Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Stanley Johnson: one-time spy, politician, animal rights crusader - and irresistibly brilliant raconteur. From his career as a Member of the European Parliament to his pioneering work saving the rainforests, Stanley Johnson's life has roamed many avenues. Amongst much else, he has served on the staff of the World Bank and the European Commission, penned dozens of books, appeared on many popular television shows and won awards for his environmental campaigning, besides fathering six children, including the current Mayor of London. This second volume of rip-roaring and hilarious recollections from the man himself begins with him falling out of a tree on his fortieth birthday, then picks up where its acclaimed predecessor, Stanley, I Presume, left off. Along the way, we're treated to the sights of Stanley posing as a burglar, horrifying Margaret Thatcher with his cocktail party repartee, climbing Kilimanjaro (twice) and navigating the turbulent rapids of parenthood. Riotous and illuminating, Stanley, I Resume paints a vivid portrait of a politician, poet and adventurer, an idealist, a family man and - above all - a born storyteller.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 602
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Praise for Stanley, I Presume
‘Poet, explorer, irresistibly funny … This lovely book reflects its author’s delightful personality.’
– Esther Rantzen
‘Stanley Johnson’s life sparkles with a joy of living. He writes with the wit and humour of a true raconteur.Stanley, I Presume is a fascinating read of a fascinating life.’
– Zoë Wanamaker
‘A wonderful, jaw-dropping account of a rollercoaster life. Johnson senior does not disappoint … the book is a triumph.’
– Anne Robinson
‘Stanley, I Presume is funny and engaging. It reveals not only the person but also his many talents, passions and adventures, from novelist to secret service agent, poet to population activist and explorer to Eurocrat. And it also reveals why the Mayor of London is called Boris.’
– Tony Juniper
‘Hearty and humorous … an enjoyable yarn, full of tall stories … yet contains real achievements.’
– TLS
‘A hilarious memoir.’
– Sunday Times
‘Illuminating … Tells Johnson senior’s life story without pretension and is full of the literary, historical and social confidence that goes with real erudition … A happy book about a happy life, tempered with poetry and sadness … We could do with much more of this sort of writing.’
– Country Life
‘A very funny book and quite often made me laugh out loud.’
– Andrew Gimson, Daily Telegraph
‘When asked to review my father’s memoir … I was thrilled. My father has had a rip-roaring life, created countless cock-ups on all four continents and writes like a dream … Highly enjoyable reading.’
– Rachel Johnson, Evening Standard
‘Laugh-out-loud funny – once you’ve read it you’ll understand a lot more about what makes Boris tick.’
– News of the World
Contents
Chapter One
My Forty-First Year to Heaven
My fortieth year to heaven, as Dylan Thomas might have put it if he had lived just a few weeks longer, did not begin auspiciously. For a start, I was on my own. I hate being on my own. I am not good at it. But that morning, 18 August 1980, the very morning of my fortieth birthday, I was definitely the only one sitting down for breakfast in the kitchen of our Exmoor farmhouse.
I hadn’t planned it that way. My American girlfriend, Bobby, with her two young children, aged four and two, had been staying on the farm with me for the past few days. Bobby never travelled light. She had brought with her a staff of three Nepalese ladies and a vast quantity of baggage. She planned to stay on for the big four-zero event.
I should have realised things were not going well when I came down to the kitchen in the middle of the night a couple of days earlier to find all three Nepalese hunched over the old oak table, studying some document intently by the light of a candle. Caravaggio? Georges de la Tour?
There are several things I should explain about this scenario.
The first is that in 1980, West Nethercote, our Exmoor home, still didn’t have mains electricity. The breakthrough on that front didn’t occur till halfway through the ’90s when our nearest and dearest neighbours, Antony and Jenny Acland, clubbed together with us to bribe the local power company. I use the term ‘bribe’ figuratively, of course. SWEB, the South Western Electricity Board, charged a premium rate – tens of thousands of pounds – to bring a line in over the hills. Irritatingly, a year or two later, an EU grant enabled deprived houses and farms like ours on Exmoor to be linked to the modern world for a nugatory fee. We didn’t exactly miss the boat. We embarked too early and missed the discount!
The second thing I should point out is that the document the three Nepalese ladies were studying turned out to be the railway timetable.
When they saw me walk into the kitchen in my dressing gown, torch in hand, the three women ‘started like a guilty thing’ like the ghost in Hamlet, and scurried off, taking their candle with them.
I shone my torch on the book. It was still open. I could see that Bobby’s inhouse team had been studying Table 56: Weekend Trains from Taunton to London.
Were the three Nepalese already planning to leave, I wondered? Was Exmoor too much for them? In that case, were Bobby and her kids going to leave with them?
I was, I admit, alarmed. I was keen on Bobby. We had been an ‘item’, as the saying goes, for several months. I had met her soon after I was elected to the European Parliament in June 1979. When I wasn’t in Brussels, Strasbourg or Luxembourg (in those days the European Parliament had three seats and we visited each more or less in turn), I stayed in lovely Bobby’s lovely listed seventeenth-century house in Hampstead, looking out onto Hampstead Heath. Though Bobby still worked with her husband – they dealt in primitive art and had a gallery in Cork Street – he had moved out of the marital home and, as I understood it, they were in the process of separating.
Looking back almost thirty-five years later, I can see that, from Bobby’s point of view at least, I was not necessarily an ideal partner. I was a divorced father of four. I spent most of my time on the train or plane, heading off to or returning from meetings of the European Parliament. I didn’t really pull my weight. I didn’t, for example, make any useful contribution to the running of her large household, apart from once helping to resurface her tennis court. Nor did I really put in the time I should have with her young children, Redmond and Sarah.
Even before we left London for Somerset, I could tell she was giving some thought to the situation. You don’t have to have super-sensitive antennae to pick up on these things. But with the European Parliament in recess over the summer, I knew I had a chance to ‘raise my game’, as the saying goes. And I wasn’t just talking about tennis.
‘Come to Exmoor for my fortieth birthday,’ I said to Bobby. ‘You can stay as long as you like. The kids will love it.’
The third thing I need to explain is the actual physical layout of the farmhouse, because that proved to be a key aspect of the ensuing drama.
West Nethercote is a fine example of a traditional West Somerset long-house. And by ‘long’, I really mean long. Think Borneo! As far as the upstairs sleeping arrangements were concerned, Bobby and I were at one end of the house. Her staff and the two young children were at the other. The distance that separated us was at least the length of a cricket pitch.
I was quite happy about this in the sense that I felt confident that if Redmond or Sarah woke up in the night, Bobby’s staff would rise to the occasion and Bobby and I would not be disturbed.
Bobby, I could see, was doubtful. On arrival, she had gazed at the gloomy passage that separated one end of the house from another.
‘Isn’t that an awfully long way for little kids to come and find their mother when it’s dark as pitch?’ she commented. ‘Can’t you leave the light on at least?’
I explained patiently that I could hardly leave the 4 kilowatt Lister Diesel Startomatic chugging away all night in the engine shed beyond the barn. (Startomatic was a total misnomer. In order to get that particular engine going you had to whirl away with the crank while simultaneously squirting ‘Easystart’ into the cylinder block. Once the engine fired, you had to pull the heavy crank away swiftly, otherwise it would spin round too, before literally flying off the handle, endangering life and limb.)
‘I am sure the kids will be fine,’ I added.
Well, they weren’t fine. On more than one occasion, in the middle of the night, that first week of Bobby’s stay on Exmoor, I would hear the patter of tiny feet in the long passage. I would slip out of bed, without waking Bobby up, and gently shoo the owners of those tiny feet back to their end of the house.
I think Bobby knew what was happening. Maybe she was half-awake and realised what was going on. Or maybe the Nepalese told her that the kids had been wandering round in the dark at night, looking for their mother. Anyway, on the Sunday before the birthday Monday she told me firmly at breakfast in her no-nonsense American way, ‘My children must have access to me at all times.’
I wanted to say ‘not in my house, they don’t’, but I hate confrontations, so I kept quiet. Instead, claiming urgent business at the top of the farm, I eased out of the kitchen to start the Land Rover.
While I was out ‘up-over’ that morning in the Land Rover, fetching wood from a pile stacked in a field where we had been hedging, Bobby summoned the village taxi, which duly bounced its way up the two-mile track to the farm. By the time I got back down with a load of logs, the whole party – Bobby, her two children, the three Nepalese staff and all their baggage – had gone.
I found a note on the kitchen table. ‘Gone back to London. Happy birthday! Bobby.’
So that is why, when I woke up the next day, having turned forty overnight, I had no one but my own chastened self for company.
Forty years earlier, cows had munched their way through their own breakfasts in the very room where I was now sitting. In a bad winter, and winters were often bad on Exmoor, the cows were brought into the byre at the east end of the house. This was quite convenient, since the hay was stored on the floor immediately above the byre. To feed the cows, you simply dropped the hay down into the manger below.
Even today, in many parts of the world (Bhutan, for example), cows still ‘live in’ on the ground floor of the houses. It makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. You don’t have to trudge out into the fields to feed them, and their body heat, rising up through wooden or wattle structures, helps to keep a place warm.
I think my father would have been quite content to leave the cows in situ as it were when we took over West Nethercote from the previous owners but my mother, not at all a pushy woman, insisted on having a kitchen, so the cows went off to a newly restored cowshed some distance away.
My mother pressed home her advantage.
‘Surely, Johnny,’ – she always called my father Johnny – ‘now the cows have gone, we don’t need to store the hay in the house. Can’t we have a bathroom instead of the hayloft?’
I remember that hayloft well. It had a warm, comfortable smell. But, even as a ten-year-old (we moved to Exmoor in 1951), I could see my mother’s point. There was no bathroom at all at West Nethercote when we arrived, though there was an Elsan in one of the outbuildings.
But back to the present. After that solitary breakfast, there being no other convenient distractions, I decided I would trim a large ash tree that hung over the eastern gable of the house. The tree not only cast a deep, almost excessive, shade over the front garden, but some of the branches looked quite rickety and might have done considerable damage to the roof if they became detached from the trunk.
I went out to the stable across the yard to fetch the chainsaw. Strictly speaking, it is not really a stable nowadays. We haven’t kept horses for twenty years. It’s more of a toolshed than a stable.
Clad in shorts and sandals (it was high summer on Exmoor), I climbed up the tree holding the chainsaw. I found a good perch and yanked on the cord. The chainsaw started on the first pull.
It would have been better if it hadn’t. After clearing some foliage and twigs, I decided to attack a large solid branch some twenty feet above the ground. Unfortunately, it happened to be the branch I was sitting on.
The extraordinary thing about falling out of a tree is how quickly it happens. One minute you are up in the air, hacking away. A split second later you are lying on your back, totally winded, and the chainsaw is roaring away an inch or two from your jugular vein.
Later that week, my (then) four children, viz. Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo – all of them in the middle of their summer holidays – arrived at the farm. A day or two later we set off for Cornwall in the Land Rover.
It proved to be a long journey. In the course of travelling from Exmoor to Penzance, the Land Rover developed not just one but a whole series of punctures. It was totally bizarre.
A garage man in Lostwithiel had his own theory.
‘Basically,’ he said, ‘the tyres are all bruised internally.’
Truth to tell, I was feeling fairly bruised internally at that particular juncture of my life, but I let it pass.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
The man explained, ‘Maybe you’ve been doing some rough work on the farm. At low speeds, that doesn’t matter. But you start driving at 50 or 60 miles an hour on the highway for long distances, those bruises will blow out. How many new tyres do you say you’ve had?’
‘Three,’ I sighed. ‘The near front tyre is the only one I haven’t had to change so far.’
The man walked round to the front of the car and gave the relevant tyre a reflective kick.
‘It might last you, but I wouldn’t bet on it.’
My almost-fifteen-year-old daughter, Rachel, clambered out of the back of the vehicle to stretch her legs. It had been a long journey.
‘You just have to roll with the punctures,’ she said.
Happily, the sun sets late in the far west of England. It was still daylight when, around Penzance, the near front tyre decided to join the club, deflating suddenly and forcing me to swerve to the roadside. I had bought a spare ‘spare’ at the last pit stop in Lostwithiel and I fitted the last new tyre by the roadside in the fading light.
I wondered at the time whether that epic journey from Exmoor to the furthest extremity of Cornwall was in some way symbolic. Was the transition to a new and different life (‘newly elected Euro MP, newly single, still blonde or blonde-ish, father of four, GSOH, seeks change of direction, maybe more’) always going to be fraught with unexpected hazards?
I took my hat off to the children, then as always. It had taken more than ten hours to get from Exmoor to Land’s End, but I hadn’t heard a single whine or squeal of protest.
Next morning, we all woke up, checked the tyres on the Land Rover (no overnight punctures!), had breakfast and went out into the garden of Minack House.
‘Wow!’ I said.
‘Wow!’ the children chorused.
Whoever said ‘the journey not the arrival matters’ got it wrong. The arrival is what counts.
Minack House, which I had rented for a couple of weeks that summer, is built right on top of the cliff. A steep footpath takes you down to Porthcurno Beach. On the far side of the bay you can see the magnificent granite cliffs, which are (to me) Cornwall’s most distinctive feature. From the garden, and from almost every window of the house, you have a clear view of the great Logan Rock, an 80-ton monster, so precariously balanced that it looked as though every gale might dislodge it.
I was working that summer on my fourth novel. It was called The Marburg Virus and it was about the outbreak of a mysterious and fatal epidemic. I like to think I foresaw the AIDS epidemic, at least in fictional terms, before the event itself.
Strictly speaking, I was rewriting the book. I had completed most of it on holiday in Rhodes the previous year. In those days, I prided myself that I could knock off a novel in a few weeks. Give me an uninterrupted month or two and it was a done deal.
Gillon Aitken, my then literary agent, was more concerned with quality than speed. He was tremendously tall and tremendously grand. He rang me up, after I had sent him the first draft, suggesting that I might like to come to see him in his house in Chelsea.
‘I think this needs a bit more work, Stanley,’ he told me over a glass of Pouilly-quelque-chose. ‘Every time a cliché rears its ugly head, you’ve got to take it out. Ruthlessly.’
Amazingly, Gillon had actually started to rewrite the first few chapters. But I could tell that he was beginning to regret it. He was looking pale and drawn.
‘You may have bitten off more than you can chew,’ I suggested.
He pounced immediately. ‘That’s exactly what I mean, Stanley. For heaven’s sake, try to avoid the clichés.’
My first season as a newly elected Member of the European Parliament had been fairly busy. But I promised my agent that I would work on the book in Cornwall.
So I sat in the garden of Minack House while the children scrambled down the cliff path to spend the day on the beach, and basically rewrote The Marburg Virus from top to toe. The only real problem was the wind. With the house’s breezy location, I was constantly running to reclaim pages, and sometimes whole chapters, from the edge of the cliff.
Did those Cornish gales dispose of all the offending clichés? I suppose they must have done, because when Heinemann, the firm that had published my first three novels, published The Marburg Virus too, the response of the literary critics was quite positive. Stephen Glover, for example, reviewing the book in the Daily Telegraph, wrote: ‘There are some novelists who, whether by accident or design, understand perfectly the ingredients of a thriller. Stanley Johnson is one of these.’
When I meet Stephen Glover nowadays, I sometimes remind him of the good review he gave to my fourth novel. I am not sure he remembers it as clearly as I do. He probably reviews quite a few books.
One night during that summer holiday in Cornwall, we went to the famous Minack Theatre, set in the cliff-face just below Minack House. The play was Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. With the wind blowing strongly, and the waves almost crashing over the rocks onto the stage, the actors had to shout their lines.
I carried my youngest child, Jo (aged eight at the time, now an MP), back to the house during the interval and handed him over to Candy, a solid Lancastrian girl whom I had employed to cook and housekeep during our Minack vacation.
‘The main thing I want you to do, Candy,’ I had told her when I picked her up from Penzance Station the day after our own traumatic arrival at Minack, ‘is to provide plenty of binge meals.’
Well, she certainly did that even if she was a touch heavy on the carbohydrates.
Chapter Two
The Pope Gives His Approval
Summers always have to come to an end. As the children went back to their respective schools, I realised I needed a London base.
I thought it would be best to avoid Hampstead so I wrote off to some estate agents serving the Paddington area. Paddington, I felt, was convenient. There were good trains to the West Country from Paddington.
In any case, I already had use of a pied-à-terre in Paddington.
When I left the European Commission on being elected to the European Parliament in June 1979, Crispin and Penelope Tickell had very kindly lent me their flat in Blomfield Road, which runs alongside the Union Canal near Paddington Basin. Crispin served as Roy Jenkins’s chef de cabinet when Jenkins took over the presidency of the Commission and was still en poste in Brussels. Penelope, who happened to be in London that day, volunteered to come with me to inspect a maisonette on Maida Avenue, the road that runs along the canal on the opposite side from Blomfield Road.
We met outside the house. It was a large, imposing, stucco-fronted building, looking out onto the canal. Boatmen glided past on barges. They didn’t call it Little Venice for nothing. My spirits soared after the débacle on Exmoor. Perhaps I could survive living on my own in a place like this.
The house was three storeys high, with the maisonette occupying the second and third floors. According to the particulars, it had three bedrooms and a large L-shaped sitting room looking out over the water. Just the ticket, I thought.
The maisonette was empty, but the agent had given me the keys. I suppose we had been looking around inside for about twenty minutes when the flat’s own doorbell rang. Though the maisonette was reached through the main entrance, as was the ground-floor flat, it had its own door at the top of the stairs leading up to the first floor.
I ignored it. It sounded again. More urgently.
‘I wonder who that can be,’ Penelope said.
I opened the door, and looked down the stairs into the hall to see a slim, dark-haired woman gazing up at me with a cross look on her face.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
I don’t know why I didn’t give the obvious answer. I could have told the cross young lady that I was a potential tenant on a tour of inspection. But there was something about the whole situation that irked me. I didn’t like being put on the spot.
‘Actually, I’m a burglar,’ I said. ‘I’ve just broken in, and quite soon, I’m going to start a fire.’
Fast forward several weeks. I have made my apologies to Jenny, the young lady from downstairs. As a matter of fact, I have fallen for her. But I don’t think she has fallen for me.
Before Christmas, Jenny fled to Barbados. But I tracked her down, flying out to the Caribbean myself on the next available plane.
I went windsurfing that first afternoon. I am not particularly good at windsurfing. I crashed heavily on some rocks. When I dragged the windsurfer back in to shore after a disappointing stint, Jenny pointed out that the little toe on my left foot was sticking out at right angles.
‘You must have dislocated it.’ She didn’t sound very sympathetic. I think my sudden appearance in Barbados, when she thought I was safely back in London, had rather thrown her.
Having a dislocated little toe is surprisingly debilitating. You can’t wear normal shoes, for example. Your feet look odd, even in sandals, because there is this solid lump of flesh sticking out at one side.
‘Stop worrying about how it looks,’ Jenny advised. ‘You need to have that seen to soon, otherwise they’ll have to break it and reset it.’
I realised then that Jenny, apart from being an absolute stunner as far as looks were concerned, was an extremely practical person. She helped me (hobbling) into her rented car and drove off at speed.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘There’s a vet’s surgery halfway to Sandy Lane.’
‘A vet?’
‘No time to lose,’ she said.
Half an hour later, after a couple of quick, if painful, wrenches from a man who obviously knew what he was doing, I was right as rain.
After a few more days together, we flew back from Barbados to London. Jenny, recently widowed, had two dogs. Douglas was a large chocolate Labrador; Jimmy was a Cairn terrier.
I carried my bags upstairs to my maisonette. Jenny went straight into her downstairs flat and firmly shut the door.
Most days, as I looked out of my first-floor window onto the canal when I was in London (which wasn’t often since the Euro parliamentary term had begun again), I would hear the front door slam and, seconds later, see Jenny stride down the path into the street, being – literally – pulled by the two dogs. Jenny clearly gave the dogs their money’s worth because it would often be more than an hour before she returned.
I met her once on the doorstep. Douglas slobbered over me, while Jimmy nipped at my heels.
‘Where do you take them?’ I asked.
‘Hyde Park, usually,’ Jenny said. ‘I have to keep an eye on them though.’
‘I’ll take them tomorrow, if you like. I don’t have to go to Strasbourg till Tuesday this week.’
Jenny looked doubtful.
‘No, I mean it,’ I insisted. ‘I’ll be delighted.’
Truthfully, when I made the offer, I didn’t for a moment foresee any problems. I had grown up with dogs. There were always dogs on the farm. They were a basic part of my parents’ life and of my own childhood. At mealtimes, if you didn’t want to eat the fatty bits, you could surreptitiously flip them onto the floor for the dogs.
Next day I set off in the car with Jimmy and Douglas. I parked near the Serpentine. It was a bright, sunny day.
Jimmy and Douglas, once released from the leash, took off and disappeared into the distance. Within seconds of letting them out of the car, I had managed to lose both of them.
I wouldn’t say I panicked, but it certainly wasn’t a happy moment. I headed off on foot in the direction I thought the two dogs had taken. I asked passers-by, ‘I say, you haven’t by any chance seen two dogs, Jimmy and Douglas? Chocolate Labrador and Cairn terrier?’
Two fruitless hours later, I drove back to the house on Maida Avenue and parked the car on the concrete pad in front of the garage.
I rang Jenny’s doorbell. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to break the news.
Jenny opened the door just a crack. This wasn’t Penelope welcoming Odysseus on his return from Troy.
‘I hear you lost the dogs.’ She sounded cool, if not icy. ‘Someone rang up. They were both of them found in Hyde Park earlier today. Near Park Lane, actually. Not the best place for them.’
Jimmy and Douglas obviously had no hard feelings. They pushed their way out into the hall and greeted me enthusiastically.
One morning, only a few days after I had returned with Jenny from the Caribbean, I went downstairs to the front hall to collect the morning mail. On the mat I found an extraordinary communication. It was from James Scott-Hopkins, a former MP, now an MEP, whom Mrs Thatcher had asked to serve as the leader of the sixty-one Conservatives MEPs.
During the course of the discussions to be held in Rome later this month with Italian colleagues from the Christian Democratic Party, Members of the European Democratic Group will have the honour of being received by His Holiness the Pope in the Vatican. Wives are also invited. Mantillas should be worn.
By then, Jenny had forgiven me for losing her dogs in Hyde Park. She had even driven down to the farm with me for the weekend with the dogs in the back. She had met my parents, who approved of her enormously.
The dogs as well as Jenny were a total success. When Douglas killed a duck on the pond at West Nethercote, my father patted him approvingly.
‘Every dog is allowed his duck,’ he had said.
I was still in the hall, mulling over Scott-Hopkins’s intriguing message, when Jenny came out of her ground-floor flat to pick up her own post.
‘Do you have a mantilla?’ I asked.
Strictly speaking, the invitation to meet the Pope applied to MEPs and their wives. It didn’t say anything about ‘partners’ or ‘girlfriends’. And anyway, Jenny, when I invited her to join me on the trip to Rome, said she wasn’t sure that she wanted to meet ‘a whole load of Tories’. She hadn’t met a lot of Tories in the past. I had a feeling she disapproved of them.
‘Do come,’ I urged her. ‘How often are you going to have an audience with the Pope?’
Two weeks later we found ourselves in Rome, being ushered into the gilded papal reception rooms in the Vatican.
Scott-Hopkins, a tall, imposing man, made the introductions.
‘This is Lord Bethell, Holy Father,’ Scott-Hopkins said. ‘This is Lady Douro. This is Sir Fred Warner and this is Lady Warner. This is Sir Henry Plumb and this is Lady Plumb. This is Sir Jack and Lady Stewart-Clark. This is Sir David Nicholson and Dame Shelagh Roberts…’
Jenny and I shuffled slowly forward while the Pope greeted the grandees. Eventually, it was the turn of the ‘plebs’, to use that now fashionable term.
I saw Scott-Hopkins look at me and then look at Jenny. He seemed doubtful. He had obviously forgotten her name.
‘This is … er … Mr Johnson, Holy Father,’ Scott-Hopkins mumbled, ‘and this is, er, in point of fact…’
When Jim lost the thread, as he sometimes did, he ‘in point of fact’ed quite a lot.
The Holy Father looked at our puzzled leader. He looked at me. He peered at Jenny under her mantilla. He obviously decided to help Scott-Hopkins out.
‘Well, this is Mrs Johnson, I suppose,’ he said.
The Pope was not speaking ex cathedra but he might as well have been. When it was all over, and the Pope had gone back to the papal apartments, and the Conservative MEPs and their wives had dispersed in various directions, Jenny and I scooted off to have a pizza in the piazza.
Jenny tucked the mantilla into her bag.
‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked.
She studied the menu. ‘I’ll go for the pizza napolitana but with extra anchovies.’
‘No,’ I persisted, ‘what do you feel about being “Mrs Johnson”? The Pope seems to think it’s a good idea.’
Jenny and I were married on 27 February 1981, which, at the time of writing (June 2014), is more than thirty-three years ago. I have a lot to thank the Pope for.
Chapter Three
Roman Remains
The Parliament’s Environment Committee was meeting in Rome towards the end of July 1981 when I received an invitation to lunch at the exclusive Circolo della Caccia, in the Palazzo Borghese in the heart of Rome.
My host, a charming silver-haired gentleman, Mr Pio Teodorani Fabri (who, as it happened, was married to the sister of Giovanni Agnelli, founder of Fiat) insisted on calling me ‘Onorevole’, Italian for ‘honourable’.
‘The problem, Onorevole,’ he explained, as the game course succeeded the pasta (it is not called Circolo de la Caccia – the Hunting Club – for nothing), ‘is that the planners are proposing to divert water from the River Po by building an irrigation canal hundreds of kilometres across the plains of northern Italy to the Adriatic Coast. And the route they have selected goes directly through the famous “centuriations”, which are to be found in the vicinity of present-day Cesena. As you may know, these are possibly the best-preserved “centuriations” in the whole of Italy, indeed in the whole world. Not only do the centuriationi in Cesena cover a large area, not only are they among the oldest in Italy, they are also unique in that they have a precise north–south orientation. There is no other such example in the whole of Italy.’
‘Dio mio!’ I exclaimed, ‘A precise north–south orientation!’
Teodorani Fabri poured me a glass of some delicious dessert wine. It could have been ambrosia. Then he went on to explain that he, and people like him, who were keen to preserve a unique part of Italy’s heritage, had run into a brick wall in their attempts to stop, or at least divert, the proposed canal. The authorities were determined to proceed with the project.
‘We need help at the European level. That’s why we are appealing to you, both as a Member of the European Parliament and as the vice chairman of the Parliament’s Environment Committee.’
I telephoned the Mayor of Cesena from London a few days later. Pio Teodorani Fabri had obviously given him a glowing account of our recent encounter.
The mayor pleaded with me to come to Cesena in person.
‘Veni subito, Onorevole Signor Johnson.’ Come at once!
Before ringing the mayor, I had looked up Cesena on the map. I could see that the town was situated in the Emilio-Romagna region of Italy, in the province of Cesena-Forli, a few miles from the Adriatic, about 40 miles south of Ravenna.
I was already planning to drive through Italy to Greece for a long-arranged family holiday in Corfu.
‘I’ll stop off in Cesena on the way,’ I said.
We agreed that I would come to Cesena on Sunday 2 August. The mayor suggested we should meet in the parking area of Cesena’s best hotel, the Hotel Casali.
It only remained to agree on the precise time of the RV.
‘How about six o’ clock?’ I suggested. To be sure that the mayor had understood, I repeated myself in Italian. ‘A la sei de la tarde. A la sei, pronto.’
That, at least, is what I thought I had said.
I still have my engagement book in front of me as I write these words. The entry for 2 August 1981 reads: ‘Meet Mayor of Cesena, Hotel Casali, Via Benedetto Croce, 6 p.m.’
Jenny, already pregnant with Julia, wisely decided to fly, rather than drive, to Corfu. My mother, whom we had invited to join us in our rented villa there, would accompany her. This was a load off my mind. Well into her seventies, I didn’t like the idea of my mother making the journey by herself. For one thing, since she was quite deaf by then, I doubted if she would be able to hear the boarding announcements. She might board a plane to New Zealand by accident.
There was also the question of space. My Volvo estate could easily handle four children and their luggage, but we planned to pick up a Belgian friend, Camille de Wouters. Camille, with a lively and engaging personality, was the same age as my daughter, Rachel, then a few weeks short of her sixteenth birthday.
‘It would be marvellous,’ I said to Jenny, ‘if you could bring Granny Butter with you on the plane.’
My mother’s nickname was Buster. Acquired decades earlier when my mother was a vigorous lacrosse player at Cheltenham Ladies College, the nickname had stuck with her in later life. My children, though, called her ‘Granny Butter’.
I have to hand it to Jenny. When she said ‘yes’ to my marriage proposal over that pizza napolitana (‘with extra anchovies’) in St Peter’s Square, the day we met the Pope in Rome, she could have had no idea what she was letting herself in for.
I was, as I have already indicated, a recently divorced man with four children. I was frequently absent and not very rich. On the face of it, I wasn’t much of a catch. And now I was asking her to look after my elderly mother as well.
But Jenny made it all right at once. ‘I love your mother,’ she told me. ‘I really do. We can play Scrabble at Gatwick while we’re waiting for the plane.’
As a matter of fact, my mother, even then, when some of her faculties had begun to fade, was a more than competent Scrabble player. She was also very good at anagrams.
‘Can you think of an anagram of SPINE, Granny Butter?’ the children would ask.
My mother didn’t fall for that one. ‘PINES,’ she would say firmly.
Sometimes, when my parents came to lunch, my mother would insist on doing the washing up and the kids would pass her the same saucepan time and time again. Lovingly, of course. Granny Butter played the game. She knew they were pulling her leg.
The four children and I left England on the last day of July 1981, driving down in my Volvo estate car to Dover, with luggage piled high on the roof rack. We took the afternoon ferry to Calais, picked up Camille in Brussels, and then drove through the night through Germany and Austria, before coming down out of the mountains via Cortina d’Ampezzo. As we reached the plains I saw a sign that said: ‘VENICE – VENEZIA 220 kilometers’!
‘Hey, kids,’ I called out. ‘What do you say to lunch in St Mark’s Square?’
I don’t know if anyone else has ‘done Venice’ in two hours but that is what we did that day. We parked up by the station and whizzed down the Grand Canal on the vaporetto to see St Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace and we still had time for a meal in a nearby trattoria.
At 3 p.m. we were back on the road.
By then I was going for gold. It was 140 kilometres to Ravenna and only another 60 kilometres to Cesena. ‘Why don’t we take in Ravenna, too?’ I called out. ‘It’s right on the way to Cesena.’
So we stopped in Ravenna to gawp, wonderstruck, at the mosaics.
We swept into the parcheggio of the Hotel Casali, in Cesena’s Via Benedetto Croce, at precisely five minutes to six. I reckoned I still had time to change. I was an Onorevole, after all. And I didn’t want to ‘diss’ the Mayor of Cesena by looking too casual.
While the kids stayed put, I dashed round to the back of the car to whip off my shirt and shorts. I was still in my underpants when I heard excited cries coming from the hotel, on the far side of the parking lot. Moments later, I found myself surrounded by half a dozen smartly dressed Italians. One of them wore a mayoral chain of office.
‘Finalmente! Eccolo-qui!’ the mayor exclaimed.
I thought I detected a note of irritation in his voice. Did he think I was late? I jolly well wasn’t. I was right on the dot!
Well, it turned out that, by the Mayor of Cesena’s reckoning, I really was late. I had noted 6 p.m. as the time of the RV because I thought I had clearly said ‘a la sei’. Six o’clock. But the mayor and his team had been waiting two hours because they thought I had said ‘a la seidici’. Sixteen hundred hours, or four o’clock!
‘Quick,’ the mayor cried, when we had sorted out the confusion. ‘Andiamo molto presto, per favore.’
It seemed that even though we would not have time that evening to see the famous centurationi, it would not be too late for me to deliver my speech!
Speech? What speech? Nobody had told me about a speech.
We screeched out of the car park onto the highway, following the mayoral cavalcade, with blue lights flashing.
The mayor had reserved seats for all of us in the grandstand of the Cesena racecourse. He bounced up to the podium to seize the mike.
‘Signore e signori,’ his voice echoed over the stand. ‘I am delighted to welcome to Cesena tonight Mr Stanley Johnson, the Vice President of the European Parliament. Senor Johnson, Onorevole Johnson, we are honoured to have you! Senor Johnson is here to help us save Cesena’s famous Roman centuriationi!’
There was a roar of applause from the crowd as the mayor handed me the mike.
In my view, speaking Italian is basically a piece of cake. Un pezzo di torta. You just need a bit of self-confidence. It helps, of course, if you have a bit of Latin. As a matter of fact, I have a lot of Latin. Several decades’ worth.
Still, it was a strange experience. I could hear my voice booming about the ground as I spoke. The floodlights came on.
I began by saying what an honour it was to be in Cesena and that I was sorry to be a bit late. My fault entirely. I went on to say that the mission of the European Community was not just to shovel money at French or even Italian farmers. It also had a mission to save the environment and culture.
‘La politica ambientale e molto importante,’ I cried. ‘Anche la preservatione degli bene culturale.’
When it came to the matter of most immediate concern, the preservation of the Roman legionnaires’ hard-won homesteads, I could not have been clearer.
‘Questa canale Padana – the Po Canal – no e una problema locale di Cesena; no e una problema regionale di Emilio-Romagna; no e una problema nationale – di Italia. No e solamente una problema europea!’
After all these ‘no e’s, I had to deliver a punchline and I did. ‘La preservatione degli centuriationi Romani di Cesena e una problema INTERNATIONALE! GLOBALE!’
There was another roar of applause from the crowd. The starter waved his flag, the horses bounded from the gates and I subsided gratefully into my seat. It had been a long day.
It turned out to be a profitable day as well. I won 188,000 lire on the tote, having to my amazement correctly bet on the results of three of the five races. That may sound like a lot of money. Actually, at 3,000 lire to the pound, the then current exchange rate, it was about £60.
Just enough, I thought, as I pocketed my winnings, to buy a decent present for Leonard and Rosalind.
I should explain that Leonard Ingrams was Boris’s godfather and that Rosalind, his wife, was a contemporary of my former wife, Charlotte, at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. The Ingrams owned a magical villa called Rufena, not far from Gaiole in Chianti. John Mortimer, who often hired Rufena from them for the summer, used it as a setting for his novel Summer’s Lease.
A few weeks earlier I had telephoned Rosalind in Italy and had asked whether we might ‘drop in’, given that we were going to be in her neck of the woods.
I realise that I was using the expression ‘drop in’ rather loosely. We were, after all, a party of six (me plus five) and we planned to stay three nights before catching the ferry from Ancona, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, to Patras.
Weighing things up as we headed for Tuscany after our eventful time in Cesena, I decided that our ‘house gift’ should indeed be a generous one.
So we stopped at a ‘super-mercato’ on the autostrada en route to the Ingrams’ Tuscan villa, where I spent all the money I had won at the races the previous evening on a huge wheel of Parmesan. It was so heavy I could barely lift it.
To my sorrow, there was no sign of that splendid cheese at dinner that first night, nor at lunch the next day. Not a hunk. Not a sliver. Certainly not the great wheel that I had seen Rosalind stow in the fridge the evening we arrived at Rufena. I had high hopes, however, that the cheese would make an appearance by the time we sat down for the second dinner, taken as always on the Ingrams’ terrace in the long Tuscan evening, with the distant Castello de Brolio providing a wondrous backdrop. No such luck. There were plenty of other cheeses, but no Parmesan. It was clear to me that Rosalind, the most generous of hostesses, had forgotten all about it.
That night, when all the Ingrams and the Johnsons had gone to bed, I snuck into Rufena’s huge rustic kitchen and padded across the old stone floor, towards the fridge.
I opened the fridge door. There was the giant cheese, utterly virgin, still taking up the whole of the top shelf.
It wouldn’t hurt, I said to myself, to cut a bit off. I didn’t want to lift the whole cheese out of the fridge since I didn’t want to be caught in flagrante, as it were. So I decided to tackle the cheese without trying to lift it from the shelf. If I heard anyone coming I could quickly shut the fridge door and shuffle off into the night.
I found a knife, opened the fridge door and tried to hack off a modestly sized piece of cheese. Disaster! Parmesan is tough stuff. It’s not like Dolcelatte or Gorgonzola. Even when it is fresh and tender, as ‘my cheese’ undoubtedly was, it still has a certain resilience.
I pressed harder, but to no avail. I was coming at it from a tricky angle and simply couldn’t get the leverage I needed. I pressed even harder. Suddenly there was a tremendous noise in the kitchen. The fridge’s top shelf had collapsed. The cheese had fallen through onto the second shelf and that in turn had collapsed onto the bottom shelf.
I shut the fridge door quickly, returned the knife to its drawer and scarpered back to bed, mission totally unaccomplished.
I was there next morning when Rosalind came into the kitchen and opened the fridge.
‘Good heavens!’ she exclaimed. ‘All the shelves seem to have collapsed! It must have been the cheese. We had better have some for breakfast.’
I think Leonard suspected something. He was a brilliant classicist and a one-time fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford.
‘Timeo Danaos,’ he muttered, ‘et dona ferentes.’
Replete, finally, with Parmesan and prosciutto, we headed on to Ancona.
I feel everlastingly grateful to Aristomenes Karageorgis, owner of the Karageorgis Shipping Line that inter alia operated the Ancona to Patras car ferry. He ‘comped’ us luxury cabins on board his splendid streamlined vessel as it made the overnight crossing of the Adriatic from Ancona on Italy’s Adriatic coast to Patras, the principal harbour of the western Peloponnese. I have had a soft spot for Greek ship owners ever since.
In my youth, I have slept on deck under the stars on these Aegean ferries. This time, thanks to Mr Karageorgis’s generosity, we had cabins aplenty and felt fighting fit when we landed at Patras. So much so that we headed off at once to Olympia, 130 kilometres to the east, where we spent a happy day among the ruins, returning to Patras in time to catch a late afternoon ferry to Corfu.
The White House, Kalami, on the east coast of Corfu, where we were to spend the next two weeks, was once owned or at least occupied by Gerald Durrell. As portrayed in the Corfu Villas brochure, it looks utterly superb: a large, square house, set right on the sea at the edge of a most enchanting bay. What I hadn’t realised, when I signed on the dotted line, was that only the upper floor was available for holiday lets, the ground floor being taken over by a taverna.
We barely had time to settle in before I had to drive back from Kalami to Corfu airport to meet Jenny and my mother.
‘How was your journey?’ I asked.
‘Fine,’ Jenny replied. ‘How was yours?’
I told her about the cheese.
‘Did you see Venice?’ she asked.
‘Sort of.’
Even though, being by now a party of five children (ages ranging from Boris’s seventeen to my youngest son, Jo’s, eight and a half years) and three adults, we were fairly cramped on the top floor of the White House, Kalami, my mother thought it was all wonderful. That was her default position. Jenny was less convinced. Since we had been married only a few months and this was the first summer holiday en famille, she certainly had a lot to get used to.
But that was true for the children, too. If Jenny had acquired four stepchildren, they had acquired a stepmother. Was everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds? Well, maybe not absolutely totally, but pretty darn close. That was my view and I was sticking to it.
To celebrate my forty-first birthday, I hired a small fishing dinghy with an outboard motor for an afternoon’s excursion.
My plan had been to chug up the coast towards the north-eastern tip of the island, somewhere around Agios Stefanos, then anchor in some idyllic cove for a swim and some ‘birthday’ drinks, which we had packed in a coolbox.
At first, all went to plan. We puttered north, keeping Albania on the right and Corfu on the left.
Unfortunately, the wind grew stronger by the minute.
The children finally put their life jackets on. Since there weren’t enough life jackets to go round, my mother dramatically took hers off.
She thrust it at Camille.
‘Here, darling,’ she said. ‘You take it. I don’t need it. I’ve had a long life.’
My mother was a stickler for etiquette. If you’ve invited a friend on your boat, and you put that friend’s life in danger, then that friend has to be saved first.
I was still at the helm. Time to make for home, I thought. Forget about that idyllic cove.
Unfortunately, just about then, the outboard motor fell off into the sea. Luckily, it didn’t go to the bottom. It was attached to the boat by a rope. Trying not to fall in myself, I pulled the engine back up.
I yanked on the starting cord more than a dozen times to no avail. Water, I thought, must have got into the carburettor, if outboard motors had carburettors.
Frankly, I had absolutely no idea what to do. I gave another despairing tug on the lanyard (is that the right word?) and, amazingly, the motor fired and caught.
That wasn’t the last of our misadventures on that Corfu holiday. One morning, Boris went windsurfing in the bay and headed straight for Albania. When we saw him, far out to sea, fall off the windsurfer and fail to restart, I said to Jenny, ‘I’d better get out there.’
My swimming technique is slow but serviceable. ‘Crawl’ is le mot juste. It took me about twenty minutes to reach Boris.
I think Boris was pleased to see me when I finally caught up with him. The strait between Corfu and Albania is only about 2 miles wide at that point. If he had gone much further, he might have found himself in a Maoist prison.
‘Leave it to me,’ I panted.
While Boris swam back, I heaved the sail up in the approved fashion. Amazingly, I kept my balance. The windsurfer took off in a hurry, heading, of course, even closer to the Albanian coastline.
Half an hour later, I had given up all attempts to sail the windsurfer. Instead, I lay on the board face down, having jettisoned the sail, using my hands to try to paddle it back to Kalami.
I wasn’t making much progress. In fact, I was wondering whether I might not have to swim back myself, when I heard a shout.
‘I say, aren’t you our Euro MP? Freddy, come over here and take a look. That’s Stanley Johnson, isn’t it?’
I’m not making this up. I looked up to see a group of holiday-makers, clearly English, gazing down at me from the taffrail of a largish pleasure boat. I recognised one of them at least.
‘Oh my God!’ What on earth was Freddy Emery Wallis, the Conservative leader of Portsmouth City Council, doing on that boat? Freddy was a key member of my Euro Constituency Council.
‘Hello, Freddy!’ I waved cheerfully, trying to give the impression that this was the way I normally operated a windsurfer, viz. prone and paddling.
Freddy had a gin and tonic in his hand.
‘Can we get you a drink?’ he shouted.
In the end, they picked up the windsurfer’s sail, which was still floating in the water where I had discarded it. Then they threw me a line and towed me to shore. Phew!
Chapter Four
The Seal Campaign
My second daughter, and Jenny’s first, Julia Lois Johnson, was born on 9 January 1982, in the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s, Paddington. Nowadays mothers seem to leave hospital almost as soon as they have given birth. I am glad to say that at the beginning of the ’80s they were allowed a little ‘downtime’. Julia and Jenny didn’t come back to 30 Maida Avenue, a stone’s throw from St Mary’s, until a decent interval had elapsed.
There was no question, of course, of ‘paternity’ leave. We had an au pair organised and, anyway, I was at that moment deeply involved in the Seal campaign.
If I had to point out the ten things that have most changed the course of my life, I would say that seals and, specifically, the great herds of harp and hooded seals that each spring migrate from the Arctic to Canadian waters to give birth to their young on the ice floes in the Gulf of St Lawrence and off the coast of Newfoundland, would certainly feature on that list – and quite high on it at that.
For me, at least, so much has flowed from the seal campaign that I initiated in the European Parliament in 1980, soon after being elected as an MEP, that it is hard to imagine my own personal direction of travel without it.
I stumbled into the seal campaign almost by accident. I was reading the Daily Telegraph one day in the plane coming back from Strasbourg when I came across a story about the annual Canadian seal hunt. Of course, I knew about the hunt. Everyone did. Brigitte Bardot was trying to stop it. So were Greenpeace, the RSPCA and a host of other environmental and animal welfare organisations. More than 200,000 harp and hooded seals in Canadian waters, under quotas issued by the Canadian authorities, were slaughtered each year even though these animals were in no sense the exclusive property of Canada. On the contrary, they undertook an annual vast migration, arriving in Canadian waters only to take advantage of the ice floes as a place to give birth to their young.
What I didn’t know, until I read the article, was that around 80 per cent of the skins resulting from the Canadian seal hunt were actually sold in, or through, the European Community.
In those days, the European Parliament was a fairly feeble body. Even though the Parliament would in due course acquire rights of ‘co-decision’ with the Council, the crucial right of initiative lay, as it still does, with the European Commission.
I had already spent six years with the European Commission. I knew how jealously that institution guarded its ‘right of initiative’. Could the Parliament, I wondered, somehow force the Commission to act, even when it didn’t want to?
The seal campaign, it seemed to me, was a wonderful test case, quite apart from being a ‘good thing’ in its own right. Was more blood to be spilled on the ice year after year, with the quotas of slaughtered animals being raised ever higher from one season to the next?
In April 1980, with the support of other MEPs, I had tabled a motion for a resolution calling for ‘measures designed to regulate international trade in seal products and to prohibit entry into the Community of: (a) any products coming from seals which had not been humanely killed, and (b) any products coming from seal species whose stocks are recognised as being imperilled’.
Because the Canadian seal hunt focused especially on young harp seals (whitecoats) as well as young hooded seals, my resolution went on to call on the Commission to make ‘proposals for a total ban on imports into the Community of products from whitecoat or blueback (hooded) seals and on all intra-Community trade in such products’.
Finally, my resolution called for ‘negotiations with other countries involved in the trade in such products, and in particular with Norway and Canada, with a view to achieving international action’.
I knew perfectly well, when I put the motion down, that there was absolutely no obligation on the Commission to come forward with any proposals even if the Parliament adopted the resolution in precisely the form I had put forward. MEPs were always drafting resolutions. It was a way of letting off steam. We drafted resolutions on all kinds of subjects: Nicaragua, Afghanistan, washing powder, maternity leave – there would always be some individual or some group in the Parliament with strong views on a particular subject, ready to call on the Commission to ‘take action’.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the Commission politely, and sometimes not so politely, looked the other way.
My seals resolution fared rather differently.
It was referred to the Environment Committee, chaired by a Scottish Labour MEP, Ken Collins. In due course a rapporteur, a Dutch Christian Democrat called Johanna Maij-Weggen, was appointed. All this was perfectly normal. The general expectation – including, I have to say, my own prediction – was that the Environment Committee would eventually come out with a report, the matter would be referred to a plenary session of Parliament, a vote would be taken, the responsible commissioner would stand up and rattle off a prepared statement without committing the Commission to any action. And that would be the end of the matter.
It didn’t turn out that way at all. Even if the Parliament didn’t take itself seriously, in terms of expecting the Commission to act on its resolutions, there were apparently others who did.
One of those who did was a Welshman turned Canadian called Brian Davies. Davies had devoted much of his life to trying to stop the Canadian seal hunt. In 1969, he had founded an organisation – the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) – dedicated to that end. He had been arrested and imprisoned by the Canadian authorities. But the objective of ending the seal hunt seemed as elusive as ever.
