Free JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition by Sonia Purnell

and he said, “I can’t believe it says in your paper that Allegra is having avery glamorous party.” “Well she is,” I replied. “But she hasn’t invited me!” he cried.
    ‘I think getting engaged at Oxford was all too soon. It was like they were rehearsing, playing at being grown ups. I think he was a boy who had always done everything precociously early – in the same way as he wanted to be President of the Union so that he could play at being prime minister.’
    Furthermore, already there was a strong – even destructive – streak of rivalry between Boris and Allegra. ‘They used to compete on everything, even down to who had the best orgasm,’ remembers one contemporary. Perhaps that explains why Boris told Allegra’s mother that he had never skied when he joined the family on the French Alps one winter. Allegra and her brothers are acknowledged as accomplished skiers, but Boris, too was no slouch on the slopes: as a child, he had also gone on family skiing holidays.
    ‘All my children ski very well, as did I in those days,’ recalls Gaia. ‘I had rented a flat and he came to join us, but I was quite concerned because he said he hadn’t skied before and the slopes were difficult. But he threw himself down, and I kept thinking he’s not going to make it, he doesn’t know how! But he always did, and so I thought that boy must have enormous courage and determination. He takes things on and he will go far.’ Evidently, Boris’s little ruse had worked.
    Meanwhile, Sebastian Shakespeare was being put through his paces by Stanley, who has always doted on his daughter, with her libidinous laugh, toothy smile and helmet of blonde hair. Although Sebastian went out with Rachel for most of his three years at Oxford, he formed the distinct impression that Stanley wanted his eldest daughter to advance the Johnson project by ‘marrying above her station.’ Stanley, he recalls, ‘had no compunction’ in making it clear that he felt Shakespeare – though thoroughly well-born and successful by non-Johnsonian standards – was neither rich nor grand enough to fit the bill. ‘Charlotte was very sweet towards me, whereas Stanley went out of his way to discombobulate me,’ he reveals. ‘I got the impression that I didn’t cut the mustard for him.’
    Stanley had his unique ways of testing Sebastian’s mettle that made the keen young suitor feel distinctly unwanted. On his first visit toNethercote, Stanley gave Sebastian and Rachel a lift, ‘and drove us like the clappers, 90mph down these country lanes. I was absolutely terrified, but he was testing me, literally trying to shake me out. I was probably meant to crack. He wanted to see what I was made of.’
    Indeed, this odd behaviour was not untypical. ‘There was also the memorable Wellington boot episode. We went out for a walk one very wet day in Nethercote and he insisted I wear his boots, even though I had my own. I thought it was curious, but it seemed rude to turn him down. Within a few minutes, I was awash with water as they had a bloody great hole in them. He cackled with laughter – and so did Rachel. It’s a Johnson jape, isn’t it? He’d got one over on me in front of Rachel because I was being polite. My ego didn’t just wilt, it comprehensively drowned.’ And as someone else, who has suffered at the hands of a Johnson jape, puts it: ‘They are much better at charm than they are at manners.’
    Stanley’s antics worked, it seemed. After Oxford, Sebastian – later editor of the Evening Standard ’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ – and Rachel drifted apart. In 1992, she went on to marry the blue-blooded Ivo Dawnay, an Old Etonian former journalist whose father was a private secretary to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, one grandfather Lawrence of Arabia’s commanding officer and the other Eighth Earl of Glasgow. Rachel occasionally holds grand gatherings at the home of the current Earl of Glasgow – the thirteenth-century Kelburn Castle,