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life’ while managing to dodge the outrage of Middle England? As with his rival OE David Cameron, contemporaries question whether Boris ever really indulged. Since President Clinton admitted that he had tried, but ‘not inhaled’ marijuana, a confession of a minor drugs ‘experience’ in youth has become almost de rigueur for any ambitious politician. Both Boris and Cameron are highly self-disciplined characters, who grew up at a time when it was considereddull or odd not to at least give drugs a try. Both desire the appearance of being normal, but being iron-disciplined and self-focused, neither was anything of the sort.
    Boris is strangely reticent about his gap year but it gave him the time and the distance to practise and perfect the Boris persona – with the ‘ready wit’ and ‘facility with Latin’ that made such an impact at Geelong. At the end of it, ‘Al’ was left 10,000 miles away in the Australian Outback and ‘Boris’ was to come to the fore at Oxford and thereafter.

Chapter Three
Toffs, Tugs and Stains
Oxford, 1983–1987
    Boris could not be going up to Oxford at a better time. For the previous two decades the ancient University had lost ground to its great rival Cambridge in terms of political importance. In the 1960s, the ‘other place’ had produced most of the then rising Tory political elite, such as Ken Clarke, Norman Lamont and Michael Howard. The so-called ‘Cambridge Mafia’ produced a clutch of Cabinet ministers and a party leader, though not a prime minister. But by 1983, the year Boris went up, the balance of Varsity power was shifting: Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister and at the height of her powers, was an Oxford graduate.
    The political winds were also changing, with tradition back in the ascendant and the Michael Foot-led Left in chaos. Toffs were back in favour and Sloane Rangers and Young Fogeys were the rising social tribes. Since Granada Television’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited had transmitted a romanticised view of Oxford life into the nation’s living rooms in 1981, the town had once again been attracting the nation’s brightest ‘young things’. Could any young public schoolboy resist emulating the languid undergraduate style and charm of a young Lord Sebastian Flyte? The charismatic, but ultimately doomed character – or rather Anthony Andrews’ seductive TV portrayal – spawned a thousand tank tops, male blonds (bottle or au naturel ) and cut-glass accents (real or affected) across Waugh’s ‘city of aquatint’ and ‘cloistral hush’. 1 There were even a few teddy bears, too.
    Boris found himself at the forefront of a gilded generation of Oxford undergraduates, who went on to dominate politics and the media in the early twenty-first century. While much of Britain languished in post-recession gloom with three million on the dole, at Oxford the air fizzed with future potential. ‘There was an arrogance and an ambition,’ says another alumnus James Delingpole, now a writer, journalist and broadcaster. ‘We all thought that we would be part of the ruling class; that we should be rewarded for being bright and working hard.’ One forward-thinking Balliol student spent three years having his photograph taken with as many Oxford contemporaries as possible on the (correct) assumption that a good number of them would become famous or powerful.
    The roll call of Boris’s contemporaries at Oxford includes British Prime Minister David Cameron, Foreign Secretary William Hague, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, Education Secretary Michael Gove, Conservative fixer and thinker Nick Boles MP, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, PR tycoon Roland Rudd, BBC political editor Nick Robinson, Channel 4 political editor Gary Gibbon, Clinton press secretary George Stephanopoulos and US pollster Frank Luntz. Labour’s post-Blair/Brown elite was also well represented by David Miliband (followed a few years later by his brother and future Labour