REPORT 18  OCTOBER 2004

Forget Boris, I thought. His old man is in a hurry. . . .

The last few weeks have been the usual helter-skelter with the usual highs alternating with the usual lows in a pattern I have grown completely familiar with but which seems to completely elude bank managers and their ilk!

Possibly the best episode was going up to Exmoor to stay with Stanley Johnson whom I have known since 1957 when he was head of house at Sherborne School and I was a callow new boy. Our first serious encounter was when I went to his study and said 'Please Johnson, may I clean your rugby boots?' When Stanley expressed some incredulity I explained that as a new boy and 'fag' I was required to carry out a number of menial jobs for the prefects every week and that I hadn't fulfilled my quota. If I failed I would be beaten or caned at the weekend. To his lasting credit Stanley was appalled and even commissioned me to write an attack on the 'fagging system' in the school magazine of which he was the editor. This duly appeared and did not go down well with the authorities. However Johnson and I have been friends ever since.

Recently he was adopted, at the ripe old age of 60 plus, as the Conservatives' parliamentary candidate in Teignbridge. On the strength of this, and a visit to him in his Exmoor home, I decided to write a short piece. This I have even tried to sell, so far with a predictable lack of success. All the same I thought someone might like to read it so here it is:

"The Tory candidate for Teignbridge walked from his home to work the other day. Actually it took Stanley Johnson four days to stomp from the middle of Exmoor where he has an ancient farm-house in a remote part of the Exe valley to the village of Widecombe high on Dartmoor and famous for its annual fair and for Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

Stanley, of course, is famous for being the father of Boris. Even the local mid-Devon newspaper had a page two headline saying that "MP Boris' Dad" was doing a sixty-mile walk along the Two Moors Trail. For those who know Stanley this is ridiculous. Stanley's friends take some pleasure, when told of Boris' various attributes in, saying 'But he's not as clever as his father'. Which is almost true. In and around Winsford where the family have lived since 1951 it is accepted that Stanley is the gaffer and Boris is best known as one of the brothers who used to play for the village cricket team.

The walk was conducted in the company of George Strickland, a local carpenter and joiner whose father was once the vicar. Apart from celebrating Stanley's selection for the Lib-Dem held seat it was also designed to raise money for the churches of the two parishes which were both in need of bell-ringing equipment. "Money for new rope", said the candidate, chuckling, as he handed over cheques for over a thousand pounds to the appreciative churchwardens in the aisle at Winsford before he set off on a wet, misty, blustery morning. Like his eldest son, he is given to jokes such as this, and it hasn't always done him good. Many years ago, arriving at a constituency selection meeting in Leicester with several small children in the sidecar of his motor-cycle, he told the selection committee, presided over by a beady-eyed Duke of Rutland that this was the first time he had been to Leicester and that in fact the nearest he had been previously was Leicester Square. He is still surprised that the Duke and his colleagues failed to see the funny side of this.

At his latest selection meeting in Dawlish he was asked a question about universities and in the course of an erudite answer on the merits of degrees in surfing remarked "They only surf who stand and wait".

This time the response was more positive, making one suppose that word-play and witticism is a safer bet when delivered by a sixty-four year old grandfather than a thirty-something motor-cyclist.

Even before the outset of the Great March Stanley's friends, who had been asked to sponsor him at the rate of 20p a mile and make their cheques out to the respective Parochial Church Councils, had responded with well over two thousand pounds. I am asked to respect their anonymity but the generous friends are an extraordinary collection of the great, the good and the neither of these two. There should be no shortage of celebrities to open the Conservative Fete in Moretonhampstead or Bovey Tracey if Johnson joins his son in the House.

That it has taken so long for him to arrive at this point is a matter of some surprise. At Sherborne his housemaster used to say that only two of the boys he ever taught were clearly destined for greatness. One was David Sheppard who later captained the England cricket team and became Bishop of Liverpool and the other was Stanley. He was Head of School, a rambunctious and habitually blood-stained wing-forward in the 1st XV, a late flowering pianist (he and the headmaster, who was also learning the instrument, performed a memorable end-of-term duet of 'Three Blind Mice' at the end of term concert, and he won a classics scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford. His greatest achievement at university was to win the Newdigate. This was a prize for a long original poem on some arcane subject and Stanley only found out about it around midnight before entries were due to be submitted at nine o'clock the following morning. He promptly sat down and knocked out a hundred or so deftly rhyming-couplets before breakfast and won hands-down.

Since then he has written a dozen or so thrillers which while not perhaps great works of arts are nevertheless infinitely more accomplished than the works of better known political figures such as Jeffrey Archer - oh all right, not difficult, but they're as good in their way as Douglas Hurd's which is more of a compliment. He's also penned a handful of distinguished works on the environment, served as a Euro-MP for the Isle of Wight and Hampshire and run a department at the European Commission in Brussels.

This is good but not what we all expected. Now, of course, the failure, if it's not too harsh to describe it so, has been compounded by the meteoric rise of the brilliant son, who so uncannily resembles him. They both have the same shock of blond hair, shambling manner and air of self-deprecatory buffoonery which shouldn't deceive anyone but, amazingly, does. Now at last it seems perhaps that Stanley's time has come

I walked with him and George for the first few miles of their fund-raiser, over Winsford Hill, across the river at Tarr Steps before waving them off at Hawkridge. The candidate beamed cheerily as he trudged away over the moor, reporter's notebook in his rucksack (he is writing the trip up for a new travel magazine out later this year), new-fangled walking sticks a touch incongruously clutched in each hand.

Forget Boris, I thought. His old man is in a hurry."

Tim Heald

Report Number 18    OCTOBER 2004