‘You’ve got to run for this thing, Dave,’ Boris urged David Cameron immediately after Michael Howard’s announcement, ‘or else I will.’ The threat, Boris would recall, forced Cameron to declare his candidacy.1 That version of a conversation was Boris’s. Not surprisingly, Cameron has never acknowledged Boris’s influence on his careful plot to beat his competitors over the following seven months. Michael Howard had deliberately contrived a long campaign to facilitate Cameron’s success. Boris was never a contender. During that hiatus, he told an interviewer, ‘I am backing David Cameron’s campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest’.2 He expected to be rewarded after the new leader was named at the party conference. In the political vacuum, Boris felt vulnerable.
Soon after the election, Boris met Andrew Neil for breakfast at a Chelsea brasserie. Neil’s plans to close Doughty Street and expand commercialisation of the Spectator were complete. ‘I need a full-time editor,’ said Neil. Despite increasing the circulation to 70,000, Boris had too many masters for Neil’s liking. ‘I’ve had a good innings,’ said Boris cheerfully. ‘I’ll be gone by Christmas.’ Boris was out. Under his replacement, the magazine lost its glamour and the circulation fell.
In his developing habit of introspection, Boris’s interview on Desert Island Discs in October 2005 revealed both his aspirations and uncertainty. Between choosing the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Clash and his favourite, Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, he candidly told Sue Lawley, ‘My ambition silicon chip has been programmed to try and scrabble my way up this cursus honorum, this ladder of things, and so you do feel a kind of sense you’ve got to [go for it] … I think British society is designed like that.’3 Asked to choose between journalism and politics, he admitted ‘I have successfully ridden two horses for quite a long time, but I have to admit there have been moments when the distance between the two horses has grown terrifyingly wide … and I did momentarily come off.’ Taking risks, he admitted, included the possibility of being caught out. To avoid the consequences of exposure, he revealed, his calculated tactic was to make a joke or a deflective comment. ‘I think the profound truth of the matter is that it would be very, very hard to do it in any other way.’ He could not endure the ‘sheer mental strain’ to always have a ‘snappy, inspiring sound bite on my lips’ because he would ‘explode’. Therefore, it was ‘much easier for me to play what shots I have as freely as I can’. In the future, he said, his political ambition would take precedence over journalism.
His vulnerability increased after the thirty-nine-year-old Cameron convincingly won the leadership on 6 December against David Davis, the fifty-six-year-old Yorkshire MP. ‘I was with Boris on the day Cameron was elected leader,’ Stephen Glover, a critic of Boris, wrote in the Daily Mail five years later. ‘He was shocked to his foundations that the man whom he claimed to have outshone at Eton and Oxford could have leapt over him in this way. It was as though a cosmic injustice had occurred.’4 That exaggerated observation – Boris had expected Cameron to win – nevertheless accurately reflected the politicians’ rivalry.
Unlike Boris, Cameron was not an arriviste. Reflecting his family’s traditional City stockbroker background, Cameron enjoyed shooting with the aristocracy and regularly holidaying with the Notting Hill Gate set – a group of friends, many from Eton or Oxford, who met frequently and were godparents to each other’s children. To those members of the new establishment, blessing themselves as the modern Camelot, Boris, the loner from Islington, was an outsider more anxious about his income and his mistresses. To hype his social status, Boris occasionally flourished his de Pfeffel aristocratic background or blew hot about his association with Charles (now Earl) Spencer, even though their friendship was not close. His misfortune was his image as an untrustworthy and uncontrollable celebrity unwilling to obey anyone unless he deemed it to be in his own interest.
Planning to rebuild the party, Cameron decided not to rely on Boris. Whatever his charms, he was judged to be a man without convictions – or just one, recently for speeding. Intensely disappointed not to be appointed to the Shadow Cabinet, Boris accepted a minor post as Shadow higher education minister. The snub provoked a riposte to a fellow MP. ‘I dimly remember Cameron as a tiny chap known as Cameron minor,’ said Boris, contemptuous of that ‘second-rate’ man. Those like Cameron who got firsts at Oxford were ‘girly swots who wasted their time at university’, he scoffed, still privately incensed that he had failed to make that grade.5
Although passionate about education and equally ardent against worthless degrees like wind surfing, Boris found the tour of universities, soliciting inquiries about student loans and coursework, hardly fulfilling. Uninspired both by David Willetts, the Shadow education minister, and Cameron’s failure to develop a robust alternative to Labour, his indifference was ill-concealed. Asked in a BBC TV interview who he supported in a university strike – the staff or the local authorities – Boris waffled, desperate not to take sides. Invited to deliver a key speech to a distinguished audience at King’s College London, he arrived unprepared. In his familiar cavalier manner, he treated his audience as fodder without a proper speech. They interpreted his behaviour as a gross insult to their status and intelligence. Some even heckled. In the aftermath, Max Hastings wrote an excoriating criticism of Boris’s offence. In reply, Boris sent Hastings a letter with a threat of revenge, from which Hastings concluded, Boris is ‘not nice’.6
Veering between carelessness and recklessness in his political life, his eagerness to promote himself never faltered. Making money out of notoriety, he wrote Life in the Fast Lane, a book in praise of gas-guzzling cars. To summarise his life, he pumped up the pleasure of speeding in expensive sports cars, and chortled about the curse of parking tickets, tow-aways, and running out of fuel. Driving a Ferrari through London ‘like some racehorse trying to weave though a herd of cows’, he damned the obstacles thrown up by ‘our namby-pamby, mollycoddled air-bagged society’. Speaking on a mobile phone while driving, he spouted, was not seriously dangerous – no different from scratching your nose. To advertise a Lexus, the seventeen-stone writer sat on the roof. The dent cost £5,000 to repair.7 Shamelessly, the MP even admitted that he could imagine an affair with Cherie Blair and confessed to having taken cocaine: ‘I remember it vividly. And it achieved no pharmacological, psychotropic or any effect on me whatsoever.’ Previously, he had said that none went up his nose because he sneezed, and added, ‘In fact, I might have been doing icing sugar.’
The hyper-publicity reflected his frustration. In politics and journalism he had hit a brick wall. Emotionally, he was also dissatisfied. Life with Marina was difficult and he missed Petronella. Despite the exposé of that relationship, he had started another affair, with Anna Fazackerley, a twenty-nine-year-old political reporter on the Times Higher Education Supplement. His misfortune was that the News of the World was employing an expert to hack their mobile telephones. Their photographer was waiting when he walked out of Fazackerley’s Chelsea home. The affair was exposed while he was abroad filming a two-part TV series on ancient Rome. Marina was doorstepped and Fazackerley resigned from the supplement.8 Reflecting the state of his marriage, Marina did not order her husband to leave the house. For the sake of the children and convenience it was best to once again accept his apologies and get on with life. One year later, Boris would express his admiration of France’s management of adultery during the break-up of Nicolas Sarkozy’s marriage. One morning, Madame Sarkozy had stood next to the French president in Paris and by nightfall the following day she was with her lover in New York. ‘It’s vastly superior to our approach,’ gushed Boris.9
Four years after he had entered Parliament, and in the wake of yet another sexual scandal, there was neither balance nor consideration in Boris’s world. Nor any care about the electoral consequence – especially to women voters – of being a serial adulterer. Ghosts, past and present, cast a gloomy fate over his life. His career had again hit the buffers. This time, there was little reason to hope for resuscitation.
*
Unknown to Boris, during 2007, the Tories would choose their candidate for London’s mayor. The elections were due on 1 May 2008.
In mid-2006, Cameron had not thought about the contest. In the previous two elections, Ken Livingstone, the former Labour MP, had humiliated the Tory challenger Steve Norris, and Livingstone was expected to win the third election. Cameron was in no hurry to find a new candidate. Despite the prestige of the position, the mayor’s responsibilities and powers were limited to London’s transport network, the Metropolitan Police, social improvements and planning. Most of the £11 billion budget was spent on transport. Most else depended on pushing the thirty-two London boroughs to build houses, creating the right atmosphere for generating more public and private investment and encouraging charitable donations. Persuasion through publicity and grants had been Livingstone’s weapon to change London.
Veronica Wadley, the editor of the Evening Standard, then a newspaper of considerable influence in London, was frustrated by Cameron’s indifference to challenging Livingstone’s tired regime. In the 2006 London borough elections, the Tories had won 35 per cent of the vote against Labour’s 28 per cent, their best showing since 1982. Livingstone was vulnerable about fare increases and the congestion charge. Wadley had suggested that Michael Portillo should stand but, convinced a Tory would lose, he refused. To defeat Livingstone required an unusual personality able to cross party loyalties and attract dissatisfied Labour voters. After considering the limited options, Wadley fixed on the only Tory matching her requirements. She had worked with Boris at the Telegraph and understood his potential. At a summer party in Carlton Gardens, she cornered Boris and suggested that he run for mayor. Although surprised, he agreed to consider it.
Some months later, she told Cameron that the newspaper would support Boris and no one else. ‘He’s optimistic, he makes people feel good and he has a serious political agenda,’ she told him, overselling the only candidate with a chance to beat Livingstone. Cameron dismissed the idea. Boris, he believed, was ‘useless’ and could not be trusted to run anything. After approaching an eclectic group of wholly unsuitable personalities, he landed on Nick Boles, the ambitious director of Policy Exchange, a leftish Tory think tank. Boles’s selection was bizarre. As a paid-up member of the Notting Hill Gate set, the intelligent Wykehamist was known as an overemotional prima donna. Worse, he lacked any political profile at the time. Livingstone would have little difficulty crushing another Tory dud. Wadley told Cameron that only a character like Boris could defeat Livingstone. In the event, Boles was saved from the Standard’s veto after he fell victim to cancer and withdrew. While Cameron cast around for alternatives and proposed more duds, Boris protected himself by remaining ‘uncertain’. Their mutual distrust was not helped after Cameron’s office leaked that Boris could be the Tory candidate. That leak was followed by a formal announcement: ‘Boris is definitely not a candidate.’ In reply, Boris issued a statement that he was ‘honoured’ to be considered as the candidate ‘but I’m greatly enjoying what I’m doing’. Then, George Eustace, Cameron’s press spokesman, left a message on Boris’s answerphone asking him to call back. Before Eustace replaced the receiver, he inadvertently said to someone in his office, ‘That man is a complete cunt.’ After hearing the recorded curse, Boris called Eustace: ‘I suppose I am behaving like a bit of a cunt.’
Boris was agonising about his future. The Commons was a disappointment. He disliked the reprimands for ignoring the whip’s discipline and Cameron seemed intent on squashing him. Against that, the prospect of victory in London was slim. With Labour’s lead in the national polls increasing – 40 per cent against 33 per cent for the Tories – there could be a general election in 2008. If that occurred, he would face the risk of resigning from the Commons before the mayoral election. Then, if he lost, he would be neither the mayor nor an MP. Finally, even with the Standard’s support, Livingstone seemed impregnable. On the other hand, with the promise of the newspaper’s support, his higher profile would improve his status in the Commons. To settle the matter, Marina’s advice was decisive: he should run. With no alternative, Cameron reluctantly agreed to support Boris.
On 4 July 2007 – one week after Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister – the Evening Standard revealed that Boris, forty-three, had emerged ‘as a surprise Tory contender’. For a week he ‘agonised’ about the decision. On 16 July, in an article for the Standard, he officially declared himself a candidate. Publicly, Cameron’s office welcomed his candidature, but privately briefed against their accident-prone colleague. Westminster was surprised by his decision. Boris’s candidature, said Steve Norris, ‘smacks of a certain desperation’. Peter Sutherland, the Henley constituency chairman, was doubtful about Boris’s ability to govern the city. Few believed that he possessed the self-discipline. Boris did not deny the challenge: ‘The political risk for me is considerable.10 Ken is the favourite.’ Not quite. The first opinion poll in July showed a ‘Boris Bounce’ with his lead over Livingstone at 46 per cent to 40 per cent – paradoxically the same percentage of voters who favoured Gordon Brown over Cameron, and Brown’s lead soon rose to 10 per cent, the benefit of a honeymoon early in his premiership. The trick for Boris would be to exploit London’s particular interests.
In his Evening Standard article, Boris explained his decision: ‘I have found myself brooding – like all paranoid politicians – on the negative voices, the people who say that the great King Newt [i.e. Livingstone, famously a newt-fancier] is too dug in, that his positions are impregnable, his machine is too vast and well oiled … I say phooey … the prize [is] too wonderful to miss.’ Next, he set out his agenda: ‘When I look at the streets of London, I see the future for the planet, a model of co-operation and harmony between races and religions, in which the barriers are broken down by tolerance and humour and respect – without giving way either to bigotry or the petty Balkanisation of the race-relations industry.’ Appalled by the rise in crime, the disparity of wealth, the empty foreign-owned homes and overcrowding on the Tube, there was much to be done. However, his flaws were obvious. ‘I suppose I will be pilloried for being a toff, representing a small section of society,’ he wrote. ‘And all I can say is, be my guest.’ After setting out his Muslim, Jewish and Christian background qualifications to be ‘a one-man melting pot’, he appealed to Londoners as a supporter of immigration and diversity.11 Athens, he said, thrived while Sparta collapsed because Sparta forbade immigration.
In contrast to this rousing call to arms, Boris’s first media appearance on 16 July was not encouraging. Pushing a dilapidated bike, he arrived late in front of City Hall. Disappearing into a scrum of journalists and photographers, his blond mop occasionally bobbed up amid the morass heading slowly towards the river. ‘What do you stand for, Boris?’ they asked, convinced that he lacked any core beliefs and his only ambition was for himself. Finally, he called a halt, got on his bike and after colliding with the TV crew, wobbled away. His only policies, according to the newspaper reports, were to abolish speed bumps, ban car booster seats for children and kill the bendy buses – ‘the 18-metre-long socialist Frankfurters’. The overwhelming mood that day about a man accused of being unreliable and opportunistic was negative. Few gave him much chance against Livingstone’s machine.12
That pessimism was endorsed by John Ross of the think tank Social Action Team: ‘It’s a mathematical impossibility for Boris to win.’ The presumption, agreed Professor Tony Travers, the London School of Economics’ expert on the capital’s politics, was that the lightweight would be defeated by the entrenched wily operator. ‘What should I be doing?’ Boris asked Travers when they met in Westminster. Boris, it appeared to Travers, had no particular policy interests and relied on a sense of wanting to make London better. ‘He’s like Stanley Baldwin,’ thought Travers: ‘I’d rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.’ Just how, wondered Travers, could Boris survive the rich reservoir of prejudice which Livingstone and the Guardian had instantly unearthed from his Telegraph articles? Their vitriol was vehement.
As an Old Etonian, Livingstone’s press office relayed, Boris had supported fox hunting, the Iraq War, and voted against adoption by gay couples (although he had voted in 2003 to end the discriminatory Section 28). He had also opposed extra tax breaks to single-parent families, insisted that young Muslims must be taught only in English to force their integration, and spoke of his fear that religious zealots were ruling ‘large chunks of the Muslim population’ in Tower Hamlets with sharia law. He had spoken against ‘carpet-bombing some of the loveliest places in [south-east] England’ with housing developments, against ‘the persecution of smokers’, and against forcing schoolchildren to eat healthy meals. That left the race card. Livingstone’s officials had dug up the articles mentioning ‘piccaninnies’ and ‘watermelon smiles’ and a ‘racist’ quote from the Telegraph in 2006: ‘For ten years, we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief killing.’ Papua’s ambassador in London had complained that her modern country should not be compared to the Tory party’s antics.13
Another blast was fired by Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. The negligent Scotland Yard investigation of her son’s murder had been criticised by Sir William Macpherson, the retired judge who conducted the inquiry into the killing, as ‘institutionally racist’. With the background of a long campaign for justice, Doreen Lawrence condemned Boris as a rabid racist for criticising Macpherson’s recommendation that racist language in a home or private place should be a crime. Mrs Lawrence forgot that the Labour government had also opposed that Orwellian recommendation. Some readers of her denunciation may not have realised that her organisation had received £1.9 million from Ken Livingstone to build a campaign headquarters.14
Chuka Umunna, a lawyer whose grandfather, Sir Helenus Milmo, was an accomplished barrister and High Court judge, compiled a dossier of Boris’s quotations on behalf of Compass, a left-wing think tank. Among his allegedly incriminatory discoveries was Boris’s ‘fanatical’ backing for George W. Bush. In the article, Boris had actually written that the re-election of the ‘cross-eyed warmonger’ had been ‘the most dismal awakening of my life’.15 Besides misquoting Boris, Umunna had also in his search missed a priceless Boris sentiment: ‘Some dream of their teeth falling out as they are about to be executed with the scimitar by a beautiful black woman.’16 Inevitably, some were convinced that Boris was a racist, not least Polly Toynbee, the Guardian’s matriarchal loather of Tories. No one matched Toynbee’s predictions of doom for an Old Etonian personifying intellectual, social and educational elitism. Cameron, she wrote, ‘has just made his worst mistake … It would be as much a disaster for Cameron’s Tories as for Londoners if this buffoon, jester, serial liar and self-absorbed sociopath got to run the great global city.’ Fearing the potential lure of Boris’s ‘humour and wit’, Toynbee damned a man ‘who has never run anything except his own image’ for treating ‘this mighty financial centre’ as ‘a celebrity Eton wall game’ without any care for ‘ordinary Londoners’. Worst of all for Toynbee, Boris embraced excellence in education, although she had sent her own children to private schools for a time. The Camerons, Toynbee concluded, ‘are struggling for gravitas but Boris will strip it away from them’.17 As a finale, she condemned the Standard’s bias towards Boris. Her newspaper’s support for Livingstone was naturally different.
Boris spat out a reply to Toynbee: ‘She incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending, schoolmarminess of Blair’s Britain. She is the defender and friend of … every gay and lesbian outreach worker, every clipboard-toter and pen-pusher and form-filler whose function has been generated by mindless regulation. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness.’
More soberly, Cameron acknowledged that Boris was a problem. To curb his irrepressible contradictions and mistakes, he asked Nick Boles, now in recovery, to mastermind Boris’s campaign. Boris rejected Boles. Others were recruited – all young and inexperienced about leadership, strategy and running a campaign. ‘A bunch of crusties,’ their replacement would later judge. ‘Stray dogs and also-rans.’
Their first test was the launch of Boris’s campaign at County Hall on 3 September. Organised by James Cleverly, a publisher and territorial officer who was standing for the London Assembly in the same 2008 elections, it proved his team to be amateurs. After a long delay, Boris the Movie started. Looking dishevelled, Boris spoke but there was no sound. Stopping the film, Cleverly announced ‘I give you the original political blond bombshell’, and pointed at the main door. There was no dramatic entrance because Boris was slouching towards the stage from the corner of the room. In an uncharacteristically dull speech, he promised to replace the bendy buses – ‘the jack-knifing, traffic-blocking, self-combusting, cyclist crusher’ and a magnet for fare dodgers – with a new Routemaster; Livingstone’s new rabbit-hutch dwellings would be replaced by bigger homes; the west London congestion zone would be reviewed; and he would terminate Livingstone’s barter deals with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s Marxist dictator. Finally, Boris added ‘I reserve the right in the course of this campaign to make jokes.’18 Asked about the racism exposed by Livingstone and others, Boris appeared to be trapped. He believed in free speech, hated to be told to use politically correct language but the journalist knew that protesting politicians dug their own graves. ‘If you’re the incumbent,’ he replied, ‘you don’t big up the challenger. I really can’t believe it. It’s a classic political goof.’ Unlike Livingstone, he would preach openness and optimism: ‘I will always defend the use of humour in politics … It’s a great utensil for bringing people together.’19
Eight weeks later, Boris had made no impact. Many wondered whether a campaign even existed. Instead of focusing on winning votes, the candidate was earning money from journalism, TV appearances and after-dinner speeches.20 His key pledge remained to scrap the flammable, road-blocking bendy buses and restore the iconic red Routemaster double-decker ‘hop on, hop off’ bus. ‘I want to give Londoners a bus they can be proud of,’ he said with childlike nostalgia.21 Challenged about the cost of conductors on 600 buses, he invented a figure of £8 million. The true cost would be at least £70 million.22 When exposed, he assumed, he could ignore the mistake as harmless. Wadley’s patience was exhausted. At the Spectator’s annual lunch in November she sat next to Boris. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she said loudly. ‘You need to pull your finger out.’ In her subsequent conversations with George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, she repeated the warning.
Facing chaos, Cameron stepped in. He called Jonathan Marland, a no-nonsense successful businessman and the Tory Party’s treasurer: ‘The campaign’s no good and there’s no money. Take over.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re the only person Boris will be frightened of.’
Marland called Lynton Crosby, an Australian political strategist famed for masterminding John Howard’s four successful campaigns to be elected Australia’s prime minister. ‘You need a win in the UK,’ Marland said, reminding Crosby of his failure in 2005 to secure Michael Howard’s victory. Crosby was blamed for focusing excessively on immigration. ‘We’ll pay you £75,000 and we’ll get you rent-free accommodation in Chelsea,’ said Marland. ‘It’s an odd campaign so far,’ he added. ‘It’s as if Boris is unwilling to mow the lawn, hoping his popularity will carry him through.’ George Osborne was the next to call Crosby. ‘The campaign’s going nowhere,’ he said. Finally, Boris emerged. He asked Crosby to take over but noticeably did not admit that there were problems.
‘I watched his declaration of running,’ Crosby said later, ‘and I thought he had no chance of winning. There was no clear message. No grip. He’s not lazy, just ill-disciplined. He wasn’t applying himself and was unaware what was required.’ The good news was that initial research reported that Boris was an admired celebrity.
They agreed to meet in Quirinale, a restaurant in Westminster, at 8 p.m. Boris arrived at 8.25.
‘If you ever come late again,’ said Crosby, ‘I’ll cut your legs off.’
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ replied Boris, ‘I’ll get my hair cut.’
Over the following two hours, Crosby and Marland read the Riot Act. ‘There’ll be no more womanising,’ ordered Marland convinced that Boris was having affairs all over town and News of the World reporters were tailing him. ‘You’ve failed at everything so far. You need a win. This is your last-chance saloon in your political career.’
Boris became downcast. The race, he acknowledged, was his redemption rather than a stepping stone to something greater. Even if he won, he could not decide whether he would remain in City Hall for one term or two. Like a butterfly, his conversation darted around, committing himself to prove he was serious and competent. Other than promising symbols – bikes and bendy buses – he didn’t have a narrative about his vision for London.
‘The voters on polling day,’ said Crosby, ‘must have a strong idea why they should buy from you. They need a story.’ Next, Crosby unveiled the winning strategy: ‘We’re going to target the Tories in outer London. Either they’ve never voted in local elections or they voted for Ken because they didn’t like Norris.’ Crosby had learned from Norris’s defeat. Mistakenly, Norris had focused on outbidding Livingstone with undeliverable election promises and he had ignored London’s suburbs. Success for the Tories’ cross-generational candidate depended on the second preference votes from the minor parties, and his appeal to traditional Tory outer-London boroughs like Bromley as well as the rich in Notting Hill Gate.23 Analysis of elections was a novelty for Boris. He was gripped. Finally he was interested and listened.
‘I’m taking total control,’ said Crosby. The current team would be replaced by himself and James McGrath, another Australian. Boris, he decided, ‘was like a puppy dog running around the farm, and sometimes I’d need to whack him with a rolled-up newspaper’. Boris was ordered to stop writing his Telegraph column. ‘I am laying down my pen and taking up the sword full time,’ he wrote, cringing about the financial loss.24 At their next meeting two days later, Boris arrived twenty minutes early, a shambolic figure drenched from cycling in the rain.
Crosby taking ‘total control’ transformed Boris’s chances. First priority was to agree on a simple campaign promise. Livingstone’s many flaws, not least his anti-Semitism, would play a part in the campaign, but the achievements of London’s first mayor could not be entirely dismissed. Public transport had improved, the congestion charge had been a success, he had supported the Blair government’s bid for the Olympics and he had not opposed Thatcherite reforms to enhance London’s global financial status. Above all, Livingstone had made a huge success of Blair’s proposal that cities would prosper with self-governing mayors.
Crosby identified Livingstone’s weaknesses. Knife crime was increasing, London suffered huge inequality of wealth and, despite encouraging unlimited immigration, Livingstone’s housing record was dismal. Construction of new homes in 2008 would fall to just 12,300 compared to 28,800 just one year earlier.25 Livingstone’s ‘raw deal from Gordon Brown’ meant Treasury grants had fallen while Livingstone had increased rates by 152 per cent over his eight years.26 Livingstone also made many bogus claims, especially about transport and housing.
Nearly all the new overground train and Tube extensions and improvements across London had been commissioned under the last Tory government. Crossrail had been conceived by Margaret Thatcher’s government and was still struggling to start construction during the Labour era. Livingstone’s bendy buses had increased fare dodging and blocked London’s roads. Many were running 80 per cent empty.27 Even the congestion charge, invented by a Whitehall civil servant, was faltering – traffic levels had surged back to pre-charge levels.28 Aesthetically, Livingstone had damaged London by approving multiple tower blocks in the City and along the Thames. He was damned for his love of towers by Eddie Lister, the Tory leader of Wandsworth, as the obsession of a ‘one-man dictatorship’ for the edifice complex. Boris would publicly pledge to disallow any proposed tower threatening London’s historic beauty.
On Crosby’s orders, few of those truths would be mentioned in the campaign. Boris was told not to speak about social justice, a ‘fairer city’ and repairing the ‘fractures’ because those issues would not win votes.29 Instead, he was to focus solely on the environment, Livingstone’s rate increases, rising Tube fares, bendy buses and especially the growth of gangs and street crime. Focus on the murders – shootings and stabbings – Crosby ordered Boris after Christmas. Livingstone was accused of spending more time with property developers than with the victims’ mothers. The statistic that violent crime had fallen in London by 8 per cent to a ten-year low was buried.
For a man eager to entertain and offer something new, the order of constant repetition offended Boris’s authenticity. ‘I can’t keep giving them the same old stuff,’ he complained to Crosby.
‘You have to, that’s what you must do,’ ordered Crosby. ‘The message must be consistent. It’s not dog whistle but a fog horn – everyone must hear what we’re saying.’ A furious argument erupted in a taxi after Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, acknowledged receipt of an article purportedly by Boris. ‘How dare you,’ Boris shouted at Crosby, who had submitted an article in Boris’s name but written by a staffer. ‘It’s no good. My words are my currency and that’s not me.’
‘We haven’t got time, Boris,’ snapped Crosby closing the argument. The Australian had given up discussing what Boris should wear. He had laughed after hearing that Cameron had held four meetings to decide what he would wear for a photo shoot at the Taj Mahal.
At the beginning of 2008, the election result was uncertain. Boris’s hope for a roller-coaster campaign was stalled. Opinion polls put Livingstone ahead. Everything depended on the preference vote, persuading Lib Dems to choose Boris for their second vote. Then unexpectedly the mood began to swing against Labour. Gordon Brown had missed his chance of victory by opting not to call a snap general election and was riding into the financial crisis. As so often with Boris, events beyond his control, a gambler’s luck, conspired to work to his advantage. To his further advantage, his contact with voters spread optimism. Like Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, he made people feel good. His genius was to persuade people to like him. Unlike most politicians, he was stopped in the street. Funny, tactless, ironic, posh, vague and genial, he did not refuse any demand for a selfie. Having got her selfie, one woman walked away and said loudly to her friend, ‘I’d never vote for him.’ Boris was nonplussed. Crosby mentioned the benefit of being underestimated: ‘You’ll always surprise people.30 And if you surprise them at the right time, that can be very powerful.’
Occasionally, Boris behaved suspiciously. He disappeared on his bike or, just after he and his team got into a Tube carriage, he jumped out at the last moment. ‘He’s given us the slip,’ a staffer shouted. Although he would arrive at the destination, his team were puzzled. Was he just a loner fond of saying ‘I cycle because no one can tell me what to do’? Or was he calling in to see a girlfriend? Asked by a newspaper whether he had any secret children, he replied ‘Not as far as I am aware.’
‘Are there any other affairs?’ he was asked
‘Not that I know of,’ he said.31
Boris’s affairs, Crosby discovered, did not dent his popularity and remained unmentioned because Livingstone himself had three undisclosed children from previous relationships.32 Some called it the Clinton effect – the president’s ratings had increased during the Monica Lewinsky scandal – and Boris championed Clinton’s right to privacy about his sexual relationships. Politics, wrote Boris, was being ‘turned into hell for so many of its practitioners by the public’s belief in the “democratic right” to insist on its leaders taking no mistresses’.33
*
The election’s momentum and tone dramatically changed in early 2008. Andrew Gilligan – the sharp investigative journalist who at the BBC in 2003 had broken the story about the ‘sexed up’ dossier into Iraq’s military capabilities – had been directed by the Evening Standard’s editor to investigate suspected corruption at City Hall. The centre of the spider’s web, he discovered, was the London Development Agency (LDA), established by Livingstone to create jobs and generate business. Since 2000, the LDA had spent £2.6 billion.34 Livingstone claimed that the LDA had ‘created or safeguarded’ 90,800 jobs but Gilligan had discovered that City Hall could only identify a few hundred additional jobs. The LDA’s real beneficiaries were race, environmental and peace groups, especially in migrant communities which supported Livingstone. Christian community groups received barely any money. Huge sums of LDA grants, Gilligan discovered, had disappeared through bankruptcies and waste. Among the beneficiaries was a Greater London Authority (GLA) employee: she enjoyed a holiday to Nigeria paid from public funds.35 The victims of Livingstone’s cronyism, the newspaper claimed, were London’s children living in poverty in the East End. They had received none of the LDA’s money to improve their education to avoid poor jobs or unemployment.
The Standard’s principal target was Lee Jasper, the mayor’s equalities adviser. According to Gilligan, Jasper had handed over between £2.5 million and £3.3 million of LDA money to allies. Among the beneficiaries was a group managed by a woman employed as a community worker with whom Jasper had apparently enjoyed a sexual relationship. Jasper had given the group £100,000.36
Boris demanded that Livingstone account for the £2.6 billion. ‘There is something chilling and Stalinist about his refusal to comply,’ Boris said.37
Livingstone’s supporters, especially in the Guardian, protested that Boris’s racism had fuelled the attacks on Jasper. Boris, they said, was endangering Livingstone’s ‘progressive’ policies to build a multicultural city. ‘It is an utter disgrace,’ replied Boris about the ‘slush fund’ for Jasper’s ‘cronies’, that ‘anyone who dares question the order of things is denounced as a “racist” … It is the politics of the skunk.’ Accused of breaking City Hall rules, Jasper resigned but Livingstone loyally insisted that Jasper was innocent and would be re-employed if Livingstone won the election. (A subsequent official inquiry would condemn Jasper’s behaviour as ‘entirely inappropriate’ and ‘improper’.38)
In answer to the racist charge against himself, Boris apologised on a website for having used the terms ‘piccaninnies’ and ‘watermelon smiles’ in his journalism: ‘Of course I am sorry because it does not represent what I have in my heart. I think people have a political motive to try and take something out of twenty years of journalism – millions of words – and they have found a few phrases that they think they can spin to prove that this guy harbours old-fashioned thinking. It’s absolute nonsense.’ At hustings he repeated that he supported immigration and an amnesty for illegal immigrants – ‘I’m absolutely 100 per cent anti-racist.39 I despise and loathe racism’ – and lamented that the debate had been ‘reduced’ to misquoting his article. Invariably, he recited his family background: Muslim, Jewish and Christian with a Catholic baptism. In reply, the Standard highlighted Livingstone’s association with Muslim extremists who denounced western liberalism and shared his anti-Semitism; and also his tirade against the Jewish property developers David and Simon Reuben. After an argument about a site they owned near the Olympic Park, Livingstone had told the brothers, who were British citizens born in Bombay, ‘Go back to Iran.’ (Livingstone’s reference to Iran was doubly wrong, as the Reubens’ parents were actually Iraqi Jews.) In retaliation, the brothers contributed to Boris’s election fund.
As the race turned increasingly acrimonious, Crosby discovered that most of London’s voters were, to his relief, unconvinced by the allegations of racism levelled at Boris. Crime and transport were, as he’d predicted, the dominant issues. The balance was tilted by the Standard’s characterisation of Livingstone as ‘a phoney, a charlatan and a fraud’ and his re-election as a ‘frightening prospect’. Daily, the newspapers’ 500 street billboards across the city screamed ‘Ken-fraud’, ‘Ken-lies’, ‘Ken-scandal’, ‘Suicide bomb backer runs Ken campaign’ and ‘Ken – drunk on power’. Johnson suffered only marginal criticism in the newspaper.40 ‘I’m not working to get a Tory elected,’ Andrew Gilligan said. ‘I’m working to get Ken unelected.’41
Looking exhausted with eight weeks of campaigning still ahead of him, Livingstone’s vulnerability was reflected in the polls. By mid-March 2008, the Standard’s poll placed Boris 12 per cent ahead of Livingstone.42 The voters thought Livingstone was more dishonest than Boris; and in a surprising insight into voter psychology, Boris was particularly popular among women. Unexpectedly for Livingstone, some working-class voters in the suburbs targeted by Crosby were attracted to Boris; and painfully for Livingstone, Lib Dem and Green supporters were tempted to cast their second preference vote for Boris rather than him. With Labour running about 15 per cent behind the Tories in the national polls, the hammer blow fell as Livingstone became an unforeseen casualty of Gordon Brown’s personal unpopularity. Nevertheless, with a loyal following, some polls put Livingstone slightly ahead.43 As election day loomed, the Guardian reported uncertainty about the outcome and Boris’s own belief that he would lose.44 Those doubts were echoed by The Times and even the Telegraph, both lukewarm about Boris. Envy poisoned some natural Tories. ‘Mr Johnson,’ wrote Simon Heffer, ‘is not a politician. He is an act. For some of us the joke has worn not thin, but out.’ Among other Tories who refused to vote for Boris was Michael Portillo.45 Both critics would have been scathing about a riotous fundraising dinner for Boris’s campaign in Notting Hill Gate organised by Boris’s Bullingdon friends including David Cameron. At the end of Boris’s speech, his toast was to ‘Mayor Leavingsoon’.46
In late March, Gordon Brown had written off Livingstone’s chances while Livingstone himself continued to live in hope. Although Crosby’s and the Standard’s polls predicted that Boris had a real chance of winning, Boris himself still feared he might lose the prize by making an inappropriate joke or an unfortunate revelation about his personal life.47 Nervous and tired, in the last days he chose to be dull. He pledged to ban alcohol from the Tube, stop drug-taking on buses and, overruling the Tube’s managers, not to close any ticket offices.48 The flurry was in fact a smokescreen following an embarrassing encounter of exactly the kind Boris had feared might derail him at the last moment. A. A. Gill, the acerbic Sunday Times columnist, asked Boris, ‘What are you going to do on your first day in City Hall?’ Boris was stuck. There was no plan. ‘Put conductors and policemen on buses,’ he stuttered. He also failed to name a single member of his future team.49 Unlike Livingstone, he had no court of fellow travellers with whom he had worked in Parliament or the party. Crosby had wanted Boris to focus on the campaign and avoid appearing complacent by anticipating appointments. Other than put on a serious face, Boris genuinely did not know what he would do. In desperation, he announced that he would appoint Bob Diamond, Barclays Bank’s former chief executive, to run the Mayor’s Fund, his new charity for young Londoners. Diamond had earned £21 million in the previous year despite Barclays writing off £1.6 billion in losses.50
‘Boris was freaked out by the prospect of becoming mayor,’ Jonathan Marland noticed as election day neared. ‘His self-confidence fell.’ There was no team. No one had prepared for victory. Boris did not understand the process of public appointments and managing state organisations. ‘I’ve got an £11 billion budget,’ he said in panic. Marland, Francis Maude, a cerebral senior Tory MP, and George Osborne discussed how to save the still unelected mayor. Boles, they agreed, should be responsible for choosing the transition team with Boris as chairman of the board. No one believed Boris could actually manage.
On election day, Thursday 1 May, the Standard’s headline over a photo of Boris pointing Kitchener-like at the camera was ‘Honesty and competence’. The Guardian’s headline was: ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid … Imagine what it would be like if this bigoted, lying Old Etonian got his hands on our diverse and liberal capital!’ Their columnist Zoe Williams derided the ‘floppy hair, that sodding bicycle and big gob’. Boris, ‘a snob’ she wrote, ‘despises gays, provincials, Liverpudlians, Muslims, Congolese and Africans’. London, she lamented, would become an international ‘laughing stock’ because Boris would make ‘a mess of the whole thing’.51
The results would not be announced until the following evening. At 5 p.m. on Friday 2 May, Tessa Jowell, the Labour MP, telephoned the Standard’s editor with an insider’s tip that Livingstone had lost. One hour later, with victory almost certain, Wadley ordered the final edition to be printed before the result was confirmed. ‘Boris has won’ was the headline of a special edition on sale across London by 6 p.m. She was taking a risk, she told her staff, without admitting that if Boris lost she would probably be fired. Five hours later, Boris, with Marina beside him, stood in City Hall to take applause. After the second preference votes were redistributed, Boris got 1,168,738 votes against Livingstone’s 1,028,966 – 53 per cent to 47 per cent. Livingstone was shocked. Despite losing in white working-class areas like Barking and Dagenham because they disliked his race card, he blamed the Standard’s campaign. In truth, the Tories were trusted by a multiracial city. (In the nationwide local elections, which had taken place on the same day as the London mayoral election, the Tories won 44 per cent of the vote with Labour struggling on 24 per cent.) In his victory speech, Boris praised Livingstone’s ‘transparent love of London’, courage and ‘sheer exuberant nerve’. Len Duvall, a Labour member of the London Assembly who would be a vocal critic of the new mayor, saw the dawn of a different epoch: ‘Ken’s a twentieth-century politician, Boris is twenty-first century. Celebrity won.’
Beside her husband, Marina stood pensive and composed, shunning the spotlight. Throughout much of the campaign, she had been away fighting a complex case in the north and, as in Henley, she was rarely seen. Their children were looked after by a nanny and housekeeper. Barely looking at each other, they left the hall and headed to a champagne celebration at Millbank Tower. In the cheering crowd, Stanley Johnson revealed that he would try to inherit his son’s seat in Henley.52 Cameron firmly crushed that idea. ‘We need a local candidate,’ he swiftly ordered. Watching Stanley, a friend commented, ‘Every time Boris succeeds, a little bit of Stanley dies.’
‘Let’s get cracking tomorrow – let’s have a drink tonight,’ Boris said in a short speech. Down below stood the Festival Hall. Exactly eleven years earlier, Tony Blair had stood in front of delirious supporters to hail the ‘New Dawn’. Now, the shell-shocked Guardian editors composed a report under the headline ‘New Dusk’. Obsessed by networks, privilege and money, they puzzled how an Old Etonian could win London with another Old Etonian favourite to be prime minister. Decay, the newspaper predicted, would spread from City Hall until the Tories were defeated in the 2010 general election.53
In City Hall, Livingstone’s key staff were also shocked, unable to believe their defeat. ‘Please call me Boris,’ said the victor as he toured the building the following morning. ‘You’ll discover I’m not a crazed Thatcherite neocon,’ he smiled as he shook hands in the canteen. Since he was derided by the Guardian as an ‘inexperienced buffoon’, the expectations of those trained to obey Livingstone’s edicts were low. Deploying his natural gift to make each person feel special, regardless of class or race, even the antagonistic staff became inclined to like Boris. At least his first orders – to destroy Livingstone’s conspiratorial atmosphere by removing the partitions, and banning alcohol on the Tube – were inoffensive.
The jubilation was followed by nastiness. Floating above the confusion, Boris seemed oblivious to his responsibilities. His instinct for leadership was missing. ‘Leave it to Nick,’ Boris had told Crosby, persuaded by Cameron that Boles could be trusted as Boris’s chief of staff. To assert himself, Boles did not tell Crosby about when Boris’s swearing-in ceremony would be held. The Australian was furious. Before the end of the first week, Crosby observed, the mayoralty was all about Boles, not least because Boles did not trust Boris. Bewitched by his new role, Boris failed to wrest control from the prima donna. Amid that uncertainty, Marland suggested to Boris that they appoint a chief operating officer to undertake the executive chores. Boris would be a figurehead mayor and chairman of the board. Francis Maude nominated Tim Parker, a friend known for cost-cutting at Kwik-Fit and the AA, to be appointed the deputy mayor to supervise and initiate all the day-to-day administration including transport. ‘Right,’ agreed Boris, reflecting his naivety and lack of self-confidence. He had never met Parker and was unaware that Parker, aka the Prince of Darkness due to his reputation for slashing workforces, was impatient and sceptical of politicians and government. Hired for an annual salary of £1, Parker assumed that Boris would cut ribbons while he, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York, would dominate London.54 Boris, who hitherto would play only as the captain of the team, had temporarily lost his nerve, scared of the challenge.
The combination of Boles and Parker shocked City Hall’s officials. Neither knew anything about local government. Their antagonism was unfair to Boles. With experience at Westminster Council and the Policy Exchange, he selected three critically important members of Boris’s new team. Kit Malthouse, an accountant and deputy leader of Westminster Council, would be the deputy mayor responsible for the police; Munira Mirza, thirty, state-educated in Oldham and an Oxford graduate, was given responsibility for culture and arts; and Simon Milton, the outstanding leader of Westminster Council, was appointed as a consultant for housing and planning. Educated at St Paul’s and Cambridge, Milton was the perfect administrator. With twenty years’ experience at Westminster, the son of a German Jewish refugee who created the London patisserie chain Sharaton’s, Milton understood how to negotiate with Whitehall, especially the Treasury.55 Alongside him was Eddie Lister, fifty-eight, the leader of Wandsworth Council, where he had successfully cut costs and privatised council services. The former corporate executive was recruited to undertake a financial audit of City Hall.
Seemingly oblivious to all those appointments and facing the greatest challenge of his life with great trepidation, Boris focused on his own wallet. In panic, he told Marland that he faced a crisis, namely the sharp reduction of his personal income. The mayor’s salary of £137,579, he pleaded, was insufficient to pay for his children’s private education. His instant solution was a newspaper column. Marland called Rupert Murdoch. ‘Hire Boris,’ Marland said. ‘It won’t do you any harm in the long term.’ Murdoch refused. Marland’s next call was to Aidan Barclay of the Telegraph, son of the co-owner David Barclay. Barclay quickly agreed Marland’s demand of a £250,000 fee for a weekly column. Boles was shocked by the agreement. Boris was persuaded to give £50,000 of the fee to fund media and classics scholarships. Asked by the media whether the donation was ordered by Cameron, Boris replied ‘If you put that I was forced to do it by some fucking Cameron bollocks, I’ll be extremely annoyed.’56 The precise amount finally donated by Boris would remain unclear. The Telegraph column was to prove, over the following years, an invaluable platform to explore and express his political ideology. In self-justification, Boris would later write ‘Any columnist is engaged in a dialogue. What you are doing is emerging from the wings and diving onto the stage for five minutes, doing a twirl before shooting off into the wings. You are then listening to see if anyone’s paid any attention … You get screeds of abuse or praise.’57 Leading the critics of the deal was Sonia Purnell. Boris’s ‘puzzling preoccupation’ with his ‘pursuit of money’, wrote Purnell, was insatiable: ‘All the riches, the power and the glory are never quite enough, it seems.’58 Not least, she wrote, because the Johnsons were rich, owning ‘valuable houses or large tracts of land in London’s Islington, Regent’s Park, Notting Hill Gate, as well as Oxfordshire, Somerset and Greece’.59 By ‘the Johnsons’, Purnell meant Stanley and his four eldest children. All five Johnson families saw themselves as hard-working, living in modest accommodation and financially challenged. Everything was relative. Glued together by optimism and competition, the Johnsons could not believe their luck about their newly elevated social status thanks to Boris’s unexpected triumph.
As Boris admitted, there was a pertinent resemblance between himself and Mercury, the god of eloquence, theft, sharp-wittedness, luck and getting away with it. By a quirk of fate, Boris had unintentionally anticipated his eventual resurrection four years earlier. Just two days after his dismissal in disgrace by Michael Howard in 2004, Boris had fulfilled a long-standing engagement to address the Horatian Society in Lincoln’s Inn, London. For Britain’s devoted classicists, the gathering was an eagerly awaited event to enjoy a new interpretation of Rome’s favoured lyrical poet and satirist. Boris had not disappointed his audience. To roars of approval, his forty-minute witty analysis of Horace displayed profound knowledge of the texts, outclassing the academic who followed him. During his unusually fluent speech, Boris identified with Horace’s own association with Mercury – not only the guide of souls to the underworld, but also the god of communication. From Lincoln’s Inn, he headed home, and as usual before he went to sleep, he read Greek poems in the original.60