JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (61 page)

He was even dragging his feet on removing the western extension to the Congestion Charge – perhaps the most important of several election pledges made in haste that he was now repenting in leisure – no doubt largely because of the lost revenue, in this case amounting to £55 million a year (a shortfall he was effectively forced to make up through higher bus fares). Yet another pledge that quickly looked less appealing from his new vantage point in City Hall was to keep tube station ticket offices open – a folly he quickly tried to abandon after
realising the phenomenal success of the Oyster card meant some offices were selling as few as 16 tickets a day.

If concrete achievements were thin, as if to compensate announcements out of City Hall came thick and fast, ranging from a wheeze to build another airport on an island in the Thames estuary, or opening up company lavatories for public use, to planting potatoes on roofs. In truth, his greatest achievement this far seemed to be the simple avoidance of disaster. After a year in office Boris’ hopes for London were still not clear – whereas Ken, for all his faults, had always been certain.

The
Guardian
now adopted a new line of attack, Describing his style as government by columnist, the paper decreed: ‘You can tell there are no think-tanks or academics behind any of this. This is just Boris in the bath.’
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Across the Atlantic, even
Newsweek
magazine was commenting that ‘the sole connective tissue providing coherence to Johnson’s ideas sometimes seem to be that they happen to be Johnson’s ideas.’
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Meanwhile, at home one respected City Hall blogger branded him ‘Boris the Boring’.
¹⁸
And it was not only his detractors asking whether Boris was an ambitious mayor without a discernible ambition. Even his closest aides conceded the Mayor himself was concerned about what he personally dubbed the ‘vision problem.’ ‘We’re all working on it,’ said one. ‘We know it’s the weakness.’

No big deal – for now at least. Boris the brand was still in hot demand and could afford to ignore the nit-picking commentariat.
Time
magazine had just hailed him one of the hundred most influential people in the world (party boss Cameron did not feature). This in turn led him to once again play intriguing mind games as to his hopes for the future. He intimated to the
Evening Standard
, for instance, that he might stay only one term as mayor and would afterwards be ready to serve as prime minister. But then he told a political website that the mayorship was, by contrast, ‘almost certainly’ his ‘last big job in politics.’ And while he was liberal Boris as London mayor, he used his
Telegraph
column to flaunt a more traditional Boris to right-wing Tories across the country, uneasy about Cameroonian soft-soap Conservatism, by repeating his calls for the abolition of the 50p tax rate on the rich and the return of the
grammar schools. Later, on the thirtieth anniversary of her becoming prime minister, he whipped his readers up still further with an ecstatic appraisal of Margaret Thatcher (something Cameron would have never have dared do). Indeed, far from continuing to dread Boris messing up his mayorship, Cameron might have been forgiven at this point for thinking it would have been better if he had.

In May 2009 a news story broke that truly traumatised British politics. Records of expenses claims passed to the
Daily Telegraph
by a disgruntled Parliamentary employee were published to reveal an orgy of trough snuffling by MPs and members of the House of Lords. Every day over many weeks, the newspaper exposed claims for phantom mortgages, moat cleaning, duck houses, £8,000 television sets, horse manure, bath plugs, wisteria pruning and even porn videos, as well as the names of politicians engaging in so-called ‘flipping’ – the practice of swapping properties designated primary or secondary residences to avoid capital gains tax. All parties, and all ranks of Parliamentarians were seen to be ‘at it’, with even the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown ordered to repay £12,400 claimed for cleaning and gardening bills. The revelations led to a rash of resignations, ‘retirements’, sackings and even criminal prosecutions, but most of all they provoked public disgust at politicians’ evident sense of entitlement to taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

No longer an MP, of course, Boris reacted to the exposé with an air of saintly bafflement. Explaining that his own Parliamentary expenses had been only for above-board mortgage payments and utility bills for his old Henley constituency home and insisting he had nothing to fear from public scrutiny as any concerns would ‘probably have come out by now’, he said that he was ‘almost embarrassed’ not to have claimed more. He also made great play of travelling to engagements by bicycle because ‘unless you’re completely insane or devious or a Liberal Democrat then there is no way you can fiddle your bike expenses.’
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It is instructive how frequently Boris’s bike takes centre-stage whenever questions of integrity or likeability are at stake. His spokesman also put it around that in contrast to his former
colleagues Boris led a life of carbolic-clean abstinence and economy. ‘He got all that big spending, big dinner stuff out of his system at the Bullingdon,’ he said. ‘Boris barely claims expenses at all.’ While privately bombarding the
Telegraph
editor Will Lewis (who was also his employer) with enquiries as to what the newspaper intended to run about him, in public Boris could adopt the stance of a morally superior spectator.

On 2 June, the media finally switched its attention to another political drama after five Labour Cabinet ministers resigned from Gordon Brown’s government within a week, leaving the Prime Minister’s authority in tatters. As the chatterati entered a frenzied discussion over whether Brown could possibly survive, Boris’s Parliamentary expenses were finally published on a corner of page nine of the
Telegraph
. And indeed they showed that Boris had, as he said, claimed for mortgage payments on his constituency home of £85,299 over the four years of his time as MP – the last two at the maximum rate. But he had also claimed £16.50 for a Remembrance Sunday wreath – a detail that risked casting the Mayor in a damningly ungenerous light. Boris quickly explained that the wreath had been ‘mistakenly added’ to his claim and he had ‘happily’ paid for it out of his own pocket when asked to do so.
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Just two days later, however, public unrest over politicians’ expenses threatened to cross the Thames when it emerged that one of Boris’s deputy mayors, Ian Clement, had been using his City Hall credit card for personal use, including the purchase of an upmarket car stereo system. It was subsequently announced that Boris had confiscated the card and ‘bollocked’ Clement, who had repaid the money. ‘Transparency and taxpayer value are at the heart of my administration,’ Boris crowed. But more details began to seep out, including the fact that there had been concerns about Clement’s spending since the previous year and that Boris had reprimanded him as early as August 2008 for using the card to upgrade his flight to the Beijing Olympics. Assembly members were told the Mayor had assumed that Clement had subsequently given up his card, but as recently as April 2009 Boris had still been signing off Clement’s expenses personally, including claims for a list of disallowed items.

Although further damaging evidence came to light throughout June 2009 Boris maintained, despite his ‘deep sense of fury’, that Clement’s mistakes had merely been ‘crass’ rather than dishonest. Then the
Evening Standard
and other newspapers began to publish stories about how Clement had used the card to entertain his young mistress when claiming to be dining with council leaders. After facing accusations of turning a blind eye to his deputy’s wrongdoing, Boris finally summoned Clement and he was forced to resign.

In just over a year, Boris had now lost his third deputy mayor – and in circumstances suggesting he was not wholly in control of his kingdom or its coffers. Two days later, Scotland Yard launched an investigation and in the October, Clement pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence, community service and a curfew. In total, it transpired he had run up a credit card bill of £7,000 over ten months without any apparent checks and in breach of Inland Revenue rules and the GLA’s own regulations.

Boris had once been fond of comparing trying to skewer ‘Teflon’ Tony Blair to ‘nailing jelly to a wall.’ Arguably, his own non-stick coating at this point was even more effective. Beyond the odd grumble on the blogosphere, the Clement episode barely registered with the public or dented the Mayor’s popularity. Boris’s escape from public censure is all the more extraordinary when compared to Ken’s patent – and justified – electoral damage as a result of revelations on Lee Jasper’s conduct during the 2008 campaign. Shortly after Clement left City Hall in disgrace, an Inquiry by the District Auditor cleared Jasper of claims that he had fraudulently given public funds to friends and associates (although there had been ‘sloppy’ monitoring). And although four arrests were linked to the affair, unlike with Clement no police charges have been brought, let alone convictions.

There was still very little fuss even when Boris was found to have made some questionable withdrawals from the public purse of his own. The cycling mayor had spent £4,698 on taxis during his first year in office, far more than previously acknowledged. One journey alone cost taxpayers £237. In total there were 13 receipts for fares over £100 and yet all of them were for journeys of a few miles around London.
Some claims amounted to as much as £33 per mile, such as a £99.50 return taxi from City Hall to Elephant and Castle, less than 1.5 miles away. A large number of the fares were either to or from his home in Furlong Road, Islington, in apparent contravention of City Hall rules stating journeys to or from home should not generally be claimed. As a blogosphere wag – a rare dissenting voice – put it: ‘Where exactly does Boris cycle to? Is it just to and from photo shoots?’

Certainly there were soon to be plenty of cycling photo opportunities. On 9 June, the RMT transport union called a 48-hour tube driver’s strike over job cuts, pay and working conditions. Boris made great play of defiantly getting round town on his bike – no taxis now – with the cameras in tow. The industrial action pitched two wily, driven and strategic men against each other, even if they did not come directly face-to-face. (Old Etonian roué Boris refused to meet Bob Crow, the implacable class warrior at the head of one of Britain’s most militant unions.) Few, though, were putting money on the blond to win such a contest. And yet somehow Boris’s bike symbolised – and perhaps inspired – the determination of almost all Londoners to circumvent the strike themselves by walk ing, scootering, taking the bus or – like the Mayor – cycling. Drivers from other unions continued to work and there were claims some RMT members also turned up for duty, so that two lines worked normally and all ran at least some services. Crow’s belligerence garnered little public support. In contrast Boris was seen to be a rallying figure for everyday Londoners, who felt they were being put to a great deal of inconvenience by strikers who, on £40,000 for a 35-hour week, were paid £10,000 a year more than nurses. Paradoxically it was to be the toff who emerged as a man of the people and the union leader supposedly against them, with the saga of the taxi fares soon forgotten.

It was perhaps surprising that it was at this early high point that a flash of discontent broke out about the ‘do-little’ mayor. Stephan Shakespeare, founder of the YouGov pollsters (the ones who had so accurately predicted Boris’s triumph) wrote of his disappointment on
ConservativeHome
, the website he also co-owned. Boris, he said,
provided ‘welcome amusement’ and had been a ‘jolly decent mayor.’ But he added that he had, however, delivered ‘no notable achievement, no sense that anything important will change, no grip. Real problems are not solved – in fact, there’s not even a discernible attempt to solve them.’
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Of course there were voices who came to Boris’s defence, such as Sir Simon Milton, now his official chief of staff. But there was still a feeling that despite his popularity, he had yet to prove himself as mayor. A farcical incident in August involving a shed and a set of irate neighbours did not exactly advance Boris’s campaign to be taken seriously. A year after becoming mayor, Boris and his family moved from Furlong Road to Colebrooke Row, a more solidly upmarket Islington street beloved of the highest ranks of the media and legal professions. The latest Johnson residence, an imposing Georgian townhouse purchased for £2.3 million, has an air of orderly elegance only families with the means to keep staff can maintain. ‘It’s a flash, very expensive and nice house,’ notes one regular visitor, who was impressed by the ‘nice bits of furniture’, the back garden overlooking the Regent’s Canal and invaluable off-street parking for two cars at the side. Even for the Johnsons, this was a major investment and Boris frequently asks colleagues whether he made a sound financial decision. (In further evidence of her formidable toughness, Marina reportedly knocked £600,000 off the original asking price of £2.9 million, which suggests they probably did.)

Boris managed to alienate his smart new neighbours just four months after moving in, however, by putting up a ‘monstrosity’ on the back balcony. The Mayor of London had apparently flouted his own planning rules by failing to apply for permission for what looked suspiciously like a B&Q shed. Neighbours, who accused the Mayor of acting without ‘any thought’ for them, informed the local council who instructed him to remove it immediately. That night, dressed in floral swimming trunks, he was seen with several members of staff taking it apart. It was an embarrassing incident – and a bizarre one, too. Either the Mayor, who is responsible for setting London’s planning policies, was ignorant of his own planning rules or he simply chose to ignore them. He dealt with the episode with characteristic
evasion, urging one radio interviewer not to ‘intrude in the private grief’ of a fellow man’s ‘ex-shed.’