Sitting before us is a man who looks a bit like Boris Johnson, but something
is wrong. He is wearing a slick business suit, a perfectly knotted tie and
has groomed hair. He is, most alarmingly of all, bang on time.
As transformations go, it is not quite the moment when Jack Nicholson emerges
from the operating theatre in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(as Mr Johnson will tell us later: “I cannot perform a public
auto-lobotomy”) but the effect is just as unsettling.
Can Mr Johnson be serious? This is the question that will make or break his
attempt to become the Mayor of London and his political ambitions. In his
first interview of the campaign, he certainly gives it his best shot: unlike
every other media appearance, he has excised all flustered apologies,
old-fashioned exclamations (“Cripes!”), flowery Classical allusions and
every other bumbling, scruffy, funny tic of the brilliant buffoon that
endeared him to a nation and infuriated the MP’s Conservative bosses.
The old Boris was great fun but no one was sure he believed in anything. New
Boris tells us straight away that he is going to take our first question
extremely seriously because “it’s a very interesting question”. He then will
not be distracted from a detailed analysis of the class divide in London and
the “collective selfishness” that is the basis of his new – serious –
political philosophy. This means tackling the “great, gleaming temples of
Mammon” in Canary Wharf, putting money into public health, championing
rape-crisis centres and talking with regret about removing his children from
London state schools.
His favourite policy, the one that he says would be his crowning achievement
if elected mayor on May 1, is safer streets, particularly – and this is an
obsession turned into a crusade – safety on the top desk of a bus.
He has backed down from his earlier call for everyone to challenge the yobs:
“I don’t think you can reasonably expect the public to be have-a-go heroes
until you have got more basic security and safety and respect.” But it
bothers him still that we cannot act more concertedly.
“It may be individually rational but it’s collectively selfish, because if we
all acted to stop these teenage thugs and everybody getting away with bad
behaviour on public transport then, of course, there will be less of it.”
Has he ever had a go? No, although he did once run after a kid who had stolen
his bicycle and got it back off him. It turns out that his big theme has a
little flaw – Mr Johnson urges us to be less collectively selfish and then
does not quite lead from the front. Take his proposal on obliging the rich
to cough up a bit more time and money so that “you have more purposeful
giving by the people who are making money out of living in London”, with the
mayor bringing together two alienated extremes of wealth. He says that his
pressure on bankers will be “imaginative and encouraging, not bullying”.
So what voluntary work does Mr Johnson do? He pauses, gawps. “I do what I
can.” Which is? “What I try to do is on the educational front. I give some
money to various educational things, charities and schools . . .” He is
sounding rather vague. “I certainly give my share of talks and lessons and
whatever else.” So do all politicians: sometimes it’s called campaigning.
He gives money to three of our most prestigious private schools – two of them
in London – in the form of school fees. His four children started at their
local state primary but when secondary loomed, “because we live in
Islington, I extracted them”. Only one remains there.
“I have no embarrassment about it whatever,” he says, but at the same time he
talks passionately about the problems caused by middle-class flight from
state education. “It becomes a self-fulfilling problem, self-generating,
because the middle classes not having confidence in the schools perpetuates
the trouble they experience.”
What can the mayor do about it (if he isn’t actually going to champion his
local secondary himself)?
“What he can do is to sort out a lot of the disorder and incivility that I
think deters middle-class parents from sending their kids to inner-city
schools. And I’m thinking particularly of disorder on public transport.”
And we are back – as the root of his master plan – to yobs on buses. It runs
like this: you make the buses safer, and the streets, and then middle-class
parents will not be afraid to send their kids to the local state school,
using public transport, the roads will be clearer and we will be happier,
fitter and less isolated.
“What I really want for London, I want kids to be able to walk to school in
safety. And I want adults to be less paranoid about all this. We send our
kids on the Tube to school and have done for years.” Horrified friends
questioned the wisdom of him and his wife sending their children, from about
the age of 10, on the Tube alone.
“And I think they’re wrong. I think the Tube is basically safe.” And now Mr
Johnson is on a roll. “What’s sad is that in 2008 there are so many parents
in London who feel apprehensive about the streets and public transport. And
I think the job of the mayor is to change that. And, to get back to the
point, if you can change that, then you can produce economic benefits.”
It is delivered with conviction, but is it convincing? That depends on how
seriously you take Mr Johnson being serious. Has he deliberately locked the
“other Boris” in the attic, the Have I Got News for You
star, the columnist, editor, and author of novels with titles such as Seventy-Two
Virgins? Michael Portillo once advised him to choose between politics
and comedy – has he chosen? “I don’t think that people have accused me of
bumbling recently and I certainly won’t bumble . . . I cannot perform a kind
of public auto-lobotomy and become something I’m not, and that would be
difficult. But all I can say is, I have been extremely serious and
hard-working and will remain so.”
As if to prove it, he talks – extremely seriously – about the rape-crisis
centres that he wants built. Is Boris a feminist, as well as serious? A
little hesitation: “I think people of my generation have had to completely –
I mean, yeah, I would say I was a feminist in the sense that I believe
wholeheartedly and passionately in equal pay for equal work and I will be
very, very angry if anybody discriminates against any of my daughters
professionally because they are women.”
So we can assume that he agrees with David Cameron’s promise to give a third
of ministerial jobs to women: does he believe in quotas? “I think quotas can
set up various difficulties, they can create unpopularity and can often be
self-defeating, because people can argue that someone has got a job with
less merit than someone else. And you never want to find yourself in that
position.”
Mr Cameron has, technically, emphasised that this is not a quota but an
ambition, which gives Mr Johnson the wriggle room he needs: “It’s not a
quota, it’s a hoper!” He lets his old mischief with language slip back in
and mishap is avoided.
“And I invite you to look at my regime at The Spectator” –
the magazine that Mr Johnson formerly edited – “which was more or less a
feminocracy.”
It’s a risky boast, for this was the regime, remember, whose sexual
shenanigans set the gossip columns and even the West End stage alight. Mr
Johnson had an affair with the journalist Petronella Wyatt; his publisher,
Kimberly Fortier, had one with David Blunkett; and the columnist Rod Liddle
conducted one with the magazine’s receptionist.
We enter tricky territory. Both Mr Johnson and the incumbent Ken Livingstone
seem to have an unspoken agreement not to fight dirty by raiding each
other’s colourful private lives. Does Mr Johnson have any more potentially
embarrassing skeletons in the closet?
“Honestly! Isn’t that one of those kind of specially kind of spring-loaded
questions?”
Yes. Do you? “Go on, have another go.” It is probably what Mr Cameron asked
himself before asking Mr Johnson to run as mayoral candidate, so now we are
asking him.
“Well, what do you think?” We think maybe you do, lots of them.
“Nonsense!” It is relevant. “I know, but I mean it’s completely – by the way,
I don’t think it is relevant. No, I don’t.”
Before the interview is allowed to start, an officious “events manager”
insists on giving Mr Johnson an official guide to the safe use of the hotel
room that he has booked for our interview. This starts with the fire
evacuation procedure (go out through the door), then how to stick things on
the walls, and the “candles and flammable items” procedure.
The performance cannot have been better designed to test the new Boris.
Amazingly, he endures with a straight face throughout. At the end, the
mayoral candidate thanks the manager solemnly: “It’s going to be safe as
houses in here.”
And so, because of what must be extraordinary efforts of self-restraint on the
part of Boris Mark II, it is.
Making news
— Born 1964 in New York, where his father worked for the United Nations. His
mother is an artist
— Grew up in London, won scholarship to Eton; President of the Oxford
Union; BA in classics
— Trainee reporter for The Times, eventually The Daily
Telegraph’s assistant editor and political columnist; edited The
Spectator
— Elected MP for Henley in 2001; Shadow Minister for Arts 2004; sacked
by Michael Howard, who decided he had lied about an affair. Shadow spokesman
for higher education 2005-06
