PROFILE BORIS JOHNSON:The Tory MP and TV presenter has been classed as a clown, but he could be a serious contender in the race for Mayor of London. And his party leader, David Cameron, would certainly be pleased with that outcome, writes Frank Millar
'MY FRIENDS, AS I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters." So spake Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson after being sacked from Michael Howard's Conservative frontbench in December 2004. The former Classics student, President of the Oxford Union, Spectatoreditor, serious broadcaster and celebrity host of Have I Got News For Youis certainly accident-prone.
As his biographer Andrew Gimson recalls, in September 2004 Vanity Fairpublished an admiring profile billing him a likely future British prime minister.
Within the month storm clouds had gathered over a Spectatoreditorial (which Johnson did not write but for which he accepted responsibility) about reaction in Liverpool to the murder of British hostage Ken Bigley in Iraq. The article criticised "the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood". It also underestimated the death toll in the Hillsborough disaster while repeating the charge that drunken fans had been to blame, something ruled out by the official inquiry. Howard, a keen supporter of Liverpool FC, famously ordered Johnson to the city to apologise.
Even before that storm subsided, however, his private life reached a crisis point, the ostensible excuse for media intrusion being that he had denied an extra-marital affair as "an inverted pyramid of piffle". He would hardly have prevented the damage or the intrusion by simply refusing to comment on his private life. Nor had he ever posed as a moral champion, much less accepted that politicians should "set an example" to help uphold the institution of marriage. Yet such episodes speak to a wider capacity for controversy for those unsure whether Boris can realise his high ambitions and, indeed, whether he is altogether serious about the politics game.
ON THAT QUESTION the MP for Henley-on-Thames certainly divides his party. And, of course, across much of Britain this New York-born Old Etonian with Turkish forebears is much loved for it. It is his delicious irreverence, his desire to have his large cake and eat it - perhaps above all his willingness to be ridiculous - that marks "Boris" out from the whip-bound jobsworths within the political classes on all sides. For much the same reason, Howard's successor David Cameron will expect Australian election strategist Lynton Crosbie to keep his man on a tight leash between now and Thursday.
For if all politics could be relied upon to determine the "local" outcome, Boris would seem set fair in his bid to supplant the no-longer-quite-so-Red Ken Livingstone as mayor of London. And that would be an undoubted fillip for Cameron's attempt to persuade the British public that he is ready to replace Gordon Brown as Prime Minister in one general election leap.
Like Boris, "Ken" enjoys first-name recognition and campaigns with the flexibility this allows to distance himself where expedient from his official "Labour" label. Instant recognition and easy familiarity do not, of course, always spell affection, and many remain highly resistant to their respective charms.
Journalist and former Tory minister George Walden considers all three main candidates dreadful - of Lib Dem standard-bearer Brian Paddick there is simply "nothing to be said" - and has urged Londoners to continue their well-established habit of staying at home on polling day.
Londoners have never been entirely convinced about Tony Blair's gift of an elected mayor, and Walden recently served up the sobering statistic that some 86 per cent of those eligible did not vote for Livingstone in a one-third turnout. The result? "Flush with his 14 per cent authority, the representative of our great city will put you right on world affairs in bar-room style. Such as how we must dialogue mutely with Muslim clerics so as not to offend any medieval sensibilities. Corruption? If our national treasure were caught roasting babies on a spit in Trafalgar Square people would grin and say, c'mon, that's just our Ken, innit?"
In full Grumpy Old Man rant, Walden continued: "Then there is Boris Johnson. The gaiety of nations I understand, but the most entertaining thing about Johnson is when he puts on his serious, solicitous look."
Writing in the same Timesnewspaper, on the other hand, Anatole Kaletsky acknowledged the media bias in the coverage of the campaign justified by the "larger-than-life and buffoonish character" of both main candidates and their gaffes, or, for the most part, lack of them. "As a result the dinner-party consensus among the chattering classes has turned the election into a question over whether Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson is the less likely to self-destruct." According to Kaletsky, this conventional wisdom is wrong. Far from being "blundering political idiots", Johnson and Livingstone are "politicians of the first rank", whose promised gladiatorial contest has sadly degenerated "into a dull Punch and Judy show that even London's local papers can scarcely bring themselves to report."
Again, this should be good news for the Tory challenger. London's "local" elections (for Mayor and the Assembly) have played out against a backdrop of rising levels of disillusion about - and within - Britain's ruling Labour Party. Along with Ken versus Boris, the dinner party chat over reportedly reduced fare nowadays from Clerkenwell to Clapham and Croydon is about how far the property market will fall.
Labour's high employment achievement makes comparisons with the worst days of the Conservative "boom and bust" misleading, yet at least one in 10 households is said to be at risk of negative equity. Fears about redundancies in the City were already vying with rising food, fuel and council tax costs for front-page attention, even before rebel Labour MPs finally awoke to the potential disaster of Gordon Brown's wheeze (in one of his last acts as chancellor) to increase the tax burden of some of the lowest-paid workers in the UK.
No matter that (with honourable exceptions such as Frank Field) the same MPs had cheered Brown's "tax-cutting" trick the year before. When the outraged word from the campaign doorsteps finally reached Westminster something had to give. And if Cameron and many commentators are right, it will prove to have been a substantial dollop of prime minister's Brown's already diminished authority.
AT THE START of this week it seemed a given that Labour's 10p tax rebellion would not happen, if only on the time-honoured principle that "turkeys don't vote for Christmas". Yet Wednesday's dramatic U-turn - or "listening" and acting exercise, as Brown would have it - confirmed the whips' calculations that the government was actually facing defeat on a key plank of Brown's very own budget. No matter that that vote was scheduled within days of the English and Welsh council elections and the landmark London poll. Or that the results of these "mid-terms" have the potential to set a national mood ahead of what the prime minister must hope will be a general election year. The man hailed a welcome and necessary "change" from Blair just 10 months ago might very well have been a goner. And who can doubt that, in such circumstances, Ken would have been going with him?
To Brown's frustration, the latest display of Labour panic and indiscipline coincided with evidence this week that the situation may not be as bad as mutinous Labour MPs fear. After a double-digit lead a month ago, ICM gave Cameron's Conservatives a lead of just five points over Labour. Moreover, while Johnson is running neck and neck with Livingstone, the discomfiting evidence from London is that any national "time for a change" mood is not playing so strongly in the capital. After two terms the 62-year-old Livingstone looks distinctly shop-soiled, while 43-year-old Johnson is not only the more popular but also the more trusted. Ken admits to being power-hungry and attracts charges of cronyism, although allegations of corruption among some of his appointees have not been proven. Ken accuses Boris of permitting racist articles to appear under his Spectatoreditorship, while Boris counters with accusations of the Mayor's "anti-semitism" and seeks to exploit his embarrassing courtship of homophobic Islamist scholars. But nobody outside the partisan fray seriously believes multicultural and "inclusive" London would be set in reverse by a Johnson mayoralty. Both men reflect the tolerant and libertarian culture of the capital city and there is no real "fear" factor at work here.
Livingstone has been better for business than people would have imagined, has the congestion charge under his belt, and proved an able leader for all Londoners after the 7/7 bombings. Yet while people are bored with Livingstone, find him increasingly unlikeable, and are not perturbed by the idea of Boris as mayor, Andrew Cooper of the polling organisation Populus says: "It's just that this seems to be a pretty marginal call and it's almost as if Livingstone has done a better job of persuading people he wants it more."
Boris has but a few days in which to challenge and change that perception. As with the Oxford First that he wanted but didn't get, the ability is not in question . . . but he still has to work to do.
"It is his delicious irreverence, his desire to have his large cake and eat it - perhaps above all his willingness to be ridiculous - that marks Boris out
CV BORIS JOHNSON
Who is he?Boris Johnson, Tory MP and sometimes
celebrity anchor of
Have I Got News For You.
Why is he is the news?He's in with a serious chance
of defeating Ken Livingstone in next Thursday's election for London
Mayor.
Ideal home:Merry England
Hero:Margaret Thatcher
Most likely to say:"My chances of being PM are
about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being
reincarnated as an olive"
Least likely to say (now):"Voting Tory will cause
your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of
owning a BMW M3."