JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (62 page)

When public life resumed after the summer break, it was another scion of the Johnson clan who was attracting comment. Rachel had been appointed editor of the
Lady
, a venerable women’s magazine that had lost its way. Her imperious sexy manner – which has cast a spell over so many men over the years – certainly entranced Ben Budworth, the son of the magazine’s owner, who appointed her in favour of twenty rival candidates in a ‘beauty contest.’ There followed a flurry of media interest, and even a fly-on-the-wall documentary,
The Lady and the Revamp
, that chronicled Rachel’s ball-breaking blonde ambition and talent for humiliating staff.

A slew of racy and graphic articles – including one by Stanley on his gall bladder operation (yes, up he crops again) and another by Charles Glass on how to bed the nanny – kept the enchanted Ben happy but not his feisty septuagenarian mother. Mrs Budworth publicly called for Rachel to be sacked, accusing her of being vain, mad, obsessed with penises and ‘a [social] climber, like the other Johnsons.’ Above all, said Mrs Budworth, Rachel was using the magazine to promote herself. ‘It’s all about her. I suppose it’s the same with Boris and we should have spotted that. But nobody told us.’
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‘That’s a fair cop,’ Rachel responded with engaging candour, ‘[but] who was talking about the
Lady
before?’

While his sister was busy losing friends and alienating people, Boris embarked on a series of profile-boosting stunts aimed at quite the opposite. First, he jetted off on a trip to New York ostensibly to promote London and meet up again with the New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. He was particularly smitten with being driven round protected by Bloomberg’s security detail – which he breathlessly described as a ‘very detailed detail’ involving 30 terrifyingly enormous cops.
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After he criticised the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, in the US media, describing the decision as ‘mysterious’ and ‘crazy,’ he was gratified when Americans lined up to shake his hand in Times Square. Whether he achieved much during that four-day trip beyond advancing his own personal
fame – and persuading Bloomberg to grow rhubarb on his roof – is debatable but Boris’s absence nicely set up yet another media triumph on his return. The
Standard
was running a series about how Transport for London had dropped the river from Tube maps to simplify them. Sensing an easy populist hit, Boris quickly let it be known that he had ‘hit the roof ‘ at such stupidity and ordered Transport for London to reinstate the Thames forthwith.

Next came a cameo in the BBC soap
EastEnders
, in which he plays himself in the unlikely plotline of an Old Etonian mayor of London wandering into an East End pub and softening the supposed battleaxe landlady (played by Barbara Windsor) into a state of adulation with the words, ‘Please, call me Boris.’ Depending on taste he beams like a simpleton or an endearing little boy lost – the artful hopelessness of his acting, it was said, befitting a man whose entire life is an act. Whatever the reviews, the slot rammed home the message of man of the people – or rather toff gets down with the lower orders and likes it!

Yet despite these heroic efforts, it was still David Cameron, who as Leader of the Opposition garnered the headlines that mattered. It was Cameron who dominated the media as the Conservatives prepared for the 2010 General Election with a 15 to 17 point lead in the polls, which put him on track to become the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool. Not to be outdone, Boris fought back at the Tory Party Conference in Manchester later that month, whipping the party faithful into a frenzy of excitement with incendiary comments on Europe and the Lisbon Treaty on a new EU constitution. Throwing buckets of salt into old Tory wounds, Boris said that British voters deserved a referendum on the Treaty – even if it was already ratified (as seemed almost certain) by the time the Conservatives came into government. The call was a direct contradiction of Cameron’s refusal to promise a post-ratification vote and threatened to reignite old divisions over Europe that had helped lose the Tories three previous General Elections. Team Cameron scrambled to limit the damage but Boris was once again dominating a conference meticulously and expensively planned to project the leadership and their policies rather than his. He protested innocence, claiming he had never intended to
upstage Cameron or his shadow foreign secretary William Hague, but that – as he must have been able to predict – was exactly what he had done.

Publicly senior Tories were claiming that Boris had merely ‘got carried away’ or ‘wired up’ by the sense of occasion but privately, Team Cameron smouldered with rage. Rumours abounded of an abusive text having been sent to the Mayor from one particularly incandescent Cameroon. Later Nick Boles identified himself as the author of this threatening mafia-style message to the man he had helped into City Hall stating: ‘
La vendetta è un piatto che va mangiato freddo
’ (revenge is a dish best eaten cold). Cameron’s means of exacting revenge on his unbiddable mayor were, however, severely limited. As usual, Boris charmed the conference into rhapsodic ecstasy – playing the
EastEnders
’ theme tune as he took to the stage and opening by saying how pleased he was to be in Manchester, ‘one of the few great British cities I have yet to insult.’ Cameron could only look on with furrowed brow while Boris confirmed his status as party darling.

Boris’s seduction of the conference crowd yielded another dividend – it allowed him to peddle his most unpopular view with comparative impunity. There remains one area where he is startlingly at odds with many (even most) voters, a subject on which he seems uniquely prepared to risk surrendering all that populist bonhomie he has created over the years. This speech was just one of many occasions since 2008 when he saved his most powerful rhetoric to attack the 50p tax rate for higher earners and the deluded ‘banker bashers’ who support it as payback time for plunging the economy into chaos. On that occasion, he warned the audience not to forget how much Britain relies on what he described as the ‘leper colony’ in the City of London.

On other occasions, Boris has sought to sugar the pill with crowd-pleasing references to bankers variously as ‘scum’ and ‘tossers’; he has also touched on the ‘deep public rage’ at their actions that have left the majority so much poorer, but their own bonuses seemingly generous as ever. But he has warned repeatedly that manufacturing cannot be boosted or the economy re-balanced by ‘machine-gunning’ financiers, predicting an unwelcoming tax regime would drive thousands of
them out of the City and into the eager hands of rival financial centres such as Zurich or Hong Kong.

It’s a subject on which he has commented probably more than any other and City Hall sources confirm that he spends much of his time schmoozing bankers in person or on the phone. Of course, the City is key to London’s and Britain’s economy – providing some 350,000 jobs and billions of tax revenues. But victims of knife crime or police brutality, commuters trapped in tunnels by tube breakdowns, the homeless, the vast numbers who have lost their jobs, prospects or pension rights in the downturn have not earned such energetic and persistent support from Boris as these ‘masters of the universe.’ He has also directed a lot of his comments on the folly of the 50p tax rate, personally and publicly to George Osborne. By implication, he has criticised both Osborne and Cameron for failing to be sufficiently accommodating to bankers – though surely recognising the political impossibility of granting them favours while the poor and middle-earners find themselves squeezed by both higher taxes and the higher cost of living. Since his first months in office, Boris’s attitude towards the City and the super-rich has been at odds with his ‘mayor of the people’ persona. As Simon Jenkins of the
Standard
put it: ‘His defence of bankers’ greed is Bullingdon morality, pure and simple.’
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So what lies behind this persistent and puzzling trend of banker-backing? Well, only a cynic (or Ken Livingstone) would look at who backed Boris’s well-funded 2008 campaign. But those who examined the Electoral Commission records would find an impressive list of hedge funders (such as Hugh Sloane, Stanley Fink and John Tilney), financiers (Simon Keswick), private equity experts (Edmund Lazarus), investment boutiques (ECM), financial services houses (Dawnay Day), insurers (Patrick Snowball), and multi-millionaire businessmen (Frank Brake and Lord Irvine Laidlaw). According to Livingstone: ‘Looking at who our respective backers are gives the clearest possible indication of where we stand. Eighty per cent of my backing comes from trade unions and almost as much of Boris’s stems from the financial sector. He will defend them, as unions will expect to be broadly defended by me. We shouldn’t be shocked by this.’

The 2009 conference speech was significant for another reason, not
least because he had pulled off a similar stunt back at Cameron’s first conference as Leader in 2006 with his attack on Jamie Oliver. It bore the hallmarks of a systematic campaign to undermine Cameron. But if it is – and Boris would be the first to deny any such objective – it is not one that he formulates with his team. ‘No one at City Hall knew that Boris was about to do that,’ says a senior insider, who recalls astonishment in the mayoral office. ‘Or what he meant to achieve by it. He’s very difficult to read. When you see him every day, he’s open about some relatively unimportant things, but on the big stuff he’s completely closed.’

Back in London, trouble was brewing. During his electoral campaign, Boris had promised to root cronyism out of City Hall but now he himself was accused of giving preferential treatment to Veronica Wadley, who as editor of the
Standard
had championed his candidacy and attacked Ken for indulging his friends. She had since been removed from the paper by its new owners and so Boris put her up for the job of chairing London’s Arts Council.

After advice that Wadley had not been the best-qualified candidate, however, the Labour Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw refused to rubber stamp her appointment. The move led to a bitter row on both sides about political partisanship. Boris tried various ways to circumvent Bradshaw’s ban, prompting a rash of pieces in the Left-leaning press in which his motives were questioned. ‘Boris feared that if he failed to get her the job, Veronica would go on the warpath saying, “But I created you!”’ explains a former colleague. ‘The sense of payback had become acute. He was a little scared of her and even thought she had a crush on him – cracking jokes about her being Mrs Robinson in
The Graduate
. He was panicking when she got turned down.’ It was no doubt a relief for Boris when this embarrassing episode was finally brought to an end in June 2010 when the incoming Conservative Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt at last appointed Wadley.

Niggles over his support for Wadley aside, the media continued to indulge the Mayor. Most journalists were interested in only two sorts of story: the Boris gaffe or the Boris row with Dave. Few, with
honourable exceptions, bothered to track his performance at City Hall on the important work of making tubes and buses run on time, easing congestion, cutting crime and improving housing. Privately, City Hall insiders reported a sense of almost total lack of scrutiny. ‘No one’s really watching if we cock things up,’ said one. ‘People like Paxman or Andrew Neil just ask him about the Bullingdon Club or what he thinks of Cameron. He knows they won’t press him on the real stuff such as spending cuts or U-turns.’

There is also no shadow mayor – and virtually no open press conferences (beyond the rare exception mentioned above). And just as Boris had earned a reputation for treating committees in the House of Commons with contempt so did he frequently trade insults rather than information with the 25 London Assembly members elected to hold him to account. Anyone attending Mayor’s Question Time at City Hall would not be wholly surprised to learn that Boris’s favourite film is
Dodgeball
, with its running motto of ‘dodge, dip, duck, dive and dodge’. Knowing that each member is limited to a six-minute slot in which to ask him questions, he filibusters, goes off on tangents, asks for the question to be repeated, answers a totally different question, constantly shouts over questions, and employs each and every tactic to avoid answering, to the continual annoyance of successive assembly chairmen. And when that is not enough, he does what they do in
Dodgeball
and throws the ball right back at his opponents in the form of personal insults such as accusing Opposition members of needing ‘care in the community’ or ‘suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome’ and patronising female members by addressing them as ‘my dear’. Indeed, so practiced is he at fancy footwork from his days at the Eton Debating Society that he barely breaks a sweat – although his eyes roam the room like a Great White Shark sizing up some goldfish, while he strokes his upper lip. Unsurprisingly these one-sided sessions lack the crackle and drama of the best of the Commons’ committees and are rarely covered by the media. Not all of the Assembly Members can claim to have first-class forensic brains and few, if any, have become household names. Moreover City Hall is an oddly deadening building, its lighting poor and the air quality heavy.

Many Boris observers in early 2010 started to speculate that the
Mayor was also looking heavy – not only physically but emotionally too. ‘I think he’s bored,’ offered one former Parliamentary assistant. ‘I can see the signs – he’s put on weight and looks tired.’ It did not help that attention was on events at Westminster, as preparations geared up for the General Election and the Conservative assault on Downing Street. In the first months of 2010, Boris struggled to find airspace. ‘His people were always coming to us with pitches for stories,’ recalls one senior BBC political journalist, ‘but we just weren’t taking anything that wasn’t national and about the election.’

After the election was finally called by Gordon Brown on 6 April, Boris forecast a ‘solid’ overall majority for Cameron of 40 seats – when the polls indicated such an outcome was virtually impossible. Was this just another of his outbursts of almost hysterical optimism or a bid to cast Cameron’s inevitable failure to win such a mandate into even greater contrast? Boris appeared with him on the campaign trail merely a handful of times and overshadowed him when he did (such as his irreverent larking about on a visit to Chelsea Pensioners at the Royal Hospital). On the one hand, there was a widespread feeling that campaign supremo George Osborne had woefully underplayed the Party’s prize electoral asset, but other Tories detected an unwillingness on the Mayor’s part to ‘waste’ any of his personal magic on his great rival’s account.