The Dorchester hotel, Park Lane. A cold night in January. I’m getting ready to
go inside to join a party to which I’ve not been invited, and wondering
whether I’ll be thrown out. I’m on a mission to find out why a man who
believes in reducing the meddling of politicians has chosen to be a
politician. But for two months, going through the proper channels, I’ve
failed to get near the Conservative candidate for London mayor. Tonight,
Boris Johnson’s former colleagues at The Spectator magazine are throwing a
party to celebrate his campaign – and I’ve managed to get hold of an
invitation.
Strict press regulations forbid me to impersonate somebody else. If anybody
asks my name, I may be invited to leave – perhaps even marched to the
revolving doors and pushed through them like stewed apple through a sieve.
Eventually finding the rooms allotted to The Spectator, I find only six people
there, including the magazine’s editor. I’ve never met Matthew d’Ancona, and
sense that he’s wondering who I am. So I make my way to the bar and
loiter till the room fills, which it does with about 50 expensively dressed
individuals including the fashion designer Ozwald Boateng, the Oscar-winning
actor and screenwriter Julian Fellowes, and the fashion writer Plum Sykes.
I’m approached by an amiable man who says he’s a diarist on a London paper.
We’re joined by Dan Ritterband, formerly an advertising executive, now
Johnson’s campaign manager.
Ritterband boasts that his candidate has made no serious gaffes so far. This
is remarkable, he adds, considering that this particular candidate might be
expected to make eight a day.
The diarist asks about Johnson’s policies, which remain unclear. Ritterband
says he has little grasp of policy, and leaves that to the wonks – a
division of labour that might explain why politics strikes outsiders as
slickly manipulative and false. But Ritterband does reveal Johnson’s
strategy: to be “not Ken”.
Soon after, Johnson enters the room, wearing a rumpled suit and the shortest
haircut I’ve ever seen on him. After greeting his hosts, he wanders over to
hail the diarist, whom he’s known since they were at Oxford. Then he sticks
his hand out to me, saying: “And who’s this chap?” I tell him my name, and
for a moment he looks thrown “Ah. You’re this journalist. Been calling
people and asking people lots of questions. Well, your spoor has been
detected!”
It’s true that I’ve been calling people. After all, his own staff were so
unhelpful. A PR woman eventually phoned me back to say the campaign hadn’t
started in earnest. “And to be honest what we are seeing is probably not
interesting to you.”
But what about all these events he’s attended already, listed in excruciating
detail on his official site, backboris.com? Couldn’t I tag along next time
he addresses a group of taxi drivers or strolls through Portobello Market?
“There are a lot of meetings,” she said, “and policy development groups, big
organisations in London like transport and health and so on. He has met the
Metropolitan Police commissioner several times.” These meetings were
sensitive.
Johnson managed to visit all 32 boroughs, in just 16 days, in September.
Surely those can’t have been sensitive? “That was about finding a lot of the
issues. Academics and policy gurus tell you things but when you go out into
the street you find out the truth.”
I mentioned a meeting that Johnson had written about, involving a late-night
visit to north London with “street pastors” who work with disaffected
youths. “It would not be appropriate to take you,” she said. “The people
involved wouldn’t want to be photographed.”
But I don’t have a camera. I just want to follow him about. “We are
finalising the grid for the campaign period,” she said finally, “and working
through the requests.”
It’s not uncommon to find the holders of power withdrawing from scrutiny; and
for some time now it’s been all-but-impossible to interview Ken Livingstone.
It’s less common to find a would-be office-holder, in mid-campaign,
adopting the same elusive approach. But the two leading contenders to run
the capital appear to have taken on the character of some rare beast. You
catch a glimpse of the eyes and – whoosh! – they are gone.
Short of sitting outside Johnson’s house, I had no way to find him. If I did
that, and followed him about on my own bicycle, what would I find? Not a
lot, though I might grab a word with him at an intersection, just as he
once, rather amusingly, “interviewed” Tony Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan
Powell while waiting for the lights to change. (Powell said Johnson made up
the quotes.)
Desperate for scraps, I phoned a woman called Jill Parker, who represents the
Property Finance Forum, one of the groups Johnson had met over the last
weeks, according to his website. I asked how the event had come about, and
how it went.
“The invitation came about through a contact of one of our members,” she
said a little suspiciously. “He came to our office at breakfast. He spoke
about where he sees expansion. There was a good Q&A afterwards. He pitched
it just right, with a bit of humour thrown in.”
I found out later that it was Parker who warned Johnson’s people that I had
called.
Why are they so paranoid? Because Boris is desperately hard to control. His
biographer, Andrew Gimson, gives an account of how badly the Tories
mishandled his trip to Liverpool to apologise – to the entire city – for an
editorial in The Spectator. A press officer who watched it on TV told
Gimson: “Our hands were wringing in despair as it went from one catastrophe
to another.”
Brian Paddick, the former Metropolitan Police commander who is standing as
mayoral candidate for the Lib Dems, has questioned Johnson’s decision to
give up alcohol until polling day, suggesting that he did so at the
insistence of Conservative minders, to avoid making any blunders during the
campaign. “What Londoners have got to realise is, four years is a long time
for the mayor to be kept out of the media so he doesn’t make any gaffes,”
Paddick said, “and for him to give up drink.”
I mentioned this to the diarist, who asks if it was true that Johnson had
given up drink. Johnson confirms it, but says he was allowed some slack over
Christmas.
In a rather craven attempt to find common ground, I tell Boris that he and I
had both attended the same school – an international school in Brussels for
the offspring of eurocrats. (For a year, his younger brother was in my
class.) I ask what his father was doing in Brussels. He doesn’t answer the
question but says something like: “Mwargh – Stanley!” (His father’s name.)
We move into the splendid dining room. There are five large tables, Johnson’s
in the middle.
I find myself next to Sykes, and a divorced socialite of whom I know little
except that she owns a large collection of erotic art.
Most of the guests are not hardcore supporters. Fellowes tells me he was asked
along because he is one of about two people on telly who are prepared to
stand up and be counted as Conservatives, the other being (he says)
Frederick Forsyth.
After a brief introduction from D’Ancona, Johnson rises to speak. He quickly
draws everybody’s attention to the fact that there is a “man from The Sunday
Times” among them. His expression is unamused.
The erotic-art collector turns to the man seated on her other side – the
diarist – and asks why Johnson didn’t mention that he – another journalist –
was present too. He replies that Boris knows and trusts him, but doesn’t
trust me.
Continuing his speech, Johnson says: “I have to sort out a lot of problems…”
He stops, looks towards me and asks, “Are you writing this down?” in a tone
you might use to admonish a drunkard caught pissing through your letterbox.
In his speech, Johnson talks about people’s difficulty getting on the housing
ladder, and Livingstone’s tendency to pepperpot the skyline with odious
buildings. He says it was high time that the thumbs of the RMT were prised
from the neck of the commuter, with a no-strike agreement. And he expresses
a love of London buses. “But we have many of them filling up an elephants’
graveyard in Oxford Circus.” This gets a big laugh. He promises to replace
the bendy bus with a new kind of Routemaster, and to secure a free bus pass
for “Ken Leavingsoon”.
The most important thing, he says, is to sort out people’s insecurity on the
street. “I was talking to this man from The Sunday Times about a school we
both went to in Brussels. Well, a lot of kids are not so lucky. You can’t
deal with the great problem of knife crime and the murder of teenagers – 27
killed last year – and blame it all on Margaret Thatcher.”
Looking uncharacteristically earnest, he describes meeting the street pastors,
and says he will work with groups like them across London.
“As soon as I get in I will introduce proper accountability. I will get rid of
the ludicrous Londoner free sheet, the Pyongyang-style newspaper that brings
us news of the mayor’s achievements in buying more bendy buses.”
Over dinner, I ask Sykes if we really need a mayor. Having spent much time in
New York, she says that Michael Bloomberg has been terrific, but adds
certain dark comments about his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani.
The woman with the erotic art collection tells me she doesn’t mind if Johnson
is a philanderer. (When he was editor of The Spectator, the father-of-four
was revealed to have carried on with a colleague, Petronella Wyatt. There
have been stories of at least one other affair too.) In fact, she positively
approves, and asks what I think.
I say it was nobody’s business but his, and his wife Marina’s – or possibly
not even hers.
When I was phoning people, desperately, for insights into Johnson, a woman who
adores him offered this rather unusual plaudit: “As well as being a
philanderer, he’s a great family man.”
Among others on my table, Fellowes expresses libertarian ideas that fall only
slightly short of anarchist. Like Johnson, he plainly doesn’t like to be
bossed about by the nanny state. But when Fellowes asks Johnson a question
about London buses, he supplements it with a jarringly authoritarian demand
that Johnson clamp down on bicyclists to ensure they obey the law. Johnson
assures us that he will clamp down – a stance at odds with his own
documented tendency to jump lights on his bicycle.
London didn’t have a directly elected leader at all until 2000. Ken
Livingstone was first elected as an independent, then re-elected in 2004 as
the official Labour candidate. His salary, £137,579 per year, is equivalent
to that of a cabinet minister, and his powers are no less considerable. He’s
responsible for budgeting and planning a wide range of functions: transport,
the police, fire and emergency services, cultural strategy and economic
development, health, climate change and appointments to the boards of the
functional bodies.
If you live outside London, you may think this does not matter to you, but
rightly or wrongly London generates a disproportionate amount of GDP, so the
health of the capital affects you wherever you live. What’s more, where
London leads, others follow – as we’ve seen with proposals for congestion
charges in other city centres, to many people’s dismay.
If you read Johnson’s writings, you gather that he desires a world in which
people are left alone by politicians. This is largely confirmed by his
light-touch parliamentary record: he spoke in fewer debates than most MPs
last year, attended barely half the votes, and (according to PublicWhip,
which monitors these things) his “very strong” and “strong” positions tended
to be against government imposing yet more enormities on us. (Two things he
favoured strongly were invading Iraq, though he’s changed his mind, and
renewing Trident.)
“He wants people to be free to enjoy themselves,” Gimson says in his lively
biography. “He does not rush to condemn anyone whose pleasures are not his
own, and sympathises with the little man who finds himself caught in an
impossible position. While many politicians have the urge to perfect
society, Boris believes in the imperfectability of mankind, and especially
of himself. He does not seek to attain impossibly high standards, nor to
impose them on others.”
It’s this that I find so mysterious about him. Why does he want to be one of
the bossy people?
Johnson’s friend James Delingpole, a journalist who has known Johnson since
university, insists there is no ethical inconsistency between believing that
we are over-governed, as Johnson does, and wanting to be a politician:
“There’s no other way to get that changed.”
Like Livingstone, Johnson is a maverick, regarded with suspicion by most
politicians and much loved by the public. In Johnson’s case, this is because
he has always seemed not to be a serious politician. But has his shambolic
persona ceased to be an asset? In October, when Arnold Schwarzenegger
overheard Johnson addressing the Conservative conference, the governor of
California told his aides: “This guy is just fumbling around.”
Another Oxford friend, Lloyd Evans, whom Johnson hired to write theatre
reviews for The Spectator, and who repaid that by penning, with Toby Young,
a satirical play about the sexual shenanigans at the magazine under
Johnson’s editorship, believes that Johnson is at bottom an intensely
serious man.
“The bumbling quiz-show host isn’t the real Boris at all,” says Evans. “I
suspect he’s tired of that clownish persona and wants to show us the real
Boris – orator, leader, heavyweight thinker. Those qualities are there in
his personality; they just don’t come across on telly.”
When Johnson won the Conservative candidacy last September, he hinted at this:
“I reserve the right in the course of this campaign to make jokes, but be in
no doubt that I am deadly serious. There will be people across London
discovering that I mean business.”
“He has real political ambitions,” says Evans, “and genuine talents which just
need the right conditions to germinate. Sometimes in politics the cause
makes the man. It happened to Gandhi, who started as an Edwardian gadabout,
top hat, French conversation, dancing lessons. Then he found a campaign
worthy of his abilities. I don’t suppose we’ll see Boris spinning cotton in
his underpants, but once the election gets going we will see a far more
impressive persona. There’s a lot more to him than people realise.”
Johnson was born in 1964 in New York, educated in London and Brussels, then
won scholarships to Eton and Oxford. After graduating he lasted only a week
as a management consultant. (“I could not look at an overhead projection of
a growth-profit matrix, and stay conscious.”) He became a trainee reporter
on The Times, but was sacked for inventing an embarrassing quotation from
his godfather, Colin Lucas, later vice-chancellor of Oxford University. He
briefly worked for the Wolverhampton Express and Star. The then-editor of
the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, hired him to report from Brussels; where
his first marriage fell apart, and he became reacquainted with an old school
friend, Marina Wheeler – who became his second wife 12 days after his
divorce came through. Together they have four children.
It was also at the Telegraph that Johnson was involved in the conspiracy with
former Eton and Oxford friend Darius Guppy, a convicted fraudster, to get a
News of the World reporter beaten up. Johnson agreed to supply the
reporter’s address, in a taped conversation.
Ken Livingstone has understandably used this episode to query how Johnson can
present himself as a candidate in favour of law and order.
Hastings gave Johnson a telling off, but didn’t sack him. Indeed, he
eventually became assistant editor. His writing won awards, and as a result
his income rose steadily. According to last year’s register of MPs’
interests, Johnson was paid up to £250,000 for his Telegraph column, plus
many thousands for various books, and up to £15,000 each for 15
public-speaking events. His TV appearances, with Dame Edna and on Have I Got
News for You, among others, additionally paid up to £25,000 a time.
Then there’s politics, which has preoccupied him since Oxford, where he was
president of the union. He fought Clwyd South in the 1997 general election.
After he was appointed editor of The Spectator, in 1999, he promised the
then proprietor, Conrad Black, that he would abandon politics. But in 2001
he stood for Michael Heseltine’s old seat, in Henley, and won.
Doing both jobs proved increasingly difficult. As editor Johnson took
responsibility for articles that deeply annoyed his parliamentary
colleagues, not least the editorial that offended all of Liverpool. Michael
Howard resisted calls to dismiss Johnson – then Tory vice-chairman and
shadow minister for the arts – over that editorial, but a month later sacked
him for his affair with Wyatt – or, to use the prim technicality, for
dishonestly denying the affair.
Johnson’s experiments with truth are linked by his foes to a wider
inconsistency. In 2006, at the Conservative conference, he seemed scornful
about Jamie Oliver’s school-dinners campaign. “I say, let people eat what
they like. Why shouldn’t they push pies through the railings?” But David
Cameron, the party leader, had lauded the campaign as “social responsibility
in action”. Johnson subsequently described Oliver as a “national saint” and
a “messiah”.
Livingstone argues that such shifts undermine Johnson’s managerial
credentials. “Johnson used to denounce the congestion charge and now says he
supports it. He supported the Iraq war, then opposed it. London does not
need a mayor who constantly changes their positions because they have been
proved to be disastrously wrong.”
A month or so after I first approached Johnson’s people, they phoned with good
news: an event I was permitted to attend. By strange chance, Johnson’s
appearance at a meeting of the Conservative City Circle (financiers, lawyers
and accountants) at a nightclub in south Kensington, took place the night
after the Spectator party.
Arriving there, I enter a crowd of 200-300 people aged under 35. I find a spot
to watch from the upper tier. The man beside me turns out to be a
head-hunter, using the event for networking. “I’ve already been able to say
‘what ho’ to a number of clients,” he says.
I begin wondering why Johnson’s people allowed me to see this, of all the
events on his schedule? Do they want to give me the impression that Tories
are all young and rich?
Is that meant to be glamorous? Are they not worried that “ordinary” people,
reading this, might conclude that Johnson is only interested in people who
already enjoy great privilege?
Would it really have been more dangerous to let me witness him walking with
street pastors?
Johnson arrives just 10 minutes late and is talking to two young women when I
sidle up to him. He does a double-take – you again! – but tells them I’m an
awfully nice chap. When one asks why, he replies simply: “Sunday Times.”
Why is it so hard to get hold of you? Can I have a proper interview? With a
half-smile, he shrugs. And that’s all I get before he’s hurried on to shake
hands with innumerable people, pose for photos, head back downstairs and
talk conspiratorially with his communications man, Ritterband. He casts his
eye over some notes, then moves with his entourage towards a tiny platform
below me. After a short introductory speech, Johnson bounces onto the
platform.
“What a fantastic collection you all are. How they must tremble in City Hall
when they see this incredible throng of thriving young Tories. If Kensington
and Chelsea votes in anything like these numbers, we will win.”
He tells them how bad the turnout was in Kensington and Chelsea, at the last
mayoral elections, and compares the impressive turnout in solidly Labour
Lewisham. A woman in the audience, evidently failing to grasp his point,
yells: “Yay, Lewisham!”
Johnson politely offers his congratulations to Lewisham, but says he’d like to
see Kensington and Chelsea achieve the same turnout for the Tory candidate.
Then he goes onto the attack, reading out ancient quotes supposedly from Ken
Livingstone. Only a nasty moron would get rid of the Routemaster, the mayor
once said. Also: corruption flourishes the longer someone is in office.
Everybody laughs.
“What you are seeing now is the final reel of Apocalypse Now, with Marlon
Brando waiting for his executioner. And I will be the pencil that removes
the mayor from the shoe of London.”
He talks about home ownership, transport and safety, cracking the same gags as
the night before: the “elephants’ graveyard” for bendy buses, the
Pyongyang-style free sheet, the free bus pass for Ken Leavingsoon. These had
seemed funny the previous evening, but hearing them repeated was startlingly
flattening. Nor is his pitch absolutely spot-on. When he talks about his
plan to work with the non-profit organisations that aid disaffected youth,
the blank expressions suggest he might as well be describing voting systems
in his beloved ancient Rome. I suspect that he’s aware of this, because to
compensate he cranks up the volume. I write in my notebook: “Speaks at top
of his voice. Slightly crazy expression.”
He talks about bureaucracy at City Hall. “There are 630 officials in City
Hall. Some are on salaries of more than £100,000 a year – not an enormous
amount to some of you” (lots of laughter) “but they’re being subsidised by
some of the poorest people in the world, in Caracas.” Somebody says: “Hear,
hear.” But there’s something desperate, almost sick-making, about all these
young zillionaires pretending to care about impoverished Venezuelans.
Johnson finishes and moves toward the exit. A number of people grab him to
shake hands. A woman rushes towards him and thrusts her card into his hand.
He raises it to his temple to salute her.
He’s entertained them, and hinted at policy, but people want to know why
Johnson wishes to be mayor. Is it mere whimsy? Is he hoping to lose and make
a killing on some book about it all, hoik his public-speaking fees higher
still? I’ve seen him speaking two nights running, addressing audiences that
could hardly be more warmly inclined towards him, and I have no idea what
the answer is.
Johnson has brio, wit, intelligence, courage, and an engagingly anarchic
quality. I truly wish that those qualities were more common among
politicians. But the prigs want him to be serious, and if he’s serious then
he must conceal the qualities for which he’s loved. So, for his own sake,
please don’t Back Boris.
Has he got news for you - Boris's key pledges
Police Will exercise the right to chair the MPA (Metropolitan Police
Authority); replace stop-and-search forms with timesaving technology;
provide local communities with New York-style crime maps to enable residents
to hold police to account.
Gun and knife crime Fund handheld scanners for Tube and rail stations
Sexual assault Provide long-term funding for new Rape Crisis Centres.
Youth crime Introduce Payback London, a scheme requiring under-18s who
abuse their right to free bus travel to earn it back.
Transport Reduce fare evasion by giving greater power to Revenue
Protection Inspectors; launch a trial of live CCTV on 20 of the most
dangerous bus routes in London. Replace bendy buses with modern Routemasters.
Ugliness Will ensure affordable homes are aesthetically pleasing.
Press officers By cutting down on publicity spending, Boris claims that
he will release funding for about 440 extra PCSOs (police community support
officers) and 50 more British Transport police officers.
