Boris Johnson is like an actor ready for his new show

Boris Johnson is more status-conscious and prone to nurse a grudge than his image as a maverick might suggest.

Boris Johnson poses with his Madame Tussauds wax figure in 2009. Picture: AFP

Hat pulled down over the blond thatch, Boris Johnson was waiting for the lift to his tiny office in a far-flung, unfancied corner of the parliamentary estate six months ago. “I’ve been busted back down to the fifth form,” the former foreign secretary said, gesturing to his destination and evidently hurting from a humiliation by the whips in charge of allocating accommodation.

Mr Johnson, 55, is more status-conscious and prone to nurse a grudge than his image as a maverick might suggest. A lifetime winning and then losing the approval of the establishment, however, has made Britain’s new Prime Minister the insiders’ outsider.

Even in Brussels, the scene of some his most notorious journalistic exploits, Mr Johnson has a surprising “in”. EU leaders are aware that he went to the European School while his father Stanley worked for the European Commission. The commission’s next president, Ursula von der Leyen, had been a pupil at the institution a few years earlier.

The teenage Johnson was sent to Eton when his mother, Charlotte, who had had a mental breakdown when he was 10, continued to suffer ill health. She had been the one consistent figure in the four Johnson children’s lives as they moved 32 times in 14 years, trailing their father’s work. An ­acclaimed artist, she had bouts of depression that contributed to the break-up of her marriage in 1979. “I was so, so close to the children,” she told her son’s biographer Andrew Gimson, “then I disappeared.”

After graduation at Oxford, a brief stint at The Times ended in disgrace — he was sacked for making up quotes — but success at The Daily Telegraph led to the editor’s chair at The Spectator.

It was to be a recurring theme: he was sacked from the Tory frontbench for lying, having falsely ­denied an extramarital relationship with a journalist. Other affairs are well documented. He married Allegra ­Mostyn-Owen in 1987 and weeks after their divorce in 1993 married Marina Wheeler, a barrister who gave birth to their first child five weeks later. They have four children but are divorcing.

He lives with Carrie Symonds, 31, a former Tory director of communications. She has been credited with some of his electability but he won celebrity years earlier as voters tired of New Labour’s bland professionalism and its Tory mimics.

He teamed up with Australian strategist Lynton Crosby for a tilt at the London mayoralty. Their victory and successful defence four years later established the pair as an election-winning team and kept Johnson on the political frontline during the coalition era without being contaminated by its compromises.

In one of the most perceptive pieces on Johnson in recent weeks, the Evening Standard recalled the spirit of the mayor’s office, his “sense of theatre” and eagerness to seduce. “Bike helmet in one corner, rucksack in another, probably some old clothes somewhere else, and a model of a Routemaster bus missing its radiator, it felt like the home of some egocentric well-paid TV academic-turned-hack.

“If you created a play about someone like Johnson in the West End, you’d pick props like this. He was putting on a show — and he obviously knew it and was eager for it to be enjoyed.”

The Times