JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (58 page)

‘The background to my role was that Boris needed someone who would be his right-hand man in charge of running things,’ recalls Parker. ‘But when I arrived at City Hall, I found that although I was the first deputy mayor, I was not the head deputy mayor. It was clear that the other deputies did not see themselves as reporting through me. It was also apparent that Boris, and not myself, should really be chairing Transport for London as this was by far his biggest budget and he was the elected people’s representative. I concluded that if Boris needed anyone, it was a chief of staff political fixer, which he duly got in Simon Milton.’ Parker says he enjoyed working with Boris, but he departed hastily back to business after he left City Hall.

The problem now was how to explain to the outside world that within little more than 100 days of the election, he had lost his second deputy mayor and his third key adviser. The answer lay not in apology but in defiance. Boris would now present himself as a ruthless operator in defence of his power base and his beliefs. Parker’s departure also marked the exit of Boris the Bumbler and the arrival of Mayor Boris.

Boris was due to leave almost immediately for Beijing and the closing ceremony of the Olympics, where he was to wave the Olympic flag to signal the games were coming to London next. He had originally questioned the need to go – suggesting a deputy mayor
represent him. Post-Parker, he now realised that it was a job that the mayor had to do himself and in any case, there was a certain cachet in strutting around a stage in front of an estimated 1.6 billion viewers.

Lord (Sebastian) Coe, who had led the London bid, had said: ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t drop it,’ but bumbling Boris was already moving on. On the very day that Parker had resigned, Boris chose to silence his detractors with what looked like a direct swipe at David Cameron and the start of an alternative Tory philosophy. He used his
Telegraph
column to argue that British sporting triumphs in Beijing had shown that it was ‘piffle’ to suggest, as the Tory leader had just done, that Britain was a ‘broken society in which the courage and morals of young people have been sapped by welfarism and political correctness.’

How many politicians, one commentator asked, call their leader’s oft-repeated views ‘piffle’ in public? Far from the Parker saga sapping Boris’s strength, the grit that the Mayor had now shown under pressure portrayed him as an alternative Tory chieftain who would not be dominated by anybody or play by their rules. It immediately gave rise to new suggestions that he might well one day challenge for the Leadership himself – suggestions he did little or nothing to quell. As if to demonstrate how long a week is in politics, Boris had travelled in days from the shambolic nadir just before Parker’s departure to serious speculation that City Hall was the natural springboard to Downing Street.

His new focus also saw the return of an old opportunism. He let it be known that in keeping with his drive to cut waste, his team was switching to a cheaper hotel than the one originally booked by Ken when he was mayor for their trip to Beijing and would also be flying economy. The effect was spoilt, however, by the revelation that his aides had unsuccessfully tried to get Boris an upgrade. And there was also another side to Boris that had still to be reformed: his failure to button up his jacket while waving the flag in Beijing caused a mini diplomatic incident – offending his Chinese hosts and many other older viewers, who thought him scruffy and disrespectful. Crucially, though, back home the row was swiftly filed under the ‘Boris will be Boris’ category and was soon forgotten. After all Boris was now
basking in the reflected glories of being officially in charge of the preparations for the next Olympic Games in 2012.

Boris had also moved quickly from wanting to keep Henley to wanting to be shot of it as soon as possible. Central Office, though, was keen closely to control the by-election and pushed the date back to allow time for meticulous planning. The Leadership wanted to block any chance whatsoever of another egocentric MP springing up from this idyllic corner of Oxfordshire with big ambitions for the Leadership and/or explosive media headlines. Cameron particularly did not want a dynastic takeover. Stanley’s vigorous campaign to inherit Henley from Boris – launched within hours of the mayoral victory – was therefore quietly but ruthlessly quashed. Unusually, Central Office produced a shortlist of three local councillors – all ‘sound’ names not known nationally or frankly, ever likely to be. No other candidate was to be considered – and certainly not one called Johnson. To drive home the message, just three weeks after Boris became mayor, Cameron himself travelled out to Henley to oversee the process. ‘The whole episode made Cameron look frightened of Boris,’ one local Tory complained. When the by-election was held on 26 June, the Conservatives won more than comfortably on a 10,000 majority.

Downriver at City Hall, Boris was dismantling some of Ken’s old regime. Out was the oil-for-advice deal with Venezuela – to be replaced by the rather more nebulous ‘partnership and exchange’ programme with New York. The
Londoner
newspaper was abolished, as promised – and new trees planted with some of the money saved. He also fulfilled his pledge to axe six-monthly black-cab inspections: it had proved, as expected, a keen recruiter of the taxi driver vote (although nearly three years later, they would be reinstated). However, Boris’s pledge to abolish the Kenbassies was soon kicked into the long grass via the time-honoured means of a ‘review’ – in fact, all but one have been retained. Indeed, whatever the rhetoric, Boris’s whole approach was largely ‘leave well alone.’

‘Boris certainly did not destroy the architecture that Ken had built,’ says one City Hall insider. ‘He trimmed at the edges, but he largely
ignored the Tory warnings that the place was inhabited by a bunch of Marxists. If they were good, like Hendy at Transport, he mostly kept people on. And once the initial departures were over, the atmosphere really improved.’ ‘City Hall has become a nicer place to work under Boris, with less politicking than there was under Ken,’ says another. ‘There is less unpleasantness.’ Even officials previously seen as natural Ken supporters gush about how ‘nice’ Boris is to work for. ‘Personally, he is extremely good to me,’ notes one. ‘And Boris is brighter than Ken. With the odd permissible exception on technical matters, you never need to explain things to Boris more than once. He immediately gets things.’ Indeed, one of few personal complaints is that the Mayor does not shower after a typically thigh-pumping cycle into work – and the windows at City Hall are not designed to open. ‘We wish the Mayor would use deodorant,’ says one colleague.

A more serious charge that crops up repeatedly is that with greater leeway given to staff by Boris – notorious for his dislike of rigid structure – comes a lack of direction. ‘Under Ken there was a weekly meeting of the mayoral management board, where everything was thrashed out for the week ahead,’ says one senior official. ‘Boris abolished that meeting and others and there is a consequent lack of coherence – people don’t always know what they should be doing. I would go in to see Ken and know exactly what his view would be about something. With Boris, it’s impossible to predict and he likes to keep everything close to his chest.’ ‘I imagine it’s rather like the
Spectator
,’ notes another old hand. ‘Boris is surrounded by people who are seeking to advance their own careers rather than his vision but he doesn’t seem to mind and we’re not clear what his vision is anyway. After a load of shouting they get down to things, but no one knows what.’

In Boris’s City Hall, there are not many senior women but the gay community is well represented in the upper ranks. ‘Our chief of staff is gay, our director of marketing is gay, four out of the ten top people are gay,’ notes Guto Harri. ‘We are the most gay administration in British history.’ Steve Pope of the
Voice
had led the campaign to keep Boris out because of the fears of black voters, including City Hall staff, but even he has become a Boris convert. ‘He is the best thing that
could have happened,’ says Pope, speaking 18 months into the new mayoralty. ‘You have a reputation, but once you arrive it’s all down to how you treat people.’ He confirms Boris’s reputation as a ‘listener’ to Ken’s ‘dictator’ tendencies and concludes: ‘Boris has woven a magic spell over us – he’s not harboured any grudges. His press team have been noticeably more welcoming to a black newspaper like ours than Ken’s ever were.’

It’s an astonishing change of view from Pope and his newspaper – and all the more so given that in July 2008, Boris brought in ‘to help promote the Mayor’s diversity policies’ a man who once wrote that third-world immigrants brought ‘too many germs into the country.’
¹
Anthony Browne, whom Boris hired as policy director on a salary of £124,000 a year, was previously director of the Cameroon think-tank Policy Exchange (having replaced Boles). His most infamous political pamphlet – ‘Do We Need Mass Immigration?’ – was a 150-page tract against large-scale immigration on the grounds that British people did not want to be ‘culturally enriched’ by immigrants, most immigrants ‘do not pay their way’, Britain is already overcrowded, immigrants lower wages for indigenous workers, cause social fragmentation and also housing shortages.

When the book was spotted in the BNP online gift shop, Browne was forced to apologise for his comments – which he had also rehearsed in the
Spectator
under Boris’s editorship – saying they were not a fair reflection of his real views. This time, though, Boris knew better than to sack him at the first hint of ‘incoming’ as his detractors accused him of doing with James McGrath. ‘I do very much regret any offence caused,’ announced Browne. ‘It really never was my intention to cause offence, but to provoke debate. I want to make clear that I am emphatically not anti-immigration.’ Browne’s supporters, some of them eminent Lefties, defended him as anxious to ask difficult questions rather than peddle any racist agenda. Indeed, by now the two men were spearheading a debate on an amnesty for an estimated 400,000 long-standing illegal immigrants residing in London somewhat undercutting the anti-immigrant charge. Nevertheless, this was another high-risk appointment that did not last the full mayoral term, although Browne is working on his re-election campaign.

Despite his record in print and the hostile attention this has attracted, Boris has been phenomenally successful in batting away questions over race. It is testament to his extraordinary power to charm different people with different views and convince them simultaneously of his sincerity. He does this by performing a political and personal seduction on practically every interest group, even if they might seem to hold opposing positions. What’s more, he knows the importance of gestures – whether it’s riding a bike to work (great with the Greens) or ensuring that ethnic minority newspapers are treated the same as the mainstream press. So, what’s to stop Boris donning a pink Stetson as he did to attend a Gay Pride rally, for instance, or waving the flag of St George to celebrate the ancient heritage of England? It is more astonishing that other politicians seem to think that you have to choose one over the other, when Boris’s highly effective policy on cake, as we already know, is both having and eating it.

Boris found no problems with the ‘soft power’ issues of wooing different interest groups but after nearly six months’ baptism of fire at the beginning of his mayorship, he was still struggling to exert any ‘hard power.’ Parker might be gone but what he really needed to establish himself as a serious player was a glorious victory over someone – or something – more significant. As usual, luck provided him with the perfect opportunity.

On Wednesday, 1 October 2008, Sir Ian Blair hurried into Boris’s office overlooking Tower Bridge. He was a few minutes’ late for a meeting with the Mayor, scheduled for noon. As Metropolitan Police Commissioner for four years, Blair had long served as a whipping boy for the Tory right who saw him as a New Labour stooge but as he took his seat to Boris’s left, he was confident that he had built a good working relationship with a Conservative mayor whom he considered witty and likeable. ‘Ian thought Boris was leaving all the political vitriol behind him,’ observes a source close to Blair.

Following the exit of Tim Parker in August, however, Boris had decided to exert more control over his fiefdom by becoming chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, the body designated to hold the Commissioner to account. It was in this new capacity that after a few minutes, according to Blair’s account, Boris declared: ‘There’s no easy way to say this, Ian …’ The Mayor then pronounced that a change of leadership at the Met was vital; that Blair could not continue in the post with ‘distractions’ such as inquiries into his alleged involvement in awarding Met contracts to his own friends and the continuing fallout from the police shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

Boris conceded that he did not have the power to fire him but looking across at his beefy deputy mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, as if for reassurance, said he would prompt a vote of no confidence at the next full Police Authority meeting. Describing Boris’s manner
as ‘pleasant but determined,’ Blair recalls: ‘that was the moment when the first intimation came to me that I might have to go.’
¹
At this now notorious meeting, however, he merely agreed to consider his position.

The next morning there were exquisitely timed allegations in the
Daily Mail
that Blair had paid a friend’s PR company £15,000 of Met money to sharpen up his image under a ‘vanity contract.’ The Commissioner denied any impropriety, even that the contract had anything to do with boosting his image, but still felt cornered and subsequently resigned his post.

Blair’s allies claim that persistent charges of impropriety against him in the media – which were later to be disproved – had come from rivals within Scotland Yard, a notorious cauldron of jealousy and political intrigue. A few of the most senior officers are known to have regularly gathered at The Tapster, a wine bar in Caxton Street across the road from Scotland Yard, where they would complain about Blair, sometimes in the company of a select group of journalists. At least three of the coppers involved were known to have had close links to News International titles in particular. ‘There was an element of disloyalty involved but also ambition,’ recalls one very senior officer who felt uncomfortable about the plotting. ‘They were busy chopping Blair’s legs away.’ Met sources also claim a very senior City Hall official dined with at least one of the officers involved.