![]() ![]() ![]() When he was invited on Have I Got News for You in 1998, the Guppy tape was raised again but Johnson made the audience laugh with him by rolling his eyes and ruffling his hair and won a vast new following. But it was fashionable at the time to rail against so-called political correctness and to some Johnson seemed like a breath of fresh air. The chilling tape of his conversation with his friend Darius Guppy, a convicted fraudster, in which he agreed to help Guppy with his plan to beat up a journalist, also came to light. He also acquired a column in the Spectator, which he littered with such terms as “piccaninny” and “puffing coolies”. Johnson was brought back to London in 1994 and elevated to the Telegraph’s assistant editor and chief political columnist – although he privately confessed to a colleague to not possessing “any political opinions”. Boris the chameleon politician – and Boris the seducer – had been born.īoris Johnson endears himself to the nation on Have I Got News For You, with a spot of hair-ruffling. It was now that he discovered that success with women was one of the perks of power. He also recruited a band of starstruck helpers to do the hard graft for him and this time he won. Boris Mark II rinsed out the shades of Tory blue to appear more politically androgynous and he disguised his sense of entitlement with lashings of humour. Failure struck Johnson almost as a bereavement, but he learned from it. He barely bothered to canvass beyond public school alumni and was defeated by a slick Liberal grammar school boy. One trophy that eluded him at his first attempt was the presidency of the Oxford Union. It seemed that all the glittering prizes would fall into his lap, including membership of the Bullingdon Club, an upper-class drinking society renowned for its casual vandalism of other people’s rooms, property and feelings. Johnson went to Oxford in 1983 having, despite his teachers’ misgivings, won a scholarship to study classics at Balliol. As his schoolwork suffered, he impressed but also infuriated his teachers with his “disgracefully cavalier attitude”. ![]() By the time he went on to Eton, this public version of Al was growing more flamboyant – a transformation he enforced by changing to the more distinctive name of Boris. As self-protection he started to hone an English eccentric persona, a seemingly bumbling figure in tatty clothes concealing a finely tuned mind bent on survival. Family friends recall that Al now came under fire for his Turkish lineage and the fact that he lived in Brussels. Photograph: Ian Sumner/Rex/ShutterstockĪl and Rachel – the two eldest – were sent away to prep school in England. ![]()
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