My appointment with the mayor of London was for 10 o’clock sharp, and I was
warned in advance by the young woman in the press office not to be late
because Boris Johnson is so very heavily scheduled these days. Any lateness
on my part would be subtracted from the 30 minutes, maximum, that I had been
allocated. I arrived 10 minutes early, but 40 minutes later Boris still
hadn’t shown up in the building. His staff were apologetic. It was most
unusual for him not to be on time, they explained, but Boris had been at the
Lord Mayor’s Banquet the night before and had decided against cycling to the
event in white tie. So he was coming in on the Tube from his home, and must
have been held up.
Finally he appears a short while after our interview was scheduled to end. He
is not wearing a tie, and I am struck by how tired he looks. Unaware of the
story that has been spun to explain his tardiness, Boris mutters
apologetically about having had “a million things to do at home”, and having
rather overdone it the night before. Then he suggests that his lateness was
the fault of the French-owned electricity company EDF, because his home had
suffered a power cut that morning, incapacitating his toaster. He wonders,
jokingly, if he was being targeted for having written disobligingly about
foreign-owned utility companies in a recent column. I tell him that, having
once been a colleague of his, I’d have been astonished if he’d been on time,
and he pretends to be offended.
Sitting before me gulping coffee in an effort to kick-start his day sits the
new “serious Boris”. In truth, the distinction between the old, posh,
gaffe-prone Boris the Buffoon and the new cautious, reticent political
figure is false. As anyone who has a passing acquaintance with him knows
perfectly well, Boris has always been deadly serious in charting his life’s
course. From the moment, as a classics undergraduate at Balliol, that he
plotted his run for the presidency of the Oxford Union, his vaulting,
methodical ambition has been there to see. He dismisses the thesis that he
has suddenly got earnest: “I think I’ve paralysed the world with my
seriousness for quite long enough. Everyone’s in a narcosis induced by my
seriousness.”
Nor is that entirely true, either. Boris elicits a spontaneous enthusiasm from
almost any gathering. During a recent impromptu stopover at a south London
bus depot, he was mobbed by the drivers, and not just because they wanted to
complain about their wages. He is blessed with what might be called a
presumption of hilarity. Maybe it’s the shock of straw-coloured hair or the
extravagant hand gestures, or the way he puckers his lips before he talks,
but people expect what he says to be funny, or mischievous, or indiscreet,
so they may even be laughing before he has opened his mouth.
He is not on the greatest form on the day we meet, perhaps because a sense of
confrontation is created by the young woman minder from the press office
sitting in on our chat and thrusting a tape recorder under our noses. I put
it to him that, though it must be great fun for a journalist to become mayor
of London, a lot of the minutiae of the job must be very tedious. He recoils
theatrically: “I’ll tell you what — it’s a much bigger job than I thought it
was going to be.” But he cannot resist ending with a joke: “Every day I
awake with a sense of wonderment that the people of London…” Then he checks
himself, realising he is sounding like a hack politician and asks
self-mockingly: “You know this one?”
Boris later confessed that to get through the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and the
interminable speeches by Gordon Brown and others, he had downed the best
part of two bottles of wine. Rather than maintain our desultory interview in
his office, he suggests we have a game of ping pong. He often has a game in
the evening with his aides, lining books up in the middle of his desk as a
net. “Are you any good?” he asks, twice, and I see in his eyes the
competitiveness that friends have long remarked on. I am spared inevitable
humiliation by the press officer, who tells Boris sharply that his next
appointment is waiting for him. “Next time you come, we must definitely play
some pingers.”
Even with a makeshift ping-pong table in his office, one cannot help thinking
that the new king sits somewhat uneasily within his slightly weird new
court. Were Boris in his former incarnation as a journalist to travel to
City Hall and interview someone else who was mayor, he would certainly have
fun.
Norman Foster’s glass monstrosity on the south bank of the Thames is a
terrible insult to its neighbour, Tower Bridge, and to the Tower of London
across the river. The Glass Gonad, Boris calls his new HQ, while his deputy,
Kit Malthouse, is blunter, ranking it as an “architectural jerk-off”.
It is one of those modern buildings that seemed dated even before it opened
for business, partly because it is almost impossible and ruinously expensive
to clean the glass exterior, so that all the windows are permanently smeared
in London grime and bird droppings. Boris’s journalistic eye would have
noted the multi-faith meditation room in the basement, the fair-trade
organic teas in the canteen, and how the public space of the lower levels is
dominated by what looks like a gigantic wheelchair ramp, so that if you want
to walk, rather than take the lift, you are forced to trudge pointlessly in
wide concentric loops.
But it is the people dementedly punching at their BlackBerrys who seem
stranger even than the building. The circle who now surround Boris are not
the sort of people he would have known at Eton, Oxford or The Spectator, the
weekly magazine he edited, or in the Tory corridors of Westminster during
his time as MP for Henley.
The junior ranks of City Hall are young, quite ethnically diverse, idealistic,
one senses left-wing, and probably not that exercised by Pericles or any
other of the mayor’s classical heroes. After his stunning electoral victory,
Boris told Andrew Gimson, who wrote a riotous biography of him, that he
would govern London as Emperor Augustus ruled Rome, living in a simple room.
The office he inherited is simple; in fact it’s rather grotty, and because of
the strange design of the building, it feels as though you are sitting in a
corridor. The building may be grandiose, but the mayoralty is ascetic by
design, as Augustus might have had in mind. The mayor of New York has a
splendid official residence, but Boris, aside from his £137,000 salary —
topped up by £250,000 from his Daily Telegraph column — has nothing. No
official car, no security team, not even a mayor’s chain of office. He is
wise enough to steer clear of London’s abysmal transport system, preferring
to get around on his bicycle.
