JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (64 page)

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In August 2010 Boris repeated his usual habit after stories about an affair of taking his family on a lavish holiday. This time they stayed for two weeks in Tanzania, enjoying a retreat at the Lazy Lagoon in the Zanzibar channel – at least until Boris was swept away by powerful currents on his morning dip and had to be rescued by staff in a boat! Together the Johnsons went diving and also spent time on safari (thrillingly, their Land Rover broke down next to a pride of lions and their headwaiter had bite marks on his forehead). And at Christmas, the Mayor and his family shipped off to India on yet another enviable vacation. Boris, who made a public point that he was paying his own expenses, attributed the trip to an ambition to promote London’s interests in one of the world’s most dynamic economies but those close to the couple recognised that the jaunt was the latest phase in Boris’s marital repair campaign – not least because it gave Marina the chance to revisit her beloved India. Just before Christmas, he had surrendered the lease on his flat and moved back into the marital home.

As usual, Boris had read the emotional runes cleverly. He perfectly judged the resonance a trip to India would have for his wife and deftly avoided criticism of such lavish expense. The Johnsons spent New Year’s Eve at Serai, a luxury camp of tented villas in the Thar desert, Rajasthan, that has sent all the glossy travel magazines into a frenzy.
Conde Nast Traveller
observed the 24 ‘tents’ around a pool (in a desert!) inspired by a traditional Indian step-well represented ‘a new level of luxury.’ ‘If you want to know the state of Boris’s marriage,’ says a source close to him, ‘just look at the holidays. When he thinks he’s on the road to redemption, he’ll pull out all the stops!’

True to form, no one else noticed Boris’s extravagance – suites for two cost up to £716 for bed and breakfast per night – because all eyes were on George Osborne. The ‘age of austerity’ Chancellor of the Exchequer had fallen foul of the press by reportedly splashing out £11,000 on a skiing trip to the fashionable resort of Klosters. And it must have been even more galling for David Cameron, who had to cancel his own long-planned Christmas holiday in Thailand – the first long-haul family holiday since the death of his disabled son Ivan – amid fears as to how this would play with the public. But Boris’s man
of the people credentials remained untarnished after yet another super-luxury vacation.

Marina’s dignified silence has helped Boris to sail through each new set of revelations virtually unscathed – both must know that if she turned against him in public or divorced him, his career might never recover. He has also been fortunate in his mistresses – none has yet denounced him. ‘He’s got that shameless charm and it obviously works in keeping them onside,’ says one male admirer. His lack of hypocrisy also helps to keep the commentariat onside – allegations of fathering a lovechild with an adviser would almost certainly have meant curtains for virtually any other politician in Britain with, ironically, the possible exception of his opponent Ken (in many ways, the two are uncannily alike). Any fears on his part that the news would damage him politically proved totally unfounded though. Dominic Lawson explains Boris’s success as the Great Survivor through the fact that ‘unlike a lot of Tories – or indeed politicians in general – he does not strike high moral attitudes about other people or himself.’

Of course, his luck may yet run out. As he nears his late 40s, it might sometimes seem as if his interest in other women remains undiminished. One female associate, whom he once targeted unsuccessfully, has seen him lunch over the years with a series of different women at Magdalen, a French restaurant near City Hall. With dark red walls and thick curtains, the intimate venue serves the hearty Gallic fare favoured by the Mayor. He likes to sit in a corner with his back to the rest of the room ‘facing these women in their twenties or thirties who are never stunning exactly but hearty, posh women with character and always full-breasted’. As she observes, ‘his kingdom is built on women but his relationships with them are not ones of respect.’

Back at City Hall, Boris’s kingdom was now part of a new blue geopolitical map. But he soon discovered how a Conservative government could be just as eager to clip his wings as a Labour one. In July, it was also the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in which 52 innocent people were killed by suicide bombers in the worst terrorist atrocity London has seen. Ken, who had been mayor at the time, was
judged to have risen to the occasion with inspiring messages of defiance and unity. Now London expected its current mayor to prove himself statesman as well as entertainer.

The Culture Department, headed by Boris’s potential future leadership rival Jeremy Hunt, had different ideas, however. Hunt had inherited formal responsibility for care of the victims’ families and he decreed that the majority of them did not want the commemoration to be a formal event or for Boris to attend. ‘City Hall was very anxious,’ recalls one close observer. ‘They were worried that the
Standard
would run a front page branding him the non-caring mayor when in fact his choice would have been to be there.’ The fact that the paper relegated the story to an inside page was surprising (and yet again fortunate) given some families attacked the Mayor for ‘forgetting’ the dead. Although Boris was able to send a wreath and a handwritten card to a memorial site in Hyde Park, he had for once been comprehensively outgunned by the Cameroons on his own patch.

Boris did not lose the advantage for long, however. The unplanned uncertainty over whether he would stand again as mayor was yet another occasion when events played into his hands. He was now in the throes of negotiations with George Osborne at the Treasury over his future budget. Osborne was intent on cutting £81 billion from the Government’s total expenditure to bring the country’s economy back from the ‘brink’ and like every other area, Boris’s spending in London faced cuts of up to 40 per cent – or so he would have us believe. Brilliantly timed comments played up the threat to Crossrail here and the vital upgrade work on the Tube there. There was even a story in the
Sunday Times
suggesting Boris had threatened to quit as mayor over cuts and seek a Parliamentary seat at the first possible by-election.
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Such talk was swiftly denied by City Hall, who stated tantalisingly that he would ‘
almost
certainly [my italics]’ stand again in 2012. ‘George [Osborne] knew exactly what Boris was up to,’ says a senior Downing Street source. ‘He’s too much of a politician himself not to understand.’ But it was clear that Boris had seized the propaganda initiative from the Cameroons in what he likes to call the ‘air war.’
The fact was that Boris was ostentatiously campaigning to save Crossrail – when Cameron had been telling him for the past 12 months that it was already safe. London’s transport budget was never one of the main targets for Osborne’s axe but that did not stop Boris from rejoining the battle in his
Telegraph
column in which he upped the pressure on Osborne by questioning the speed and depth of the cuts. ‘The consensus around drastic and immediate deficit reduction is in danger of breaking down,’ Boris wrote, before highlighting how the slower, softer approach advocated by Labour heavyweight Ed Balls was ‘finding an audience, even among those who might normally be counted as state-shrinking free-marketeers.’
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What we were witnessing was the posturing and brinkmanship of an intricate power-dance in which Boris ran rings around his opponents. This was an intoxicating taste of what he is capable of achieving when fired up with a purpose beyond mere self-advancement. He even did his homework for crux meetings with Cameron, Osborne and the Treasury Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander. ‘He knew the detail, he was purposeful, he knew exactly what he wanted and he pretty much got it,’ observes one official present. ‘People just weren’t expecting Boris to be such a master of his brief.’ ‘He played an absolute blinder for us in the talks,’ confirms Peter Hendy, London’s transport commissioner. ‘He held out when some people around him wanted to settle early and extracted an extra £700 million out of the Government as a result.’

It was a worthy victory, but one that in truth merely safeguarded projects that were Ken’s in origin. Boris still needed something eye-catching of his own to symbolise the fun and freedom of his mayorship. Ironically, once again he raided Ken’s idea-bank for a solution. A cycle hire scheme based on the Vélib bikes of Paris had been in the planning stages under the previous mayor – although City Hall staff have since been instructed ‘not to mention that it had come from Ken’. That said, Boris picked up the notion and gave it the pedal power that only he could provide. Even the alliterative ‘Boris Bikes’ nickname worked in his favour – somehow Ken’s Bikes fails to trip off the tongue so easily.

But the £140 million scheme was not the easy run it may have at
first appeared. One of the problems was the sheer speed at which the scheme travelled from drawing board to completion. No-one working on it was in any doubt of its political significance for Boris and the need for the scheme to be firmly established well ahead of the next mayoral election in 2012. ‘We had to do three years’ work on it in two,’ explains one official. Another City Hall insider, who recalls problems with payment arrangements, computer systems, docking the bikes, siting the docking stations and even physically delivering the bikes at all recalls: ‘We were seconds away from being a catastrophe. There were frenzied discussions right up to the wire; it was badly managed and rushed.’ And yet, when the first bikes finally hit the streets in July 2010, they were hailed as a delightful addition to a city in search of novelty. ‘The Boris bikes have had an amazing cultural effect on London,’ remarks journalist Sarah Sands, just one of many fans. ‘They are fun. Every time you see one, it’s a little bit of Boris.’ Indeed, a cartoon character resembling Boris was even designed to promote the bikes (although that was a step too far for commentators such as BBC
Newsnight
’s Michael Crick, who mischievously suggested that the cost of developing the drawing should count as electoral expenditure).

The bikes – originally a subtle blue-green in colour – were painted the strident blue of Barclays Bank, which had emerged as the key sponsor to the tune of up to £25 million over five years. However, although the bank’s branding and livery was plastered over the bikes, its contribution covered less than a fifth of their projected cost and despite Boris’s pledge that they would not be a drain on the public purse, the bikes are proving to be a hugely expensive ‘rich boy’s toy’ – one largely for the benefit of a central London elite. During their first three months they generated on average £3,370 a day (equivalent to £1.23 million a year) compared to the £114 million over five years they will cost
after
the Barclays sponsorship. The middle-aged, affluent white men found to be the greatest users of Boris bikes cleverly avoided paying for them (beyond the £1 access fee) by returning them within the 30-minute period granted for free.

Senior sources involved in the scheme, while pointing out its popular success, concede it has proved a financial swamp. Latest
internal estimates within Transport for London suggest the much-trumpeted Boris Bikes could cost taxpayers no less than £100 million over his first mayoral term. And critics have begun to question whether giving well-off professional types living in zone one (where the first tranche of bikes were based) a highly subsidised commute to work at such enormous cost to the rest of London is justifiable in an age of austerity. A poll commissioned by Boris,found that those living in poorer outer boroughs had barely registered their existence. Yet clever marketing of their undoubted qualities has ensured the eloquent squeals of the pinstriped Boris biker drown out the worries of the number-crunchers. ‘The bikes will be enough to get Boris re-elected,’ is a common Tory view.

With the bikes finally up and running and the money for Crossrail and the tube in the bag, Boris turned his attention to a much more serious matter: taunting Cameron’s government. Indeed, he was developing a considerable track record of attacks but arguably one that owed more to his libertarian instincts than any ideological consistency. His most serious and perhaps surprising assault on official Tory policy was on its proposed cap on housing benefit. The Government was introducing a highly controversial £400-a-week maximum spend on housing benefit applications, a limit that would have greatest impact on claimants living in central London. Some might be obliged to move as they would no longer be able to afford market rents in the centre of the city. With his eye firmly on re-election in 2012, Boris summed up the case against with these explosive words. ‘What we will not accept,’ he told BBC Radio London in October 2010, ‘is any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London.’ The result was a gratifying commotion – and a multitude of new fans from the Left, who suddenly saw him as a champion against the Conservative government’s cuts.

‘That’s the first thing Boris has said that would make me vote for him,’ was a typical response from Ken’s traditional support base. Indeed, Boris had cunningly invaded Livingstone’s natural territory leaving little room for his Labour opponent – who had previously identified the Coalition’s hard-line welfare policies as his greatest electoral weapon.

As might be expected, the response was not so warm from the Cameroons. The Prime Minister was reported to have decided at the last minute to avoid a full public confrontation with Boris, but it was made very clear that Number Ten (and its Liberal Democrat allies) were thoroughly displeased. Downing Street will always be restrained in its criticism of Boris: in reality, it prefers him to be in City Hall over Ken. In any case, once the point had been emphatically made – Boris is far too astute a wordsmith not to have chosen his words very carefully for maximum impact – he resorted to the time-honoured politician get-out clause of claiming he had been taken out of context. ‘I do not agree,’ he shuffled, ‘with the wild accusations from defenders of the current system that reform will lead to social cleansing.’ But no one took much notice of this fancy footwork – it was just more of what his
Telegraph
colleague Benedict Brogan calls Boris’s ‘drive-by’ style of politics in which he knocks on Number Ten’s door and then runs away.
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