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

with heart-stopping views over the Firth of Clyde. (She would also insist they live in uber-modish Notting Hill, when Ivo, with less to prove socially, was rooting for a cheaper house in the less-fashionable west London surburb of Acton. ‘That insistence on the best is very Johnsonian,’ says one of Rachel’s closest friends.)

    On their return to Oxford for the new Michaelmas term of 1985, Allegra became joint editor of Isis . Guppy was poetry editor, while Rachel reviewed books. Allegra also ran an interview with Anthony Goodman, then President of the Union, relaying his advice to any would-be successors that, ‘you do have to be able to play off one clique against another and still look as though you’re doing no such thing.’ 12
    Meanwhile, Boris rapidly set about planning his second assault on the presidency, no doubt bearing those words in mind. Boris Mark II was far more ambiguous politically, no longer the central casting Tory and standard Old Etonian candidate. He became deft at dodging questions about his political allegiances and made more use of his humour, personality, appearance and nice line in self-deprecation. In effect, he put himself through a hugely successful one-man rebrand much closer to the Have I Got News For You Boris that was to emerge nearly two decades later.
    This personal remodelling was not so difficult as it sounds. Then as now, part of Boris liked being an establishment figure but there was also another side that revelled in his more esoteric background. Boris was now seen far less often with Guppy – at least in public. Allegra, although still with him, was also less visible and, according to contemporaries, ‘kept to her very narrow social circle just as Boris was realising he had to, for political reasons, spread out from his OE core.’
    ‘Allegra didn’t particularly hang on Boris’s arm at Union events,’ confirms a fellow Union activist and now prominent Tory, ‘but her relationship with him was something everyone was aware of – although that didn’t stop him from having a reputation as someone whom the ladies quite liked. It was more moths to the flame than flame to moths. Boris was slimmer then and really quite physically striking. Allegra, though, became completely off-bounds for everyone.’
    Boris II would now spend time with a more mixed Oxford crowd, without actually becoming close to them. He was a more egalitarian creature, or perhaps more calculating. Certainly, he now sought out talent irrespective of background to help him take another pop at the top job. Many of them – often a little over-awed – were only too happy to be enlisted by a figure so glamorous and notorious.
    This ‘disciplined and deluded collection of stooges’ 13 – as Boris himself has referred to them – did all the hard graft for him through the autumn of 1985 in return for little more than the reflected glory of the candidate remembering their name and a vague promise (usually forgotten) of returned support in the future. As Boris himself explains: ‘The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deceptionof the stooge.’ Or, as Abraham Lincoln once put it: ‘If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him you are his sincere friend.’
    Boris’s new acolytes drew lessons from the Sherlock victory and replicated much of his formidable electoral machine. Amateurism was out, replaced by a driven professionalism, albeit cunningly concealed by Boris’s buffoonery. As he conceded shortly afterwards, it is essential for a candidate of his background not to ‘appear too gritty or thrusting, or too party political.’ 14
    ‘We managed to reach our tentacles into parts of the university community that others weren’t reaching,’ observes Anthony Frieze, one of Boris’s stooges-in-chief. ‘Although it was against the Union rules, which banned campaigning, it was total politics. Out of sight in private rooms, we had lists and lists of people to canvass, and who