David Cameron held Boris Johnson’s hand up as a proud trainer might his triumphant boxer, showing off the new Conservative Mayor of London. This picture of unity belied a much more complicated truth for, in fact, it was only long after Cameron’s search for a candidate to take on Ken Livingstone had descended into farce that he turned to Boris. The mayoral primary, announced early in 2006, had first to be postponed when it failed to produce a single candidate with any genuine star quality.
Officially the Tory leadership was neutral; unofficially the modernisers had a candidate in Nicholas Boles. Boles, defeated in the 2005 election, had even given up his job as director of the Cameron-leaning think-tank Policy Exchange to take a run at the mayoralty. Although fresh-faced, personable, intelligent and gay, he was not the sort of high-profile figure who would be able to compete for the media’s attention with Livingstone. Frankly, Cameron wasn’t confident that he could win. Behind the scenes the Tory leader began to take charge of the search. Lord Coe, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington (formerly Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police) and Sir John Major were all considered but fell by the wayside.
The hunt became humiliating when Cameron approached Sir Menzies Campbell to discuss the idea of a joint Lib Dem-Conservative candidate, the former BBC director-general Greg Dyke. This slight was too much for one of Boles’s patrons. It was Charles Moore, The Spectator’s former Editor, who was suspected of leaking the approach to the magazine. Then at the end of June 2007 Boles discovered that he had cancer. Cameron was now without even a default candidate: it was time for desperate measures.
Until that moment Cameron could scarcely have done less to help Boris’s political career. The two men had known each other for almost 25 years. At Eton, at Oxford, in the media and in politics their lives had touched, diverged and touched again. Their contacts have been marked by competitiveness rather than collegiality. Boris’s swashbuckling brilliance was admired by Cameron, two years his junior, but he was more amused than impressed. Boris, a scholar, was elected to Pop, a pupil-elected elite: the schoolboy Cameron was not. In debating circles at school and university, Johnson had played for laughs and deftly concealed his gifts behind a buffoonish exterior, while the more contained Cameron had played a longer game. As fellow members of the Bullingdon Club, Cameron was comparatively strait-laced and missed out on trashing the furnishings, while Boris, reliant on his childlike charm to extricate him from scrapes, went with the flow.
Rules were a bit bourgeois. They applied only to the little people. Cameron’s first job had been at the Conservative Research Department (CRD) after being turned down by a number of blue-chip employers. Boris, on the other hand, had been interviewed by CRD six weeks after Cameron, and they had been keen to have him: Boris told them that his first preference was a traineeship at The Times, which he landed. Although that job ended in the first of his many disgraces, by the time Cameron was doing well at CRD, Boris — as The Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent — was said to be Margaret Thatcher’s favourite journalist. And when Cameron joined the media world working for Carlton, not the most prestigious outfit, in the 1990s Boris capped a decade of brilliance with the editorship of The Spectator.
It was not until both were elected to the Commons in 2001 that Cameron finally began to haul himself on to equal terms. Even when both, along with George Osborne, were asked to help Iain Duncan Smith to prepare for PMQs, it seemed that Cameron was to be cast as the drudge. Struggling after his son Ivan’s birth, he nevertheless strove to do his duty by Duncan Smith, in contrast to Boris’s lackadaisical and dilatory appearances. Cameron and Osborne shared the whips’ view that their colleague lacked seriousness and application.
Cameron is a man of astonishing gifts, but his instinct is to work within the existing framework of rules. Boris frets under such restraint and is always ready to drive a coach and horses through it. Cameron is bound to regard Boris as a bit disreputable, while Boris is bound to regard Cameron as a bit limited.
While for many the clever, funny, loveable Boris has enlivened the political landscape, Cameron sees a man who, carried away by his own verbal brilliance, is forever having to issue apologies for his lack of restraint. Who was sacked from The Times for inventing quotes? Whose extramarital affairs resulted in at least two abortions and deep distress to at least two women? Whose idealism and loathing of priggishness prevented him from understanding why his mistress would not be happy to go on a Johnson family holiday? Who lied to the press and to his boss about an affair? If Boris regards Cameron as stodgy and conventional, Cameron sees Boris as being dangerously spirited and lacking the necessary moral cut-out or internal alarm system to be a serious politician. Although Cameron is not consciously hostile to Johnson (nor vice versa), he perplexedly — and without much expectation — seeks evidence that his old associate is not going to embarrass him.
So it was a surprise only to Boris that, on December 9, 2005, three days after becoming leader, Cameron omitted Johnson from his Shadow Cabinet. Boris, as Spectator Editor, had been one of the earliest supporters of Cameron’s leadership campaign, his natural competitiveness overcome by an assumption that Cameron’s elevation could do him nothing but good. This looked like a miscalculation. His trust in Cameron had been misplaced. Boris, it seemed, would have to wait his turn, labouring in the post of spokesman for higher education. He resigned from The Spectator and addressed himself with some earnestness to a brief that, he would have had to admit, did interest him. If the 2005 snub to Boris was remarkable only to its victim, its repetition 18 months later was publicly more obvious. When Cameron reshuffled his team in July 2007 he promoted three MPs from the 2005 intake. Boris, an MP since 2001, stayed with higher education. To Boris the reason sometimes offered, that Cameron could not afford to promote yet another Etonian, was not good enough. This was not what he had left The Spectator for, and it was a stunning rebuff to his competitive spirit and to his faith in his own talents. Would Cameron never promote him?
Now that Cameron needed him, Boris was going to make him sweat. A few weeks before Boles’s withdrawal from the mayoral race he joked with a friend, “When they’ve tried everyone else, oh well, it’ll have to be me.” Musing about Cameron’s reluctance to approach Boris, a friend said: “If you ask people to name two Tories they always say ‘Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson’. He has a much higher recognition factor than Cameron. If they wanted a high-profile candidate, the answer was there from the start.”
Asked why Cameron did not turn to Boris earlier, aides suggest that there was uncertainty whether he would agree. Boris, although not fully convinced, had already advertised his availability and willingness to be courted, but Cameron made it clear that he thought the idea outlandish. Even when it became obvious that there was no other option, the Tory leader could not face asking Boris to run himself — he asked Andy Coulson, his head of communications, to sound him out. Then Dan Ritterband, who had served as a special adviser to Michael Howard, the former Tory leader, and Cameron before working for Boles, was asked to follow up. Cameron’s text to Boris at around that time (“Don’t go wobbly on me now”) suggests he had always assumed that Boris wanted the job. Around three days after the original Coulson approach, Ritterband cornered Boris at the annual Spectator summer party and showed him polling data which proved that Livingstone was beatable. Finally, after a weekend spent consulting his family, Boris said yes.
Once the formality of the primary was out of the way — he won 75 per cent of the vote in a four-horse race — it was time to get down to the hard work of unseating a two-term incumbent. As autumn wore on it seemed that his candidacy was going to be as shambolic as Cameron had feared. He told a friend: “I’m the bloody Napoleon of organisation!” but by December admitted to close friends that his campaign was not equal to the task. “He started to worry, I think, that he couldn’t win it,” an observer said. But Boris decided that he wasn’t going to surrender this last shot at redemption. “There is no doubt that there has been a growing-up process,” said an insider immediately after his victory. “This was something where charm alone would never be enough.” George Osborne, who was handling the mayoral campaign at Tory HQ, had been despairing of the Boris campaign for some time, even briefing the activist website ConservativeHome about the leadership’s “concerns”.
Ten months later Lynton Crosby, the Australian poltical architect and famously skilled organiser, came on board. Crosby’s strategy was simple enough: to suppress Livingstone’s votes while ensuring that the Tory-leaning boroughs turned out in force. The themes were few but emotive: getting rid of bendy buses, reducing youth crime and dealing with disorder on public transport.
Focus groups found that Boris’s clownishness seemed to prove his authenticity. Labour efforts to portray him as an idiot were only helping to entrench him as the “real deal”. As election day approached, the unthinkable was becoming more likely. For some months, Boris had given up drinking and perhaps surprised even himself with his self-control. By contrast, Livingstone seemed tired. In the event, he increased the number of first preferences he received, but after redistribution of second preferences Boris won. Someone who was there says that when the candidates were told the result, Boris looked dumbstruck and slightly terrified. He now faced real responsibility.
A new chapter in the Johnson–Cameron relationship was beginning. Someone who knew them both at university laughs at the media’s occasional portrayal of them as friends. “The only thing they have in common is ambition,” he says. To this might be added the well-concealed surprise aroused in both men by the other’s success. A friend who knows Boris extremely well says that he believes himself to be the most intelligent person in the world. With self-esteem of that order, founded on a belief in your own near-infallibility, people are bound to get upset, whether by accident or design.
Boris has never had much time for constraints imposed by others, let alone by David Cameron, and his disdain was made plain when he defied the leader’s example of the previous year by insisting on flying off for a holiday abroad. Soon afterwards, he caused a further media storm by writing: “If you believe the politicians, we have a broken society, in which the courage and morals of young people have been sapped by welfarism and political correctness. If you look at what is happening at the Beijing Olympics, you can see what piffle that is.” Even had Boris been as sleepy as he sometimes pretends to be, he would have known how important the “broken society” is to the Cameron message. A sharp phone call ensued from Cameron’s office, although publicly the leader adopted the indulgent “Boris is Boris” approach.
Boris continued to push for the building of a new airport in the Thames estuary, in contravention of official party policy, and showed further independence of spirit when he brought about the resignation of the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, informing Cameron only after Sir Ian had been told of the Mayor’s lack of confidence in him. Any idea that this was mere thoughtlessness, a charmingly artless mishap, should be banished by the words of someone who knows them both: “Boris despises David. He doesn’t respect his intelligence, thinks he’s conventional and safe and unimaginative, and he can’t understand how he’s got the top job.”
Cameron, when explaining that he was glad that he hadn’t joined The Economist because he was not a natural journalist, added: “I sometimes think there are people in politics who ought to be in journalism and there are people in journalism who should be in politics, but I’m certainly not going to say who.” If he was not referring to Boris Johnson, he might as well have been.
