How future PM cut his teeth and shaped his values in the Midlands
Boris Johnson says his political beliefs were cemented here in the West Midlands, when he worked for the Express & Star in Wolverhampton and was married to a Shropshire girl.
After graduating from Oxford, with a 2:1 degree in Classics, the 23-year-old Johnson joined The Times in 1987 as part of a graduate training scheme. His employer thought he would do well to learn about provincial journalism, and he was dispatched to learn his trade as a junior reporter in the West Midlands with the Midland News Association, publisher of the Express & Star and Shropshire Star..
Born in New York, and educated at Eton, life in Wolverhampton was different. He lived in digs with a landlady called Brenda in Dimmock Street, Parkfields, next to an abattoir owned by then-Tory MP Christopher Gill. While young Boris was cutting his teeth in journalism, Mr Gill, MP for Ludlow, and Wolverhampton MP Nick Budgen were beginning to make their presence felt as opponents of what would become the EU.
“I was a mere toenail in the Express & Star,” said Johnson during an interview in 2014. “I went around doing, you know, ‘toddler locked in loo’ and ‘cat stuck up tree’ stories. I did lots of UFO stories. They were so sweet. They always said ‘no Boris, no more UFOs’.”
Star columnist Peter Rhodes, remembers being told that he was in Wolverhampton to learn about ‘real life’.
He recalls: “He looked like a fish out of water in a very expensive pinstripe suit and was usually hanging around the newsdesk looking lost or bewildered.”
Despite rubbing shoulders at Oxford with David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove, Mr Johnson says writing about housing issues in the Express & Star convinced him he was a Tory.
“These were people who were long-term unemployed. And I remember feeling sorry for them. Their lives weren’t getting any better. They were living in this house and there would be a baby or other pressures on them. And they would complain about the damp and the mould and the council wasn’t doing enough about it.
“I just felt, how much better would it be to try to get those people into work, get them off benefits, get them if possible to have a share in the value of their home or, if possible, to buy their home.That was when I started to think sometimes socialism, with the best possible intentions, can keep people in a rut. That’s when I migrated towards the Conservative way of thinking.”
Not that there was any shortage of home comforts at his digs in Dimmock Street, where he recalled landlady Brenda cooking up hugely extravagant meals. He said: “She was so wonderful, she used to make the most extraordinary meals in the evening. The Times covered her expenses. She was such as sweet soul. She basically decided that they’d given her far too much money, So she used to produce the most colossal evening meal you have ever seen. There would be lasagne and incredible dishes of cheese, butter and so on.”
Mr Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, cites an incident where he was grabbed by the lapels by an angry social worker called Bruce, who accused him of patronising people in the area.
While Mr Johnson’s time in Wolverhampton was an eye opener to the young man, it was not his first taste of life in the West Midlands.
The year before starting work at the Express & Star, the future prime minister married his first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen at St Michael’s Church in West Felton, near Oswestry, and for a short time the couple lived in the village.
The way the couple met was classic Boris Johnson. While at Oxford, the sister of a school friend who was living in a neighbouring hall of residence, had invited Boris to party.
Boris, being Boris, managed to turn up on the wrong night clutching a bottle of wine. When he knocked on the door, he was greeted by the party host’s room-mate, Allegra, and the pair shared the bottle of wine. Boris quickly decided that Allegra was the girl he wanted to marry, but the union would not last.
Allegra, the only daughter of acclaimed Italian writer Gaia Servadio and multimillionaire landowner and art historian William Mostyn-Owen, arguably occupied a higher place in society than Boris. The family owned Woodhouse, a country estate in West Felton, and by the time of their marriage Allegra had already appeared on the cover of society magazine Tatler.
Remembering their time at university, Allegra recalled: “He made me laugh. We had a very nice time together. We would leave each other notes several times a day. It’s always nice to get something in your pigeonhole, especially if they’ve got little rhyming couplets.”
The couple moved to London, but by the time Boris moved to Wolverhampton the cracks were starting to show. His landlady Brenda advised him: “Boris, you’ve got to treat her like porcelain.”
But according to Gimson, Boris was “in too much of a hurry and too full of energy and ambition to treat his fine and delicate wife with the tenderness she needed.”
Boris went back to London, and managed to reconcile their differences – for a time. But when the couple moved to Brussels in 1989, after Boris became the Daily Telegraph’s Europe correspondent, the cracks resurfaced as Allegra became increasingly isolated.
Allegra said the couple split up a couple of times – once over an argument about education policy – and they drifted apart when Allegra began studying law in London, travelling to Brussels at weekends.
By the time they divorced in 1993, Boris had already begun an affair with second wife Marina Wheeler.
