In his riotously colourful book Restoration Heart, WILLIAM CASH reveals the untold story of how our PM agreed to let him raise his secret daughter – before it all ended in tears. William was in a relationship with Helen Macintyre and the couple were discussing their planned future together when she told him that Boris was her daughter Stephanie’s father.
The bombshell had to remain a secret, so William agreed to help bring up Stephanie and was even prepared to raise her as his own daughter. It was a plan which Boris agreed to, but everything went wrong when the secret was leaked to the media by Helen’s former boyfriend, sending William’s marriage plans up in smoke.
I still have the receipt from lunch at Mark’s Club in Mayfair.
I can tell it was long and that we finished with two glasses of Courvoisier on the empty roof terrace as Helen smoked her Silk Cut.
I remember the electric heaters glowing above us in the gunmetal sky as we spoke about my divorces and her failed relationships.
We talked about our future together – and how I hoped that Helen would trust me to be a stepfather to her beautiful daughter.
I still have the receipt from lunch at Mark’s Club in Mayfair. I can tell it was long and that we finished with two glasses of Courvoisier on the empty roof terrace as Helen smoked her Silk Cut, writes WILLIAM CASH. Above: Mr Cash celebrates with Helen Macintyre on her birthday in 2010
But most of all I remember the explosive impact of what came next:
‘William,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something you should know. About the father of Stephanie.
‘Nobody else knows other than my family. This has to stay absolutely between us and you cannot tell anybody.’
‘No secrets then,’ I said.
‘It’s Boris.’
‘Johnson?’
‘I’ve known him for years,’ she continued. ‘I’m an art adviser to the Mayor of London’s office. He’s smart and funny. One day he may even be Prime Minister.
‘I’m so torn, William. He texts me the whole time but I never know what’s coming next.’
I swallowed hard.
‘What’s he really like?’ I asked. ‘Did you love him?’
I hadn’t wanted to use the present tense. This shouldn’t change anything at all between Helen and me, I told myself as I reached for my brandy.
But I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. The B-Bombshell would ruin everything.
Why did I take Helen Macintyre to Mark’s, the private members’ club where I’d had my wedding lunch after each of my two failed marriages?
Was it a deliberate choice, an attempt to erase the past? There was certainly plenty to forget.
The start of that year had been bleak. Still wounded from my second divorce, at the age of 43 I was yet to have any children.
And to make matters worse, the ancient manor house that was my life’s other passion was once again in serious disrepair.
Even today, Upton Cressett’s diamond-leaded windows and stacks of twisted chimneys look as they would have done some 450 years earlier.
It’s as authentically Elizabethan a building as any you will find in England.
It became my home in the early 1970s when my ‘restore-a-wreck’ parents left Islington in North London for a derelict ruin in Shropshire.
It had always been my dream to live there with my own family, although this seemed an ever-more distant prospect.
My first whirlwind marriage had been to Ilaria Bulgari from the famous Italian jewellery family and lasted little more than three years.
Ms Macintyre and Mr Cash talked about our future together – how he hoped that Helen would trust him to be a stepfather to her beautiful daughter. She told him then that her daughter Stephanie’s father was Boris Johnson (pictured above in 2010, during his time as mayor)
I was served with divorce papers on the eve of my 40th birthday after my wife hosted a dinner for me but then failed to appear.
Next came Dr Vanessa Neumann, a green-eyed beauty known in the diary pages as the ‘Cracker from Caracas’ thanks to her Venezuelan heritage and because she’d previously dated Mick Jagger.
I proposed with a ring produced from a sock amid a tropical storm.
This time, we lasted less than 12 months.
Now, feeling past my prime, I faced the twin tasks of finding a chatelaine for Upton Cressett and renovating the oldest brick-built manor house in the county. Solo.
I was, to paraphrase Jane Austen, a single man in possession of a good house – and very much in need of a wife.
For five intense months in 2010 I thought I’d found the answer in the form of an art dealer as beautiful as she was mysterious.
Helen Macintyre had her own gallery in St James’s with a cosy office on the top floor containing a sofa in chartreuse-green velvet.
She exuded 1950s Parisian glamour, spoke several languages and could often be found sitting at a table outside Franco’s restaurant in Jermyn Street with a cigarette in hand and her two dachshunds – Monty and Carlo – snuggled on her lap inside a dark fur coat.
Helen was way out of my league as a potential girlfriend and already had a very rich Canadian boyfriend called Pierre Rolin, a property developer who flew her around the world on a private jet.
We’d first met two years earlier, in the lobby of the Grosvenor House hotel.
I already knew a little about Helen. I’d heard she was friends with people such as TV political interviewer Andrew Neil, that she was close to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, for whom she was an unpaid ‘art adviser’, and that she lived in a large townhouse in Belgravia with a chef, a butler and a chauffeur.
At the time I was a journalist commissioned to interview a Qatari prince who was staging an exhibition of his photographs – hawks, desert sunsets and so on – at a Mayfair gallery.
It was the bank holiday Monday just before my June wedding to Vanessa, but I dutifully showed up to meet the organiser of the show, who happened to be Helen.
She breezed into the hotel lobby at 9am in a cream Chanel suit and introduced herself.
‘Hello,’ she said in a disarmingly open way. Her Delft-blue eyes flashed. She smelt of Dior and Silk Cut.
At the time, I was deeply in love with Vanessa, thrilled at the prospect of becoming her husband in a few days’ time.
Yet the first instant I met Helen’s eyes, a fuse blew inside me.
I could hear myself asking banal questions about the Qatari photographs when another dialogue altogether was going on inside my head: ‘If I wasn’t marrying Vanessa, I’d marry Helen, or at least try to.’
Absurd but true.
Helen Macintyre posed for a glamorous magazine in 2010. She and Boris Johnson had a child together
We became friends and – with my marriage to Vanessa collapsing after just a few months – trusted confidantes. Helen, I realised, belonged in a Thackeray novel, an enigma wrapped in mink.
When she invited me to her house, the butler wore white gloves and a rare vintage Château d’Yquem was served with foie gras.
Pierre, the boyfriend, was nowhere to be seen.
We sat at opposite ends of an enormous polished mahogany dining-table. Before dinner, she had asked me to choose some wine.
‘Help yourself to some from the rack,’ she’d said. ‘I’m not drinking.’ This was unusual.
There was none of the usual stuff from Waitrose or Tesco. Instead, the kitchen rack was piled with dusty £500 bottles of Latour, Pétrus and the like.
Not long afterwards, I got a call. Helen wanted to meet me at The Wolseley restaurant on Piccadilly for a drink.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she announced, disarmingly candid as ever. This was the summer of 2008 – the baby was due in November.
I congratulated her, but sensed there was more to it than that.
‘Pierre’s like a nomad,’ she explained. ‘However glamorous the planes, the yachts and the holidays sounded, I was pretty lonely as he was hardly around.
‘He rented a yacht in the South of France for two weeks last summer and I found myself on deck most of the time with just the captain and crew.
‘Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t work out how my life had ended up like this. And then I got pregnant.’
I went to see her at London’s Portland Hospital when she gave birth to a daughter, Stephanie, named after Helen’s sister, who had died young.
We shared a glass of champagne as she showed off her baby, a pretty bundle with a shock of blonde hair.
Yet there was no sign of Pierre. And Stephanie looked nothing like him.
The year 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of my family living at Upton Cressett, which seemed a good time to start the major restoration of a building I was already calling ‘Money Pit Manor’.
For the English, our houses are often so much more than just bricks and mortar. In my case, Upton Cressett had always been the most dependable of my relationships, more so than any love affair or marriage.
The truth is that I was party to blame for its terrible state, having employed a cowboy builder whose idea of ‘renovation’ was to wreck the place. It resembled an architectural salvage yard.
With the foundations of my life falling away beneath me I, too, required as serious a makeover as my Elizabethan house.
In February, I found myself at traffic lights in South Kensington when a car caught my eye, as did the woman behind the wheel.
I recognised the mint-green Mini Cooper belonging to my art dealer friend Helen Macintyre. She’d won it in a raffle, of all things.
I tapped on the window and said something along the lines of: ‘Are-you-free-for-lunch-need-to-talk?’
Helen parked up and we headed for a little restaurant on Walton Street nearby. I ordered a bottle of Provence rosé, and then another.
Now divorced from Vanessa, I was telling Helen about another romantic failure – this time a brief entanglement with a 26-year-old interior designer.
But Helen had something much more interesting to say: ‘Pierre and I have split. In fact, I’ve moved out and taken a house in Chelsea where I’m living with Stephanie.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Pierre’s in trouble. He hasn’t been around. He’s always travelling. Things have been falling apart for months.
‘He’s under investigation. Administrators were knocking on the door. I don’t know exactly what’s going on but Stephanie has to come first.’
Helen had every right to be scared. The assets of Pierre’s property business were being frozen by lawyers acting for a Middle Eastern client wanting to know what had happened to tens of millions of pounds.
Pierre denied any wrongdoing but, with his firm placed in administration, he would eventually relocate to Canada and, as he put it, ‘start from less than zero’.
I felt awful for Helen: she’d had no option but to flee her home less than a month after giving birth.
My first whirlwind marriage had been to Ilaria Bulgari from the famous Italian jewellery family and lasted little more than three years, writes WILLIAM CASH. Above: Mr Cash with Helen Macintyre on holiday in 2010
‘Pierre was always on a plane doing deals or sitting on another charity board,’ she continued. ‘One moment he was in New York, the next flying into the World Economic Forum in Davos.’
At the mention of Davos, Helen took a gulp of wine and looked away. ‘You know that Pierre may not be the father,’ she said.
I nodded, saying: ‘Pierre is dark, like you.’
‘The identity of Stephanie’s father cannot get out. The father was calling me at the hospital.’
‘Does Pierre know who it might be?’
‘He has an idea,’ she replied.
‘How did he take it?’
‘He’s having a paternity test. We both knew our relationship wasn’t working. In fact, it was over.’
Helen was used to dealing with whatever life threw at her. She’d had a triple family tragedy: her sisters, Enid and Stephanie, and her father had all died within a few years of each other when she was growing up in Kent.
She had shown steely resilience throughout and had never lost her self-deprecating good humour. You could tell her anything.
She also had an almost complete lack of reserve or guard when it came to talking about men, love, politics and sex.
She loved risqué texts and louche Paris clubs and casinos. I had never met anybody else of such unaffected candour.
After lunch, I walked her to the Mini. As she stood by the car, I kissed her beside a parking meter. (Yes, she had a ticket). There felt nothing surprising about this.
When she grabbed the ticket, she laughed and walked towards her new home. As she waved back, I knew another chapter in my life was about to begin.
It wasn’t long before I was spending much of my time at her home off the Kings Road. I was happy again, even when she finally told me the name of Stephanie’s real father.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was probably the last person you’d want as a rivale d’amour.
Two years older than me, he was a heavyweight champion when it came to conquests, a veteran swordsman and super-hack paid £250,000 a year for one newspaper column (which he described as ‘chicken feed’).
I felt as if I’d been pushed out into the hot glare of the Circus Maximus to fight a seasoned gladiator.
I had met him only a few times but knew enough to know he craved attention. I’d been to a party at the Spectator magazine where, as the then editor, he’d jumped on to his mahogany desk to make a speech.
It juddered under his weight. I couldn’t imagine his predecessors playing the ‘editor-showman’ in such a way.
I’d been relatively ancient, in my mid-thirties, when I got engaged to my first wife. Boris, in contrast, was engaged while still at Oxford to aristocratic model Allegra Mostyn-Owen.
She later left him when he embarked on an affair with barrister Marina Wheeler, a childhood friend who became his second wife.
I had no personal problem with Boris. He’d known my family for years as my father, Eurosceptic MP Bill Cash, had been at Oxford with Boris’s father, Stanley.
I’d long known that Helen was a fan; she had the entire Johnson oeuvre of books on a shelf beside her bed, from his comic political novel Seventy-Two Virgins to collected journalism.
Yes, I was jealous of Boris’s hold over the woman I loved, but such were his political ambitions that I thought the likelihood of his leaving Marina was remote.
For the moment, all I wanted was to be with Helen, and if that meant bringing up Stephanie as my own daughter – preferably as her stepfather – then I was 100 per cent fine with that.
It was now critical that everyone in the tight family circle who knew the truth of Stephanie’s father had to be bound by a code of omertà. Nobody could talk about it, not even so much as hint.
For myself, I feared being burned alive by the fire storm that would destroy anything, or anybody, within its range if the news were to break.
Within a month or so, I had pretty much moved into Helen’s cottage-like house in Markham Street.
From the outset, I never made any secret of the fact that I wanted to start a family with her.
If we had our own children, nobody was going to know (or care) that the eldest had a different biological father. Helen did not seem averse to this idea, and she was a brilliant mother.
The other good news was that, as the works proceeded at Upton Cressett, Helen started to get involved.
I had taken her to Shropshire within weeks of us starting to see each other. She had a natural decorator’s eye and was soon helping source items for the house.
She seemed to love Upton Cressett, even if it were still mostly a building site. Instructions soon followed for buying a complete set of Fissler cooking pans (in Harrods’ sale). I was to consider only Miele dishwashers and washing machines and so on. But I was happy to do anything that led to us moving in together.
Yet rumours about the identity of the father refused to stop humming. After two months or so, it was decided between myself, Helen, her mother and stepfather that we needed a ‘Boris Summit’ to tell him of our intentions.
‘You will have to meet him,’ I said, ‘and tell him about us.’
‘Tell him what?’
‘That I’m going to bring up his daughter whether people know the identity of her father or not.’
‘Don’t you think you should come as well?’ asked Helen.
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is between you and Boris. Tell Boris that I’m in love with you and that I’m very fond of Stephanie and that I want to bring her up in Shropshire.
And that within a few years or so, when we’re married and have our own children, nobody is going to know that they’re not all our own children. He can come up and stay whenever he wants to see Steph.’
So Helen went off to meet Boris at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, alone. As I waited at her house, I had a surreal vision of him becoming part of the extended Cash family, with long Sunday lunches washed down with rosé as he discussed politics with my father.
Maybe Boris would arrive in a bullet-proof Jaguar with a police detail.
The ‘Boris Summit’ at Brown’s was a long meeting – worryingly so. Helen was away for at least two hours.
After the second hour started, I began to think I was a fool for having suggested a swanky hotel.
Thankfully, when Helen finally came back, she looked perfectly normal. ‘Boris is fine with our plan,’ she said. ‘He’s fine with you bringing up Stephanie.’
Boris told her he knew about Upton Cressett as he’d been there for a political house party in the autumn of 1995 at the invitation of my father and my mother, Biddy, who used to work at Downing Street. ‘Biddy, I love Biddy. Will Biddy be there?’ Boris had exclaimed to Helen.
He thought Upton Cressett would make a perfect home for Stephanie, conveniently out of the London public glare.
I was already thinking of buying an engagement ring. We were all going to be one glorious, extended happy family.
The only problem was this: if the identity of the father got out, our plan was likely to blow up.
By now, Helen and Pierre had the results of the paternity test proving Pierre wasn’t the father and, against this background, our life started to feel as if a slow-burning fuse had been lit beneath it.
By the end of June, the Boris factor was inescapable. Helen and I had been at a Swiss art fair when she stepped outside the exhibition hall to take a call from him.
By the end of June, the Boris factor was inescapable. Helen and I had been at a Swiss art fair when she stepped outside the exhibition hall to take a call from him, writes WILLIAM CASH. Above: Boris as London Mayor, shortly after news broke that he was the father of Helen’s baby
It was the start of many.
In fact, the texts and calls went on for two days and whatever he’d been saying upset her.
Helen was unable to sleep and didn’t want to talk.
Eventually, I couldn’t take the pressure-cooker atmosphere any longer so I grabbed some clothes and went down to the bar.
I remember watching football on a TV screen as I sank two whiskies. I could feel I was losing her.
When I returned to the room, Helen hugged me, crying, saying she was ‘torn apart’ and loved me. It was one of the few times I saw her vulnerable side.
Boris’s unspoken presence – even just his blond mop appearing on the BBC news – was like a boil, buried underground for months, now surfacing. It was only a matter of time before it burst. Or was lanced.
I sensed that, despite her steely core, Helen was deeply upset at the turn of events, and scared.
We all were, including Boris, who was about to announce he was running for a second term as Mayor of London.
What would the exploding powder keg do to his marriage and political career?
Helen held wildly vacillating views about his behaviour.
Part of her wanted Stephanie to have a real father in the shape of someone like me, yet another part was upset not to be with the father of her daughter.
Occasionally, she would lash out at those closest to her.
I wanted to be with Helen and for us to live between London and Shropshire once the house was finished.
After the blows of my two divorces, which had left me half-broken, I found Helen’s energy and fierce, fun, optimism refreshing.
I remember once driving in her Mini past a red-brick apartment block near Sloane Square, and she pointed to a building. ‘I lived in a flat there when I first moved to London. My rent was more than my salary.’
Helen pictured with her daughter Stephanie, whose father is Prime Minister Boris Johnson
She was often on her BlackBerry under the covers in the middle of the night, contacting Dubai, Qatar, New York, Sydney.
Helen lived for the spin of the wheel. Her philosophy was simple: you had to know when to cut your losses and walk out. It was easy enough to see why men – many men – found her so alluring.
By July, I felt I was losing control. My phone was ringing constantly from unknown numbers and we had odd callers at Helen’s Chelsea home.
It became clear that Pierre had started talking, saying he knew Boris had been conducting an affair with Helen.
He’d encountered the Mayor in a lift late at night at the Morosani Posthotel in Davos in Switzerland where he was staying with Helen.
When the lift doors opened, Boris had been standing there looking nervous, ‘his eyes shifting all over the place’.
Pierre began telling friends and journalists that he had seen CCTV of Boris entering his Belgravia house when he was away on business.
Back in London, I felt that we, too, were under observation. Helen and I were having a croissant and coffee at a cafe just 100 yards from her Chelsea house.
As we read the papers, a man in a leather bomber jacket came up to us and said: ‘What a lovely baby you both have. Would you mind if I take a photograph?’
He didn’t wait for a reply. After he had taken the photo of Stephanie in her pram and left, I turned to Helen.
‘Nobody who isn’t a paparazzo would ask to take a photograph at 9am,’ I said. ‘I think we’re being set up.’
I could sense something was wrong. Was there an informer?
Our last lunch together was at Motcombs wine bar in Belgravia. We drank two bottles of rosé in the sun and talked of marriage.
‘Upton Cressett will be ready in a few months,’ I’d said. ‘We’ll have children of our own and we’ll look like any other family. Nobody will ask any questions.’
We had even ordered curtains for the master bedroom. They were to be edged in dark plum silk velvet, with tassels that could have been chosen by Madame de Pompadour.
One week later, the newspapers splashed photographs of Helen and Boris on the front pages alleging that he was the father of her daughter.
A circus of photographers and TV cameramen camped on our London doorstep and she couldn’t even get out with Stephanie in her pram. The house became a prison.
The killer blow came by text while I was driving through Putney Common the day the story broke, as I was on my way to see a therapist.
So stressful was the B-factor, I’d needed counselling to deal with my romantic despair.
Helen texted me to say that she didn’t want me to return to Markham Street and insinuated that I was somehow responsible for the leak of the father’s identity.
My marriage plans were dust. Once again, I was out in the cold – only this time it wasn’t clear what my crime had been.
Distraught, I went to stay with my friend Elizabeth Hurley at her farm in Gloucestershire, where Helen and I had been guests in much happier circumstances a month or so before.
Angry at BoJo? No, I’m such a fan I bet on him to be PM!
By William Cash
Plans have a way of going astray when Boris’s sexual adventures are involved.
When it comes to women, especially smart, attractive women, he is inclined to risk all.
As somebody who has been flattened, Big Daddy-style, by the emotional carnage that he often leaves around him, I found myself questioning his moral character.
But my conclusion is that Boris is simply unique because of his election-winning charisma.
Boris is simply unique because of his election-winning charisma, says William Cash
When my hopes of marrying Helen blew up overnight, it was hard not to feel angry but, as the weeks and months passed, I realised I couldn’t judge him.
I too had a failed degree in human relations. I knew what it felt like to be a ‘hack on the rack’, homeless and facing an expensive divorce. I felt for Boris, who had by now been slung out of his home ‘like a tomcat’ by wife Marina.
I also came to realise, over time, that he did me a huge favour: my life wouldn’t have turned out quite so well without our strange entanglement.
People often ask me about my thoughts on Boris. My answer? Trust the women, not the jealous rivals.
The women in his life – many of them smart, feisty and attractive, like Helen – have mostly remained stoically supportive.
That’s an unusual form of loyalty and testament to his many qualities.
Personally, I took the view that smart and intelligent women are more reliable judges of human character than most. Smart women can’t stand pessimists.
While others wrote him off, I found myself placing a £150 bet two years ago on him to be Prime Minister, at 6-1. I’m glad I did! I have become a true Boris believer.
I wrote to Helen for weeks and then months, trying to get her to have a drink ‘so we can bring this unholy mess to a conclusion’.
I insisted that I’d had nothing to do with the leak. I travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, hoping that she might be there in her mink coat and knee-high sheepskin boots. I didn’t see her.
I did, however, see Boris addressing a lunch of British business leaders at the Belvedere hotel. After lunch, I cornered him in a corridor.
‘Boris, good speech. Well done,’ I said.
‘Listen, it’s about Helen. I know things haven’t exactly been easy for any of us, but can I make one thing absolutely clear?
‘I want you to know that I had nothing to do with any of the press stories. What on earth had I got to gain?
‘I wanted to marry Helen and bring up your daughter as my own. It was that simple.’
‘Right… er… got it. Thanks for letting me know.’
And then we walked off in different directions.
