JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (49 page)

His remarks to that week’s
Henley Standard
are classic bet-hedging Boris. At first, he told reporters that he was flattered to be considered for the mayoral race but that there were ‘overwhelming logistical difficulties’ and it was ‘not really a goer.’ Just hours later, the message changed to ‘I am ruling nothing out. Being Mayor of London would be a fantastic job. I have, of course, been struck by the number of people who have been urging me to run.’

There were still moments of doubt, however, on both sides. Henley was a sticking point. The Cameron supporters wanted him to give up his seat to focus on fighting for London but Boris was understandably not keen to surrender his Parliamentary fallback. ‘Boris never wants to deny himself the right to have his cake, eat it and then have a bun,’ notes one senior Tory involved in the talks. (Precedent supported him, however: Ken Livingstone had kept on his Parliamentary constituency of Brent East for a year after he first became mayor in 2000 until the next general election.) A compromise was eventually reached with Boris able to keep Henley until the mayoral election of May 2008 (saving him some £80,000 in income and mortgage expenses) – but if he won, he would then surrender it more or less immediately.
He would also step down from the unpaid higher education brief at once.

On his blog of Friday the 13th, Boris announced his intention to stand – although the post was quickly taken down again on the grounds that it was not an ‘official’ statement. But just a couple of hours before the noon deadline for nominations on 16 July, Boris did finally go live. The campaign soon descended into pandemonium as he weaved his bicycle into the waiting media scrum outside the Mayor’s HQ at City Hall. Repeatedly telling journalists and photographers jostling against him to ‘get back,’ he promised to be ‘frank and candid,’ to ‘put a smile on people’s faces’ and declared himself ‘thrilled and excited’ about running for mayor.

Boris had chosen to ignore advice from a raft of people that he would be variously bored, excluded from real power or crushed by Ken Livingstone but the Leadership was less able to bat away rumbling concerns that he would prove a ‘disaster waiting to happen’, both as a candidate and then mayor – someone who would make their return to government less rather than more likely. George Osborne, who was in charge of the campaign, told friends that he (perhaps more than Cameron) was agonising over Boris’s candidacy and whether the Leadership should ‘block or back it.’ But it was too late for cold feet – no other viable candidate had come forward and now they were left with someone who did not actually need their support to win the candidacy for he had his own powerbase, popular support and genius for publicity.

The very quality that gave the Tories palpitations – his comic dilettante reputation – was the one that made Boris so popular with the people. If control is power in politics, by turning to him for the mayoral elections, the Cameroons had just lost it. Cameron knew that he needed someone above or separate from his party – and he had found the very person who fitted the bill. Clearly, he did not come without risks, though. And his application for the candidacy – scrawled in messy handwriting and bursting with sarcasm and jokes – did little to assuage the fears. He listed his political and employment history but when it came to the section ‘challenges faced’, Boris could not help but raise a smile: ‘1. Trying to help raise 4 children in inner
London. Outcome: too early to call, but looking promising. 2. Taking on Blair and Campbell in the battle of Black Rod’s Memorandum on the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state. Outcome: Total victory. 3. Negotiating Hyde Park Corner by bicycle. Outcome: survival.’ He left the section marked ‘personal character’ blank. (Polly Toynbee of the
Guardian
tried to fill it in for him with an extraordinary piece the next day, calling him a ‘jester, toff, self-absorbed sociopath and serial liar.’)

Nor was the word out of Henley particularly encouraging. Peter Sutherland of the Henley Conservatives, normally an ardent Boris supporter, publicly doubted his mayoral credentials. ‘It is very easy to question whether he is up to the job,’ he told the
Henley Standard
. Henley’s own mayor Terry Buckett said he believed Boris was too inexperienced – ‘If I lived in London, I would be concerned.’ And he was also angry at the way the decision had been made. ‘He should have sought approval from his constituents before declaring to run,’ he said.
¹¹
Other Henley voters were more succinct: ‘Traitor!’ declared one woman, coming up to him at a Conservative gathering.

With Boris in a different league from the rest of the Conservative candidates still in the race, some thought there would be a coronation rather than the originally planned primary. But in the end, it went ahead with Boris standing against Andrew Boff (runner-up to Steve Norris in 2000) and two councillors from Kensington & Chelsea: Warwick Lightfoot and Victoria Borwick.

During the lead-up, a YouGov poll indicated that, if chosen for the Tories, Boris would lead Ken by 46 to 40 per cent. The result made the contest even more of a foregone conclusion. And Boris did indeed triumph with 79 per cent of the primary vote. Admittedly, the sample was tiny – fewer than 20,000 Londoners bothered to participate. But now, at last, the real contest could begin. It was one for which Boris’s entire life now seemed to have been in preparation: Boris versus Ken.

‘He is the most formidable opponent I will face in my political career.’ So pronounced Ken Livingstone in early August 2007 on BBC Radio 4’s
Today
programme. Unlike many of his Conservative opponents,
he
did not doubt Boris’s electoral firepower as a ‘charming and engaging rogue.’ Ken instinctively scented trouble in the personality contest and so he insisted: ‘I want to get onto the policy: this is not a sort of “Celebrity Big Mayor” – it’s a serious issue about how you run the city.’

But there was no disguising the fact that Ken vs. Boris was developing nicely into Britain’s first celebrity election. Political parties barely seemed to matter, it was not even a contest between Left and Right: it was more a question of whether Londoners preferred blond, bumbling Boris (who promised something new and somehow cheerier) or wily old Ken (who had arguably run out of steam after eight eventful years). If Ken was aware of Boris’s electoral appeal, then the Tories were equally cognisant of Ken’s track record. ‘He is the only truly successful Left-wing British politician of modern times,’ had been Charles Moore’s assessment.
¹

Not only was he a brilliant strategist, but Ken, now 62, could claim to have improved London’s buses, as well as introducing the Congestion Charge and Oyster travel pass. Indeed, he had presided over the transformation from a capital slammed by travel guides in the late-90s to one of the hippest tourist destinations in the world. On his watch, London had overtaken New York as the globe’s leading
financial centre. He had also brought the Olympics to the capital and been a calm and unifying force after the 7/7 suicide bombings of 2005.

Forty-three-year-old Boris, meanwhile, had a rocky Parliamentary career and a couple of sex scandals on his slate and had not shown much noticeable interest in London before. But he had also made a lot of people laugh, featured on various ‘cool’ lists, got into plenty of entertaining scrapes and run a notorious magazine. Ken knew he had to take the battle to Boris, so while publicly talking policy, he was actually busy trying to chip away at Boris’s likeability. He and his staff had been combing through newspapers and books for ammunition against the Cult of Boris and they first alighted on some of his writings on the subject of race.

Boris’s damning comments on the Macpherson report, which had uncovered ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the 1993 murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, were widely circulated. As we have seen, he had branded it ‘hysterical’ and ‘weird’, and its suggestions for new race crimes likely to intrude further into private life than anything under Ceausescu’s Romania. Doreen Lawrence, Stephen’s mother, declared Boris to be ‘not an appropriate person to run a multicultural city like London – those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves and look at him. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.’

A spokesman for Boris insisted that he ‘loathed racism’ and pointed to the undeniable fact that his later articles were more sympathetic to Macpherson but the accusations began to hit target. Team Ken went on to release snippets of Boris’s (now fairly aged) articles that supported the Iraq War or could potentially cause offence to homosexuals, women or people on the minimum wage. The aim was to portray him as a Right-wing bigot, with no love for multi-cultural London.

As if this were not bad enough, Gordon Brown had been enjoying a political honeymoon since he became Prime Minister in June, with Labour several points ahead in the polls. Voters liked the fact that, unlike Blair, Brown did not holiday with Berlusconi, brought in Tories
and Lib Dems to serve in his administration (as GOATs, or Government Of All the Talents) and handled the Glasgow airport bombing with firmness and tact.

Boris deserves credit for standing firm under fire at this seemingly hopeless point – although critics claim he just did not notice the woeful position he was in. To the sounds of ‘London Calling’ by the Clash, he launched his ‘Back Boris’ campaign in early September, warning that he reserved the right to continue to make jokes but that he was also ‘deadly serious’ in his bid to become mayor. That latter aim was not advanced by a series of technical failures, a lightness of policy (beyond a promise to bring back the beloved Routemaster bus in modern form) and his fondness for quips. It was not long afterwards that a journalist from the
Wall Street Journal
, who had been trailing Boris with increasing fascination, inquired: ‘Are you too funny to be mayor?’

But none of this stopped him from receiving a hero’s welcome at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool later that month. Two years after Cameron had walked the stage of the Winter Gardens in the leadership contest, Boris was busy wooing the audience into believing that he too was really a serious player. ‘When people ask me, “Are you serious about this?” I can tell them that I can think of nothing more serious than the security and prosperity of the power-house of the British economy, whose booming service industries are the best possible vindication of the revolutions brought in by Conservative governments.’ The speech was delivered in classic Boris rambling style – one familiar to his immediate audience but not to the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was waiting to broadcast a message by satellite link from the United States. ‘He’s fumbling all over the place,’ Schwarzenegger observed to aides on footage that quickly found its way onto the Internet but the legendary ‘Fumbulator’ attack played to Boris’s hand. Not only was it free publicity, it also served to highlight the contrast between his amusing, if stylised eloquence and the stilted delivery of a man he later branded a ‘monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.’

The 2007 Conservative conference went well for Boris and the party – peaking when the shadow chancellor George Osborne stole a march
on Labour by announcing a policy to take all but millionaires out of the inheritance tax trap. Hitherto widely expected to announce a snap election, Brown now ‘bottled it’. On 6 October, he made it clear that he would not be going to the country and fortuitously Boris was spared the embarrassment of trying to keep Henley – which he had admitted was his intention – and simultaneously fighting for London.

Now it was finally time to get down to work. To demonstrate his commitment, Boris made two announcements. He was to give up alcohol for the duration of the campaign – and in the process went on to lose a stone and a half. And he would withdraw into a self-imposed purdah so that, he said, he could work on policies and read into the role. Indeed, he was extremely busy during this period – albeit away from the campaign working on no fewer than three different television projects filmed in six different countries, including another episode of
Have I Got News For You.
And until February, he was still writing his weekly column for the
Telegraph
, promoting his new book of verse,
The Perils of the Pushy Parents
, and throughout this time fulfilling at least some of his duties as a constituency MP. It was almost as if he could not quite believe that he was running for mayor, or that it was worth his complete and serious attention. Quite likely he subscribed to the widely held opinion that it was impossible that he could win, but had gambled that a narrow, yet glorious defeat might be just the career booster needed. Ken certainly believed it was a case of Boris seeking to reposition himself: ‘I think he just thought this will let me back in the game,’ he says. Indeed, when an associate Boris knew from Brussels bumped into him at the House of Commons he cheeped, ‘Have you heard what I’m up to?’ like an excitable schoolboy who had just worked out how to escape a detention.

Boris inherited a youthful campaign team created by Boles and led by 32-year-old ex-Saatchi executive Dan Ritterband. It came with £60,000 of funding and a suite of rooms in Centre Point, a design guru’s dream overlooking the fleshpots of Soho, but crucially, a 35-minute walk from Tory HQ. The capable, but inexperienced Rachel Wolf had moved over in July (but left in dismay, months later). Tom Dyke, a former law student who had only recently been an intern at the Policy Exchange, was in charge of environmental policy.
Ritterband also brought in Alex Crowley, a film studies graduate in his early twenties, who had worked for the London Assembly Tories, as chief of research. Katie Perrior and Jo Tanner, former middle-ranking members of the Central Office press team, were in charge of media. Although undoubtedly talented and eager, none had run a campaign of this magnitude before and it was a tall order keeping tabs on Boris. Many of the old hands outside the team felt that invaluable time was being lost: Ken was already popping shots at Boris, but the fire was not being returned. Those inside recall feeling swamped – they were, after all, far outnumbered by Ken’s entourage, which was said to have the use of 70 press officers to their two.