JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (54 page)

More difficult to deal with was a question from the audience about morality. Dimbleby and then Paddick pressed him on his affairs as Marina and her mother, Dip, and ailing father, Charles – who would die just a few weeks later from lung cancer – sat watching in the audience. After the recording finished, Boris went straight up to his wife but a few moments later, she seemed more intent on dealing with someone else. She stormed over to Paddick’s Green Room behind stage, where he was celebrating his birthday with a friend. Quivering with anger, she shouted: ‘Don’t you
dare
bring my family into this!’ It was a bravura performance that both impressed – and saddened – everyone who witnessed it. A contrite Paddick, unaware Marina had been in the audience, apologised to Boris the following morning when the pair met at the BBC offices for a radio show. ‘He just said, “Don’t worry about it, ol’ boy – it’s just one of those things,”’ recalls the former senior police officer. Marina’s obvious hurt had shaken everyone, though. ‘It was a very tense evening indeed,’ one of Boris’s minders recalls.

Interestingly, this was the only major occasion when the subject of Boris’s philandering was raised. Crosby believes that Boris benefited from the ‘Clinton effect’ – during the Monica Lewinsky saga, the US president’s ratings actually went up. In neither case, in Crosby’s view, were the sex stories seen by voters as ‘consequential’ to political performance and in London, with Boris he detected that voters quite often thought ‘good on him.’

In the final hours of the campaign, Boris taunted Ken with his words of 1998, about how a mayor should serve only two terms because otherwise the office would inevitably, ‘become corrupt or corrupted.’ It was a good point – and perhaps appreciated more by the voters than the commentariat, who held quite different views from many of their readers by this time. Although by no means a supporter of Ken, one of Boris’s own colleagues on the
Telegraph
, Simon Heffer, wrote: ‘Mr Johnson is not a politician. He is an act. For some of us the joke has worn not thin, but out. Yet many less cynical than I am find it appealing. It conceals two things: a blinding lack of attention to detail and a ruthless ambition. He is pushy, he is thoughtless, he is indiscreet about his private life; none of this
matters much to anyone these days, which is why he has gone so far in spite of them, and tomorrow may go further still.’

Then, on Thursday, 1st May – polling day itself – the
Guardian
, which had attacked the
Standard
for its perceived bias during the campaign, printed one of the most bizarre sections on politics ever seen in a national newspaper (in spite of the gravest of reservations of several senior staff). Under a screaming headline: ‘BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID’, the paper ran five whole pages of personal attacks on Boris, beginning: ‘Unbelievable as it may seem, Boris Johnson has a real chance of being elected London mayor today. A number of
Guardian
writers and other Londoners imagine what it would be like if this bigoted, lying, Old Etonian buffoon got his hands on our diverse and liberal capital.’ Inside was an astonishing catalogue of insults – from ‘moneyed creep’ to ‘flagrant and flamboyant liar’ to Alan Rickman’s: ‘If Boris gets elected, it would be a case of the lunatic having no clue how to run the asylum’ and Charlie Brooker’s: ‘I’d sooner vote for a dog than Boris Johnson. Cartoon characters should only run cartoon cities.’

The columnist Zoe Williams kicked off the section with: ‘Ach. That flopping hair, and that sodding bicycle. Has any man ever before managed to persuade such a huge number of people that he was a decent chap on two such flimsy, trivial, irrelevant, modish pieces of ephemera? He has all the mendacity, the slyness, the patronising sleight of hand that the
Daily Mail
spews out, only he doesn’t seem so outright unpleasant, because of that sodding hair and that poxing bicycle. Let’s just concentrate on this myth of his being a nice guy. He is not a nice guy.’ At the same time, the
Voice
, reflecting those fears of black City Hall workers, also came out strongly against Boris, devoting an entire front page to telling readers to vote Ken. Once again, Boris was polarising opinions to the extreme.

But voters had their own ideas on who the nice guy was. The
Standard
’s first edition reported: ‘Boris ahead in polls, but it’s so close.’ YouGov put him on 43 per cent of first-preference votes to Ken’s 36 per cent, predicting Boris to win in the run-off, 53 to 47 per cent. Boris was out canvassing with his team that day from dawn until the polling stations shut at 10 p.m. That night, results from local elections around
the country gave Labour its worst showing for 40 years and BBC analysis put the Tories on 44 per cent nationally with Labour in third place overall on just 24 per cent. The figures were excellent news for Boris but he would have to wait another 24 hours to find out his own fate. The London result would not be announced until the following evening, giving all three candidates a night of torrid suspense. Boris certainly felt the strain and, according to a family friend, was saying in a tone of dismay: ‘Crikey! It looks like I’m going to win.’

That Friday, Marina once again demonstrated her support by going for an early-morning jog with her husband – a rare sight as he usually runs alone. In newsrooms around London, meanwhile, there were earnest discussions on how early it would be safe to call the result in favour of Boris. The original estimated declaration time of 8.30 p.m. looked optimistic as a higher-than-expected turnout of around 45 per cent meant there were simply more votes than usual (at nearly 5.5 million including second preferences) to count.

Over at the
Standard
, Veronica Wadley was booked on a late flight out to the South of France for a holiday she had no intention of missing. She pleaded with management to hold the presses for an extra half-hour, but at around 6 p.m. decided that she was prepared to gamble her job on calling it right and getting it out in what was probably the latest-ever planned edition of London’s paper. Admittedly, this was by now a negligible risk, but some six hours before the official result she decided to go ahead and print a special late edition under the headline ‘BORIS IS THE MAYOR’. ‘By 4 p.m. I had confirmation from both parties that Boris had won. But I also knew that if they were wrong and Ken kept his job, I would lose mine,’ she concedes.

Marina brought in all four children to sit with her in the front row of the Assembly Chamber gallery for the result when it finally came. The original declaration time was supposed to have been 8.30, but in the event the first GLA seat was not declared before 9 and the mayoral result took much longer still. Broadcasters were scrambling pundits and even impersonators to fill time. The morning newspapers were still on tenterhooks. Tessa Jowell for the first time admitted the possibility that Ken might not have won. But not until 11.30 were the
candidates finally invited to join the rowdy throng in Committee Room One for an announcement that was to change the lives of the Johnsons for ever.

At 11.54 p.m. precisely, the Returning Officer Anthony Mayer walked into Committee Room One at City Hall. It was packed, noisy and expectant. As they stood up to hear the result, many of the dozens of candidates and advisers present suspected that Ken already knew he had lost. Still more caught Boris looking as if
surely
he could not have won, whatever the
Standard
had screamed on its front page earlier that evening.

Mayer cleared his throat and, 40 long hours after polling began, delivered the final results. On the first count Boris had secured more than a million votes – 1,043,761 – compared to Ken’s 893,877. Paddick was left trailing a poor third. But with Boris and Ken on 43.2 and 37.0 per cent respectively, second preference votes would have to be taken into consideration. What Veronica Wadley over at the
Standard
had counted on in her calculation – that second preferences would divide almost equally between the two main candidates – turned out to be about right. Despite polling some 350,000 more votes than when he won in 2004, Ken was out. Overall, Boris had won by a relatively narrow margin of 1,168,738 to Ken’s 1,028,966 but he had scooped up more votes than his predecessor Steve Norris in the preceding two mayoral elections put together: Boris had got the voters out,
and
he had got them out for him.

There was, however, no outbreak of triumphant cheering from the Boris corner – it seemed inappropriate when the far-right BNP had also just grabbed its first GLA seat. Ken, who felt shell-shocked and
emotional, just remembers ‘Boris bouncing over to me and saying, “This is all Gordon Brown’s fault!”’

Mayer led the candidates down to the Assembly Chamber, where the news was to be announced publicly. Each candidate was then called in and climbed a slope to stand at their allotted place on a podium. Marina, dressed in a matching denim skirt and shirt, sat smiling with her equally happy-looking children in the public gallery. Lara, the eldest, leant over to her younger siblings and told them to keep their fingers crossed ‘for Daddy.’

At just gone midnight Mayer pronounced Boris the Mayor-Elect of London and Marina clapped her hands in delight. Another unknown woman in the audience also shrieked with joy. As Simon Jenkins noted at the time, people from all walks of life simply liked Boris more than they liked Ken. ‘The campaign that brought this [victory] to pass has shown that British politics can, when allowed, shift gear from party cabalism to American-style personality projection. It can galvanise interest, activity and turnout.’

Looking shattered, Boris gave a gracious speech – the unique composition of emotion, wit and politics presenting him at his best. No doubt it puzzled those who had bought the ‘Boris is a monster’ line with its playfulness and lack of triumphalism. First, he thanked the candidates from the smaller parties, though specifically not the BNP candidate. He then went on: ‘But mainly, I want to thank my two colleagues [Ken and Paddick] in the strange triumvirate who have been trundling around London’s church halls and TV studios violently disputing the meaning of multiculturalism and the exact cost of conductors. On which point I think I’m going to declare victory. And I want to congratulate you, Brian, on your great common sense and decency with which you put your case and I do hope that it is not the end of our discussions about the Police.

‘And as for Ken, Mayor Livingstone, I think you have been a very considerable public servant and a distinguished leader of this city. You shaped the office of mayor, you gave it national prominence and when London was attacked on 7 July 2005, you spoke for London. And I can tell you that your courage and the sheer exuberant nerve with which you stuck it to your enemies, especially in New Labour, have thereby
earned you the thanks and admiration of millions of Londoners, even if you think that they have a funny way of showing it today.

‘And when we have that drink together which we both so richly deserve, I hope we can discover a way in which the mayoralty can continue to benefit from your transparent love of London, a city whose energy conquered the world and which now brings the world together in one city. And that brings me to my final thank you, which is of course to the people of London. I would like to thank first the vast multitudes who voted against me – and I have met quite a few in the last nine months, not all of them entirely polite. I will work flat out to dispel some of the myths that have been created about me. And as for those who voted for me, I know there will be many whose pencils hovered for an instant before putting an X in my box and I will work flat out to repay and to justify your confidence.

‘We have a new team ready to go in to City Hall,’ he added, and then in a passage echoing the St Francis of Assisi prayer style used by Margaret Thatcher on her election victory in 1979, he continued: ‘Where there have been mistakes, we will rectify them. Where there are achievements, we will build on them. Where there are neglected opportunities, we will seize on them and we will focus on the priorities of the people of London. Let’s get cracking tomorrow and let’s have a drink tonight.’

The moment also brought the best out in Ken – who might have blamed the
Standard
or the failings of the Labour Government, or both, for his defeat but instead conceded that the fault was entirely his own. ‘I accept that responsibility,’ he said.

After they left the podium, Ken took Boris to a private room for a quick chat. ‘I advised him to take his time before doing too much and to keep Mark Watts on Environment (which he didn’t) and Peter Hendy at Transport (which he did),’ recalls Ken. ‘He offered me lunch – but he does that to everybody. He must have said that at least a dozen times but we never have, not even the drink he mentioned. I knew even then that that was the last time I’d be able to get to him.’ On several occasions since, Boris has publicly made a point of claiming that he and Ken were due to have variously lunch, dinner or a drink together soon, but at no time has this actually even gone so far
as even a date in the diary. It sounds friendly enough, but in fact at least for the first three years after the election there was no contact between the two men except for bumping into each other at the odd function. Boris has never followed up his pronouncements with an actual invitation – and indeed rarely ‘goes for a drink’ with anyone, let alone a political opponent. However, he continues to praise Ken privately – while occasionally jabbing at him in print – but Ken can be withering in private about his successor’s integrity.

Meanwhile, David Cameron hailed Boris’s victory and he in turn signalled his intention to stand down as MP for Henley, ‘as soon as possible.’ He told waiting journalists that he was still the same man as the bumbling habitué of
HIGNFY
, even though he was now the first Conservative to hold executive power in Britain for 11 years and had the biggest personal political mandate of anyone in this country, not to mention the third biggest in Europe after the Presidents of Russia and France. Indeed, he could not resist the temptation for a bit of Old Boris parody with a play on Tony Blair’s famous New Labour declaration: ‘I was elected as new Boris and I will govern as new Boris.’ Nevertheless, even he seemed a little confused by his newfound Manichean identity. ‘This is the existential question that everyone keeps posing and it is driving me slightly nuts,’ he said later, while scratching his head. ‘There is no discontinuity between old Boris and new Boris.’