From his Boris biography, Andrew Gimson:
The pretence that he has had no parental influence is Stanley at his most preposterous. Anyone who has met both father and son is struck by the extraordinary resemblance between them. They talk in an amazingly similar way, and Boris has learned a great part of his comic art from his father. They behave like stage Englishmen, often pretending to be impossibly baffled and stupid, while behind this screen they calculate what would be to their own advantage.
In Scotland on Sunday, Catherine Deveney:
When his father drove his children to boarding school, he emptied them out on to the school driveway like salt being sprinkled out of a cellar, without even switching off the engine, then rushed back to the farm. The school, Sherbourne, was "a good, tough, rugger-playing school", says Stanley. He describes the bizarre 'fag' system, where older boys could drop a pencil and demand a younger one pick it up, or could beat the living daylights out of the unfortunate minors with impunity, as if that is simply the natural world order. It sounds like a different planet. "Seemed pretty normal to me," says Stanley with some surprise. Didn't it make him think twice about sending his own children away? "Not at all. My view has always been that bringing up children is much too important to be left to the parents."
Draw your own conclusions. And could I just say that my favourite bit of the Deveney interview is this:
[Stanley's] first attempt at seduction ended unhappily when he took a girl to Paris, left her in a café while he went to find a hotel, then got himself so lost he couldn't find her again. He didn't see her for some years, though happily by then she had found her way back to England.
They're special, the posh.
