As the new year approached, Boris was still struggling to understand the scale of his task. The three-hour mayoral question sessions for Assembly members was called by him ‘medieval torture’, and ‘unhelpful’ by the members. Too often he was unwilling to give a clear answer. Either he would sidetrack issues with a joke, or seek to divert attention from what he thought were banal questions. To his good fortune, he was never exposed during the first term to forensic scrutiny. In the sterile atmosphere of the Assembly, few of the politicians forged a relationship with him. The exception was Len Duvall, a tough Londoner representing the best of Labour’s traditional passion for his community. Boris, Duvall decided, was ‘not lazy but being mayor was the first time he’d had to work in his life. He didn’t think journalism was a job. He could knock anything off and still have time for lunch. Being mayor was different.’ Boris did not resent the sharp east Londoner’s needling but gave nothing away. ‘What sort of Tory are you?’ asked Duvall. ‘One Nation Tory, European Christian Democrat, or Thatcherite?’ Boris did not reply. ‘He doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed,’ Duvall concluded. With over a year before the general election, Boris refused to identify himself with Cameron. Promoting himself was the priority.
Plans for the mayor’s £2 million firework celebrations on New Year’s Eve were underway. A 200-foot image of himself would be projected on to a building by the river. Some carped that the celebration was an ego trip, but unlike other politicians, Boris was a celebrity without spending money. Livingstone’s £1 million annual contract with Matthew Freud, the publicist, had been cancelled by Guto Harri as an expensive irrelevance. Boris could promote himself, and reassure the world that the city would be ready for the Olympics, for nothing. His message to the revellers was optimistic: ‘The recession will end. Let’s go forward into 2009 with enthusiasm and purpose.’
Mindful of Boris’s ambition ‘to go all the way to Downing Street’, Harri suggested that he meet Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail’s influential editor, ‘to clean up’. Even though Dacre wielded potent influence on the Tory Party, Boris was hesitant. Dacre was clearly delighted that Livingstone had been defeated, but given Petronella’s ‘abortion’, Marina’s humiliation and the four Johnson children’s discomfort, the editor of a newspaper that championed family values would be an unlikely cheerleader. Especially because, unlike Boris’s adoration of clever women, Dacre was reputedly a misogynist. Finally, they did meet for lunch at Mark’s Club in Mayfair. Boris returned to City Hall looking miserable. He rarely got on with people who did not approve of him.
‘Was it that bad?’ Harri asked.
‘I resisted the urge to brain him with my bike clamp. Dacre is like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.’ At least, Boris discovered, Dacre was lukewarm about Cameron and was unaware of his latest affair.
In late January 2009, Boris stood in Westminster Abbey with Marina at a memorial service for Charles Wheeler, her accomplished father, who had died the previous July. To the packed congregation, the couple appeared united. Past difficulties had been overcome. They were searching for a new house in Islington which they would buy in May.1 Yet Boris was in the midst of an affair with Helen Macintyre, a thirty-five-year-old art dealer whom he had first met at a theatre in Watlington, near his house in Thame.
Sparky and good company, Macintyre had admired Boris for years. After their affair started about six months earlier, Boris appointed her as an unpaid adviser in City Hall. She was spotted instantly by a friend of Boris’s at a mayoral presentation to London property developers about investment in the Olympic Park. Smiling and sexy, Macintyre was encouraging interest among the audience which included the Reuben brothers, Gerald Ronson and Lakshmi Mittal. ‘I took one look at her,’ said one of the guests, ‘and I warned Boris not to touch Helen. “You have an excess of enthusiasm for women,” I told him and he just laughed.’ Engaging with Macintyre despite all the risks to his marriage and mayoralty revealed the paradox of Boris. Although a loner, he craved company. Loneliness plunged him into a depression, only relieved by conversations with his current mistress. ‘What’s the difference between a wife and a bad job?’ he asked an aide. ‘After several years a bad job still sucks.’ He also quipped, ‘The moment you stop lying to your wife, your marriage is over.’
Marina loved Boris working at City Hall. Unlike the random working hours at the Spectator or the Commons, she believed that the mayor was fixed to a rigid timetable. Every hour was accounted for. She believed that his closest staff would always know his movements. At the Tory Party conference, she was told, a man stood outside his bedroom to prevent women entering. Marina was not told that Boris frequently disappeared, or arrived late at functions, with his shirt-tails hanging out, having stopped somewhere on the way.
Boris’s treatment of Marina was a private judgement but his relationship with Macintyre was subject to a formal employment code of conduct designed to prevent favouritism and corruption. Boris had signed the code promising to declare any private interest relating to his public duty. Even Macintyre’s unpaid employment at City Hall should, in the spirit of the code, have been declared. Not for the first time, Boris had no qualms about breaking rules.
Just as he had with Petronella Wyatt, Boris arranged to meet Macintyre in various locations including her Belgravia flat. The only complication was the flat’s owner. Pierre Rolin, a Canadian financier, was Macintyre’s live-in boyfriend. Fortunately, he travelled a lot, so in his absences, the mayor cycled across London to Belgravia. With his blond mop concealed beneath a woolly hat, he ignored the CCTV at the block’s entrance. His visits were logged by the porter. Over Christmas, they agreed to meet in January at the annual world economic forum in Davos. Boris was not concerned that she would be travelling with Rolin.
‘This will not be a normal year at Davos,’ said one senior banker looking forward to endless parties. Bankers were being stigmatised amid the ongoing financial meltdown but Boris ranked among their few champions. Faced with a shrinking economy and rising unemployment, Boris posed as a fierce advocate of London as the world’s financial centre. Banks, he agreed, had been ‘hideously’ greedy but they contributed 9 per cent to Britain’s GDP and the taxes on bankers’ bonuses helped to relieve poverty. ‘Don’t get carried away by neo-socialist claptrap,’ he had warned the Labour government at the Tory Party conference the previous September.2 Acknowledging the inevitability of inequality, he believed in rewarding ambition, talent and achievement. But his sensitivity to the ungenerous rich was raw. ‘A load of selfish cunts,’ he said loudly after he left a lunch at a major city law firm who had refused to contribute to the Mayor’s Fund for underprivileged children. Critics accused him of lacking ‘vision’ because his capitalism was not expressed in ideological jargon. But he did support wealth creation and in return expected the wealthy to be charitable.
Lakshmi Mittal, ranked as Britain’s richest man, counted among Boris’s angels. During a chance forty-five-second encounter in a Davos cloakroom, Boris persuaded the Indian steel tycoon to finance a £15 million tower for the Olympic Park. Boris had started the competition for a folly to distinguish east London’s skyline. Enthusiastically he spoke of a rival to the Eiffel Tower.3 Helen Macintyre was also soliciting funds for the tower. Callously, Boris also accepted £80,000 from the unwitting Pierre Rolin negotiated by Macintyre. ‘I saw him in the lift,’ Rolin recalled later about a chance meeting in Davos.4 ‘He knew who I was and he suddenly got really nervous, his eyes darting all over the place.’ Macintyre became pregnant soon after.
Boris returned to London focused on the Olympics legacy, especially the development of Stratford. All the previous Olympics, Boris knew, were cursed by costly white elephants. Summoning Peter Hendy, he listened for two hours to a presentation. ‘He sucked it in,’ said Hendy, ‘understood everything.’ Next, to prevent any obstruction by TfL, he discussed the detail with Neale Coleman. ‘He likes big flashy projects,’ Coleman discovered. ‘Transforming Stratford was substantially due to Boris’s willpower. He inspired and executed the concrete steps to make it happen. Nothing would have happened without his drive.’ There was more. To transform the Olympic Park into a cultural destination, he directed Coleman to recruit the director of the V&A museum (a subsequent director, the German Martin Roth, would become energetically involved in 2011), the director of Sadler’s Wells theatre Alistair Spalding, and others from the Smithsonian in Washington and University College London to build auditoriums, exhibition venues and a new student campus within the park. Alongside was a scheme to build 7,000 homes, schools and a £1.5 billion Westfield shopping centre. Never daunted by obstacles and crushing naysayers, Boris presented to the world a rational plan for an unprecedented development. Sheer willpower brought the Olympic Park into existence.
With the same passion, he raced across the capital to community centres, cultural events, workplaces and especially schools, spurred by his discovery that being mayor empowered him to improve peoples’ lives. Hoping to break down barriers, re-knit British society and end isolation, he launched the ‘Big Lunch’ across London to care for the lonely and elderly; and to signal that City Hall would devote money and manpower to reduce rough sleeping, he went on to London’s streets at night to persuade the homeless to move into hostels. Not for want of trying, his pledge to end rough sleeping by the end of 2012 failed. Official surveys reported that newly arrived migrants from eastern Europe rejected offers of accommodation. The numbers of rough sleepers would double to 964 in 2016. Undoubtedly he brought a feel-good factor to the city, increasing support for his administration. Unlike most politicians, he genuinely enjoyed listening to people’s stories. His frequent appearances with gays, immigrants, the isolated and the ignored had disarmed some critics. Each engagement prompted more initiatives.
Shocked during one visit to a good grammar school that not one of the sixth-formers could recite a poem – ‘not so much as a sonnet had lodged in their skulls’, he wrote – he committed time and money to literacy, numeracy and to ‘spread the benefits I had as a child’, despite education not being a mayoral responsibility. With the London Curriculum, schools accepted the mayor’s offer to encourage children to learn more about more about their city.
Nothing made Boris more angry than the state of the capital’s schools. One-third of London’s eleven-year-old children could not properly read and write. A million Londoners bordered on illiteracy. Lefty educationalists, he believed, were the culprits. Their rejection of synthetic phonics – to learn how sounds make up a word like c-a-t – was authoritarian. London’s schoolchildren, he fumed, were forced by those ideologues to rely on self-learning. The inevitable result was that the life opportunities of disadvantaged children were crushed.5 Among those he blamed was Ed Balls, the education minister, who had dismissed Latin and Greek as unimportant and was unconcerned that advanced maths was not taught in Camden. The mayor damned Balls’s ‘tragic and wilful ignorance’ as ‘viciously elitist’ for denying ‘our children the chief glories of their inheritance’. From 2012, although he possessed no formal powers over education, he relied on his deputy mayor Munira Mirza to recruit donors to help establish free schools and academies, introduce talented teachers into classrooms and fund a variety of educational experiences. To resist the advancing ‘barbarian hordes around us’, he urged the British to wage a ‘Kulturkampf’ – a struggle to retain control of schools – and simultaneously demand that schools protect beleaguered teachers from bullying parents, supine education authorities and ‘the crazed culture of health and safety’.
In those passionate appeals, he anticipated being ‘denounced by the left as the last word in bug-eyed, foam-flecked capillary-popping reactionary conservatism’. His blast at political correctness won him unexpected support. He was to be no longer automatically ridiculed as a buffoon.6 Even Dave Hill, the Guardian’s cantankerous columnist, was disarmed by Boris exceeding expectations. ‘Johnson,’ he grumbled, ‘has emerged as a more interesting and appealing politician than the cartoon reactionary depicted by his foes.’7 Livingstone’s Marxism had been replaced by Borisism, a Napoleonic liking for the spotlight and establishment of a grandiose legacy, which bemused his critics and supporters alike.
Part of this was a fondness for monuments: bridges to Ulster and France, tunnels under the Thames and a cable car over it. James Murdoch of News International, he hoped, would sponsor the first cable car in exchange for permission to build a new headquarters in Newham.8 With the same tenacity, he denounced the government’s plans for a third runway at Heathrow and proposed an airport on an artificial island on the Thames Estuary, three times as big as Heathrow. The cost of the so-called ‘Boris Island’, he said, would be £40 billion and completion within eight years. Critics countered it would take thirty years to build and cost £70 billion. Every airline opposed the scheme; environmentalists were shocked by the inevitable destruction of bird habitats; and an overwhelming proportion of Londoners agreed with the government’s edict, ‘Heathrow is vital to our economy and is operating at full capacity.’ Nevertheless, Boris committed £15,000 to fight the government in the courts. All that grandstanding deflected the critics from his failure to solve London’s deteriorating transport system.
Peter Hendy, the transport commissioner, was an accomplished survivor. Steve Norris (newly appointed to the board of Transport for London) said the thirty-page report Hendy presented to Boris after the election sounded ‘Like a Soviet tractor report. “Everything is wonderful in London. TfL is succeeding on every front.”’ Norris’s scepticism about Hendy was also levelled at Boris for not carefully reading Hendy’s report: ‘Boris was skating on thin ice but he skated fast and got away with it. ’As the failed Tory mayoral candidate, Norris was not surprisingly uncharitable about Boris; but he could not deny that Boris had inherited a poisoned chalice.
Burdened by a £3 billion debt, the London Tube risked serious disruption without essential improvements which would cost £1.4 billion. Simultaneously, Crossrail was paralysed by an unrealistically low budget. Close to financial collapse, there was insufficient money to cover an immediate £84 million black hole in TfL’s finances. During his last weeks in office, Livingstone had committed the same money three times over:9 to finance Crossrail, to commission essential Tube repairs, and to freeze fares as an election giveaway. He blamed Gordon Brown for the mess.
The prime minister loathed Livingstone and had shown little interest in London. Together with Shriti ‘The Shriek’ Vadera, an unpopular banker and his personal adviser, Brown had imposed on the Tube a flawed privatisation scheme. Over the previous five years, two corporations contracted to rebuild the Tube had received £8 billion from the Treasury. After pocketing huge profits, one corporation collapsed and the other tottered on the edge of insolvency – and the network had been barely improved. Relying on Bakelite switches installed in 1926, signals and tunnels were seriously dangerous. Trains regularly broke down and thousands of passengers were trapped in the dark by fire alerts and power failures. Brown handed the responsibility for resolving the chaos to the mayor. Livingstone was stymied. He had opposed the Brown/Vadera privatisation scheme because under Brown’s privatisation contracts, the state was left with all the risk. Unable to shed the Treasury’s control over London’s finances, City Hall engaged in endless hand-to-mouth negotiations while Brown stubbornly denied London any certainty about the Tube’s future. That was Livingstone’s legacy to Boris.10 Among the problems was the Jubilee Line, entrusted to the care of Bechtel, the American construction and engineering corporation, and other contractors.
Bechtel insisted that the Jubilee Line be closed down while essential repairs were undertaken. Boris refused and started a war of attrition to recover control of maintenance of the line. Bechtel and the other contractors demanded £2.5 billion to give up the contract. Boris refused. ‘We must carry on shaking the tree until we win,’ Daniel Moylan, his deputy chairman of the TfL board, told Boris, ‘although I don’t know how we will win.’ Finally, all the contractors settled for £310 million. But Brown still refused to pay £1.4 billion for the repairs.11 That ‘gloomy old nail-biting misery guts’, wrote Boris, ‘is a manic meddler who treats Londoners as a bunch of overweight and exhausted laboratory rats’. Boris accused him of ‘gambling with the fortunes of the capital like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well’.12
Livingstone had not mentioned his battle with Brown during his re-election campaign. Instead, he claimed credit for the new rail lines across London, especially Thameslink, the Docklands Light Railway and the new St Pancras station. In reality, all three had been designed under Conservative governments. Crossrail, proposed by Margaret Thatcher in 1989, was a seventy-three-mile east–west railway, including twenty-six miles of new tunnels running a hundred feet below London with ten new stations to transport 200 million people a year at 100 mph. The plan was cancelled in 1994 but revived by Livingstone. Approval depended on Gordon Brown providing at least £17.6 billion. In anticipation of a general election, Brown approved Crossrail but committed only £14.8 billion. Completion was set for 2017. That fantasy was Livingstone’s legacy, and Boris’s burdersome inheritance.
‘How many votes are you going to lose me?’ Boris had asked at his first meeting with the small Crossrail team in their Canary Wharf office in 2008. Reading from his notes just scribbled on a scrap of paper, he spoke enthusiastically about Crossrail, constantly looking across the room at Gordon Brown, nervously studying his own notes in the corner. Weeks after the election, Brown had not congratulated Boris on his victory. Brown had, however, succumbed to Boris’s pressure to take some responsibility for delivering Crossrail.
In his speech, Brown refused to make any genuine financial commitment but did agree that an Act of Parliament should be passed in 2009 which would empower Crossrail to buy land and underground access along the route.13 Without a financial agreement, Bechtel withdrew from the project. The risk and responsibility was transferred to the Department of Transport and TfL. In the first auditor’s review of Crossrail that year, the project was criticised as out of control. Nevertheless, as a symbol of his determination, on 15 May 2009 in Canary Wharf, Boris pressed a button to drive the first concrete pile into place. The construction of Crossrail had begun – a meaningful gesture. Nothing more could be done until David Cameron won the 2010 election even though the future prime minister was himself opposed to Crossrail. His opposition was supported by Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Evening Standard and The Times, as ‘a costly white elephant that even the government no longer wants’. Crossrail, Jenkins added, was ‘no longer a railway that makes sense’. The money should be spent on restoring the Tube.14 Boris demanded the government should finance both. But at the end of 2008, he had had no money for the Tube or Crossrail. Scrabbling for cash, he abandoned Livingstone’s plans for trams and new bridges to save £3 billion, and increased fares by 10 per cent, a breach of his election pledge.15
On his first anniversary as mayor, his popularity had increased. An opinion poll reported that 46 per cent were satisfied. Boris gave himself 6.5 out of 10. A Time Out survey reported that 22 per cent of women and 29 per cent of men would not be interested in having sex with him. In other words, over 70 per cent would be interested.16 His achievements remained slim: alcohol was banned on public transport, knife crime had fallen by 12 per cent, and Londoners enjoyed a freeze of the GLA’s share of the council tax. Nevertheless, as the most visible elected Tory, he praised himself. ‘I am a nightmare for Labour, the worst thing that could happen,’ he declared, knowing that he was equally a mixed blessing for his party’s leaders.
To placate them before the pre-election party conference, he told the Evening Standard’s new editor that he intended to fight for a second term as London’s mayor. ‘Oh my God. Weird,’ he sighed when he read the newspaper’s front-page headline declaring the opposite: that he would not run. Instead, the newspaper speculated, he intended to challenge Cameron. Boris knew the opposite. Cameron could not be ousted, but he could be embarrassed.17