffles his hair just before taking the stage. He doesn’t want to look too tidy or too styled. A big part of his schtick is not being overly smooth.

So, Boris, I ask when we meet at the Churchill Hotel in London: what is your haircare regime? He roars with laughter. (The diverting guffaw is, I will learn, a favourite tactic of his when he wishes to avoid answering certain questions.) The laughter gradually subsides. He realises I actually want him to answer.

“OK, right. Well, I have no idea.”

You must have some notion of what shampoo you use.

“No, I don’t! I’m now so short-sighted, I’m blind!” he shouts. “My eyes used to be fantastic, but now I cannot actually… There was something in the shower this morning that I used, I cannot honestly tell you what it was. It might have been acne cream” – another rousing squall of laughter – “It might have been toothpaste. I honestly couldn’t see, but I put it on and it seemed to work.”

And then what? He lets it dry naturally or…?

Loud guffaws. “This is what they call the…” Johnson breaks off. He seems a bit uncomfortable. Then he thinks of a joke and his face clears. “What I want,” he continues cheerfully, “is a new Barnett formula [the means by which public spending is allocated between Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales]. I want a formula for Barnett! I want a proper recognition. We’ve got to devolve power to London and the cities as well as to Scotland…” And he’s off, talking about the recent referendum results, treading a well-worn path of familiar political argument, and the hair is all but forgotten.

It is a classic Johnson response: smart and witty and, yes, undoubtedly entertaining, but also carrying just a hint of slipperiness. I imagine he’s clever enough to know that if he tells me what brand of shampoo he uses, it will undermine the casual nonchalance he wishes to project. Because, in an age of Identikit, silken-suited politicians, who all seem to have studied at the same Tony Blair School of Hand Gesturing, the 50-year-old Johnson is seen as a blast of fresh air.

This perceived anti-establishmentarianism can be rather baffling to those who know about his fervently establishment background (Eton, Oxford, a surname that reads “de Pfeffel Johnson” in full) and his stated policies on wealth creation (good), social inequality (a necessary “spur” to economic activity) and selective education (a “most powerful utensil of academic improvement”). And yet he possesses an appeal that transcends the normal parameters of party politics. He is, like Nigel Farage – or to a lesser extent, Alex Salmond – viewed as something of an eccentric outsider, an anti-politician, a straight talker who says what he thinks even if it’s not politically correct.

He is popular among grass-roots Conservatives who like his mildly anti-European bluster (he tells me he favours a semi-detached approach to Europe, where the EU is “more congenial” to Britain, and he’s against muddle-headed attempts “to create a single nation out of loads of different ones”). But he also carries a surprising cachet among those who would rather drink battery acid than vote Tory. Why?

“I tell you what it might be,” he says. “It might be that I really began my political career by going on Have I Got News for You [Johnson has hosted on several occasions]. So, in that way, I’ve been able to inveigle myself under people’s natural defences.” It might also be that when you ask Johnson about, say, taking drugs, he doesn’t seem to worry about confessing all manner of past indiscretions, which is refreshing for a politician. He says he smoked cannabis as a teenager, but “it didn’t do much for me.”

Was it at Eton with his near-contemporary David Cameron, I ask?

“Ah. No. No to both. Good question though. I mean, full marks.”

What about cocaine?

“What I do remember is once, it being suggested I try a substance that was alleged to be cocaine and I made an effort – I won’t deny – I made an effort to try and ingest this substance, or inhale it, rather – and I failed. Uh, it was a pitiably small amount anyway. It later appeared that it might not have been cocaine, but rather icing sugar.

“That was at university, yuh, but that was it. That was, I’m afraid, my sole experience of icing sugar. I have never tried to take icing sugar again. Nor would I recommend icing sugar to any young person.”

The Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, who ran Johnson’s two successful campaigns for London Mayor, once said that if you showed a focus group who knew nothing about him a picture of Boris Johnson, they would instinctively warm to him because of “something to do with the way he looks”. It’s that hair again.

Where does Johnson think his appeal comes from?

“I’ve no idea,” he mumbles. “The first thing to say is that all that is much exaggerated and if you cycled around London with me, if you came on a tandem and you followed me, you’d be subjected to a volley of happy abuse.”

Really? What sort of abuse? “Oh: ‘Tory tosser’,” he says, blithely adopting a semi-Cockney accent. “’Sort it out, Boris!’; ‘What’s going on? Run him over! Go on, finish him off now!’”

But he says the great thing about being Mayor is that: “I interact constantly with people in the streets and that’s probably valuable for me because I know what they’re thinking, roughly speaking.”

We are here to talk about another politician with huge popular appeal. Johnson has just written a book about his hero, Winston Churchill. The Churchill Factor is an engagingly written romp through the elder statesman’s greatest achievements (a few of his failings are touched upon briefly, but Johnson manages to magic them into character strengths without too much trouble).

Johnson has been asked repeatedly if he models himself on Churchill and there’s no doubt, reading the biography, that he has pored over the great man’s speeches, books and diaries at length. But, he says: “I’ve got more in common with a three-toed sloth than I have with Winston Churchill. There is no easy comparison with any modern politician. The more you read about him, the more completely amazed you are about what he did – his energy, his literary fecundity, his ability to work – just unbelievable energy.”

Churchill was famously sentimental. Does Johnson cry easily?

“Er… it’s not one of my things.” There is a long pause. Eventually he says he misted up at the opening of the Invictus Games. That’s a typical politician’s answer, I say.

“Sorry, should I be more emotional?” He calls out to his press secretary on the other side of the room. “Camilla, is it good to be more of a blubber or less of a blubber? What are the readers of the Observer going to want?”

They want you to blub, I say. Camilla agrees.

“Do they? Oh bloody hell.”

So he’s not like Nick Clegg then, who once admitted he “cries regularly to music”?

“Well,” he laughs. “Depends. I sometimes weep while listening to Nick Clegg. It will produce hot tears of emotion, but perhaps not in the way you mean. I am, I’m afraid, not particularly lachrymose.”

One imagines any unnecessary blubbing was frowned upon in Johnson’s youth anyhow. He was born in New York, but the family moved back to the UK and then on to Brussels where Johnson’s father, Stanley, was one of the first British officials appointed to the European Commission after Britain joined the Common Market in 1973. His mother, Charlotte, was an artist, prone to periods of depression (she was admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in London for nine months when Johnson was 10).

Johnson and his younger sister Rachel (now an acclaimed journalist and author) were soon packed off to boarding school in England. At the age of 11, Johnson would be dropped off with his school trunks at the Gare du Nord with a 10-year-old Rachel in tow, and was expected to make his own way to Ostend, where the two unaccompanied children would catch a ferry to Dover, then the train to Victoria, then another train to Forest Row, where they attended Ashdown House school, the alma mater of actor Damian Lewis among others. Once, when undertaking the reverse journey to go home one holiday, the pair of them accidentally ended up in Moscow.

I read that he was quite deaf as a child…

“What?” he says, straight-faced.

Yes, very good. Was he though?

“I – you have to ask my mother – but the truth is I often used to try and avoid engaging in conversation and I think I may have slightly exaggerated my deafness in a slightly studied way. But I did have grommets. But I don’t… I have to say – Camilla,” he calls across the room, “do you think I’m deaf now?”

Camilla is reading a sheaf of papers. “Selectively,” she says, not looking up.

Johnson chuckles. “I think maybe as a child I had glue ear and grommets and things.”

Talking about his childhood now, he says it was: “totally mad but it was wonderful but we were all unbelievably competitive and I owe everything, really, to Rachel and to the arrival of Rachel. If Rachel hadn’t appeared when I was 18 months old, I probably would have lived a life of absolute, total, panda-like passivity and complete acquiescence. I would have just sat there chewing bamboo shoots, doing nothing… And it was the constant struggle for resources, affection, parental time with Rachel – who obviously I’m devoted to – that got me going. So that’s all the psychological propulsion you need to discover.”

Two more brothers followed – Leo, who is a partner at the auditing firm PwC, specialising in environmental sustainability, and Jo, who is the Conservative MP for Orpington. Given that two Johnsons will now be jostling for space on the House of Commons benches, one suspects the fraternal competitiveness continues still. Have they thought what might happen if the two brothers both wanted the same job? Would they engage in a Miliband-esque rivalry?

Johnson squirms. “I doubt it very much. We don’t do things like that in our family.”

What do they do in his family if they have a disagreement?

“I don’t think it’s ever happened,” he says flatly. “I love these statues by the way...” and he gets up and starts pacing around the room, picking up one of the miniature models of Churchill that has been placed on the hotel tables to aid with book promotion.

“Where have these come from?” he asks his book publicist. “Have they been put here for special theatrical purposes?”

And, just like that, he changes the subject.

Ashdown House has been much in the news recently because its former headmaster, Clive Williams, was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of child sex offences. Although he was later released without charge, a number of former pupils have spoken out about alleged abuse, most notably in a recent feature by Alex Renton for this magazine.

Johnson insists he never experienced anything of the kind, “to a degree I find personally humiliating! It never cropped up for me, it never cropped up with any of my brothers and sister so for us, you know, we feel very loyal to Clive and [his wife] Rowena and very sad that this is happening. But on the other hand, you know, I can’t in any way minimise the feelings of those who… uhm… had very different experiences.” Is he still in touch with his former headmaster?

“Yuh, yuh. I… I… I… uhm… he was… yes, I mean, I’ve tried to be supportive and to, you know, I can imagine… I mean, this is very difficult. What’s happened is that he’s been… no charges have been brought so there’s a terrible long period of limbo and, you know, I just hope they get through it.”

From Ashdown House, Johnson went on to Eton and, inevitably, to Oxford where he read Classics and joined that bastion of elitist excess, the Bullingdon Club.

He hasn’t seen the recent film, The Riot Club, loosely based on the antics of the Buller, but he did read the play it was based on, Posh by Laura Wade, “which I thought was extremely good: a biting, brilliant play… [but] the thing that she misses out is the overriding sense of shame and embarrassment with which one always woke up the following morning and the deep feeling of amazement.” He pauses. “I always remember thinking on the very few occasions I did it [went out with the Bullingdon], ‘Why didn’t I just take my girlfriend out for supper? It would have been 10 times more fun.’ You know. So, it was entirely, um, I don’t know what it was all about. Also the other thing is, although these ghastly photos are floating about, we only met once a year or something like that and when it did, it was always a pretty sort of…uh… uh… well the blessed sponge of amnesia has wiped the slate clean.”

Does he still own the Bullingdon uniform (rumoured to cost around £3,500)?

“Uh, not immediately available,” Johnson says. “Why, do you want me to be photographed in it? That’s a very good idea. With a spliff. Come on, now we’re talking!”

After university, he went into journalism, working at the Times, the Daily Telegraph and later becoming editor of the Spectator. He was elected MP for Henley in 2001 after “a series of mid-life crises” led him to think he should do something more substantial with his life than mere journalism.

“I just thought I had to put myself in the path of the turnips and rotten tomatoes and see what happened. It wasn’t good enough to be throwing them myself, it wasn’t fair.”

How serious is he about his mid-life crises?

“It was a sense of vague self-dissatisfaction, that’s a better way of formulating it. I felt it was time to have a crack at something because I felt it was easier to attack than to take a position, defend it, argue it, get something done.”

There was a short-lived first marriage to his university sweetheart, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, dissolved in 1993, by which time Johnson had allegedly already struck up with Marina Wheeler, a barrister and daughter of the broadcaster Sir Charles Wheeler, who became his second wife. The couple have four children and are still married, despite persistent rumours of Johnson’s past infidelity (an affair with the journalist Petronella Wyatt cost him his job on Michael Howard’s front-bench; there are reports of a couple of other children from extramarital flings). All of which leads me to ask about Johnson’s occasionally fickle relationship with the truth. How important is the truth to him?

“Um. It is hugely,” he says quietly. “It is everything isn’t it? And I think the truth will set you free, is my view of the world. So, as far as you possibly can, you’ve got to discover it and explain it.” He goes on to give an example of Churchill deliberately overstating the size of the British fleet to Parliament during the Second World War, “but basically, I think the reason he was great is he tried to be intellectually honest with himself.”

So is it justified to tell an untruth if you’re intellectually honest with yourself?

“Um. This sounds like a sort of Socratic dialogue. Well, it’s not desirable as a general rule of thumb. I can see where you’re going with this, Elizabeth, I know. I mean, basically, I think in politics it is almost never justified.”

“Almost” is an interesting word in this context. As a trainee reporter in the mid-1980s, he was sacked from the Times for fabricating a quote. “For what it was worth… it was totally, you know, erm, a total cock-up,” he says when I bring it up and launches into a long and elaborate defence of his actions involving a godparent and one of Edward II’s royal palaces.

Has he gained more respect for the truth as he’s got older? “I… er… I try to tell the truth in a way that is whole and entire and as clearly as I can and I think that is the secret of, uh, of success in politics and…” He breaks off. “I think it is Tony Montana in the film Scarface who says: ‘I always tell the truth even when I lie.’”

It is hard to think of any other modern-day politician who’d choose to quote Scarface, let alone that nugget of dialogue. What I think Johnson means is that, as long as he is honest with himself about who he is, the truth he offers to others can be made to fit according to what he perceives as their best interests. He is being honest about his own dishonesty.

Well, I suppose it’s a start. He leaves the interview in a flurry of Johnsonian charm and self-deprecation. “Oh my God,” he mutters. “You’ve extorted the truth from me! What have I told you? Yards of stuff…” And then off he potters to the adjoining room to have his photograph taken. It has been a highly entertaining hour. Still, I can’t help but feel a man with his political ambitions should probably stop quoting fictional drug barons with a penchant for grenade-launchers and vast mounds of cocaine. If he does want to be Prime Minister, Boris Johnson will need to be more than just Tony Montana in a jolly blond wig.

The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson is published by Hodder & Stoughton, at £25, on 23 October. To order a copy for £20, go to bookshop.theguardian.com