As the nation’s senior elected Tory, Boris planned to tease his party’s leaders at the October 2009 party conference in Manchester. Over the previous year, the party’s popularity had declined, a clear indictment of Cameron’s leadership. ‘He doesn’t stand for anything,’ Boris told Guto Harri. ‘Dave wants to be prime minister because he thinks he’ll be good at it but he’s not giving people a positive reason to vote Conservative.’ As an untested, smooth operator with few remarkable ideas and misdirected passion, Cameron was not giving anyone a reason to vote Tory. He hoped, complained Boris, to create the mood music to win the 2010 election by default.
In his conference speech, Boris intended to denounce Labour’s high taxation state and to trumpet capitalism. He would ‘stick up for the pariahs’ and condemn the ‘banker-bashers’ like Cameron. Boris had always liked the rich, especially foreign millionaires. He had been easily lured to meet Evgeny Lebedev, the Standard’s new Russian owner, in spite of the direct link of Lebedev’s father’s fortune to the KGB’s plunder of Russia. On trips to Lebedev’s house in Italy, Boris ‘behaved like a naughty schoolboy’, according to an aide. Socialising with billionaires was even better fun, especially New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, a hero for London’s scrimping mayor. At a party in Bloomberg’s Upper East Side mansion in 2009, Boris was the centre of attention. He had been born in New York, he liked to remind his audience, under a Puerto Rican health scheme because his parents were uninsured. Then he repeated a quip about the British in New York: ‘We have been easily distinguishable by our accents, by our irritating charm and by our inferior dentistry.’
Mixing with New York’s rich had been unexpectedly illuminating; Wall Street was under attack. Back in London, he no longer sympathised with bankers. Goldman Sachs announced that 5,000 senior staff would receive bonuses. ‘Unbelievable,’ wrote Boris in the Telegraph. Instead of protecting good businesses from bankruptcy, the bankers had ignored their social duty. London’s best houses, the media reported under negative headlines, were being snapped up at bargain prices. After surviving because of the taxpayers’ bailout, he sniped, the bankers’ hands, ‘stuffed with money – bulging, busting, ballooning with the biggest bonuses you ever saw [were] piling back into the yachts and villas’. Unfortunately, he was completely wrong: Goldman Sachs had not been bailed out by the British taxpayer and their London bankers paid taxes on their bonuses.1 He would not repeat his mistake. When George Osborne, a rival for the throne after Cameron, later complained about Boris protecting the bankers, he counter-attacked, paraphrasing Pastor Niemöller’s poem ‘First they came …’ about people staying silent while the Nazis murdered one group of victims after another. ‘First they came for the bankers and I said nothing,’ he wrote; ‘when they came for the trustafarian sons of wealthy wallpaper manufacturers, there was no one left,’ referring to Osborne’s family business.2 That rivalry between Boris against both Cameron and Osborne had set the scene for Manchester.
Unlike any other politician, Boris’s image was the result of extraordinary casualness. Even wearing a formal blue suit, he looked dishevelled. Tie askew, collar up, odd socks, a shoelace undone on his scuffed shoes was his normal appearance. The real man was reflected in his jogging outfit. Unwilling to spend money on unnecessary clothes, he emerged from his home or office wearing a woolly hat, an old shirt, shorts of a variety of colours and patterns, tatty trainers and occasionally a fleece of unknown provenance, not only looking a mess but also unhealthy. No one could contrive such an unattractive image: a pale-skinned man with a slightly bloated face, wide girth and chubby white legs. Altogether, he offered unrivalled authenticity.
While Cameron fretted about his image as a rich Old Etonian detached from the pain of normal life, Boris planned to mingle in the conference centre as a joker among the common man. To embarrass Osborne, he would praise wealth creation, promote low taxes as the only way out of the recession and denounce the 50p income tax for harming London’s financial industry. Boris boasted that 48,000 people in London were employed in tech. But, he questioned, why had no Briton created Facebook, Twitter, Google and the rest? Why, he wondered, did Britons not pocket billions like American inventors? The reason, he believed, was making money in America is ‘a good thing’ while in Britain it excited ‘chippiness and disgust’. No one, he said, had yet come up with a better way to run an economy than capitalism but the Tories were too fearful: ‘We are hostile to risk and more hostile to reward.’3 And now, thanks to Gordon Brown’s high taxes, unopposed by Osborne, Switzerland was successfully luring British hedge-fund managers and oil traders with low taxes. A trip to Brussels three weeks earlier had aggravated his fears.4
In his first visit after a twenty-year absence, his anger was reawakened. An extravaganza of new glass palaces were, he commented, ‘filled with overpaid, underworked, anonymous power-hungry Eurocrats’ led by a Spanish socialist who was pioneering regulations to stymie the City and Mayfair’s £400 billion hedge-fund business. Neither the Labour government nor Whitehall were combating the EU’s grab.5 Mindful of how Margaret Thatcher’s objections to Euro-federalism in Rome in 1990 had been ignored, Boris became agitated by the growing euro crisis. Forty per cent of Greece’s workforce was unemployed and its youth was fleeing north to find jobs. Berlin’s refusal to help the Greeks justified the Eurosceptics’ resistance to Britain joining the euro. The stakes in 2009 were just as serious. Britain, urged the Eurosceptics, should veto the Lisbon treaty formally agreed in June 2008 but still not ratified by Ireland and some other countries. Until all the EU member states had ratified the treaty, it did not come into force. Tory Brexiteers hung on the hope that Ireland would vote a second time against ratification.
Europe’s federalists rejoiced that the latest EU treaty further integrated the members into a European state. After Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice, Lisbon increased once again Brussels’ authority. Not only did the EU’s officials and parliament receive enhanced powers but the ability of member nations to veto EU proposals had been severely curtailed. Decisions taken by the British government about asylum, justice, health and social security could be overruled by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg. With EU embassies established across the world, Britain’s sovereignty was marginalised in foreign affairs. Several countries were obliged to hold a referendum to ratify the Lisbon treaty. Under its 2005 manifesto, Labour had been committed to a referendum but Tony Blair jettisoned that pledge in the hope of becoming the EU’s first president. Cameron refused to commit himself to a referendum to withdraw from the Lisbon treaty if every other EU country approved the agreement before he became prime minister. Boris arrived in Manchester prepared to challenge Cameron and demand a referendum.
Boris was not at that stage demanding a referendum to leave the EU. Quitting Europe was not his agenda. Rather, he wanted to stop the Eurocrats’ power-grab and Britain ‘being ripped off by Europe’. His latest complaint was the one-way traffic of EU students to get free university education in Britain – 62,000 EU students were studying in Britain and not paying any fees. And Britain was training EU citizens to be nurses for free. No EU country was training Britons to become nurses without payment.6 Europe, said Boris, was a ‘force for good’ but there should be limits.
‘It’s absolutely wonderful to be here in Manchester,’ Boris told the conference, ‘one of the few great British cities I have yet to insult.’ Then followed a masterclass in populism. The audience laughed both at Boris’s jokes and lapped up his delivery – the dramatic emphases, the pauses, and the ridiculous. Rhetorically, the audience was urged to agree with him and then were congratulated for sharing his opinion. To irritate Osborne, he urged British politicians to say loudly ‘we need bankers’. The rapturous applause annoyed the Telegraph’s journalists. Charles Moore regurgitated his story that Boris was always late with his column, while Simon Heffer predicted that Mayor Boris was ‘yet one more chapter in an epic of charlatanry’. The biggest critic was Cameron, fuming about being upstaged. As Boris got off the train in Euston on his return from Manchester, he read a text from Nick Boles, responsible for the future transition of the party into government. ‘Thanks a lot for your help this week, you cunt.’7 Boles continued, ‘La vendetta è un piatto che va mangiato freddo’ (Revenge is a dish best eaten cold).8
Boles’s fury was a pleasure to behold for Boris’s supporters. When Boris met Dave, a TV documentary broadcast during the conference, suggested their rivalry stemmed from the Bullingdon Club. Initially, Boris denied a split but the publication of Boles’s text in a newspaper encouraged him to be candid: ‘All politicians are fed by their mad vanity and suffer from the necessary delusion that they can rise further up the greasy pole. I think there are two things going on. One, it is fun to see if you can make sure people are ambitious and then watch them fail. But the other is a great group of people who are endlessly trying like wasps in a jam jar to be the survivor, because what politicians are doing is competing.’9 His own abilities, he admitted, gave him a ‘Messiah complex’.10
Unlike Cameron, Boris wielded real power as mayor, and sought to bask in his few successes, not least the introduction of bikes for hire across central London. On 12 September 2007, the Tory Quality of Life Group had publicised in an 800-page document a proposal to copy Paris’s rent-a-bike scheme.11 Livingstone had seized the Tories’ idea in February 2008 as an election promise but had done nothing more. He had not even sent a memo to TfL to research a scheme. No ‘bike file’ existed when Boris had told Peter Hendy that TfL should find a contractor and a sponsor.12 One year later, in August 2009, TfL signed a £140 million six-year contract with Bixi, the Canadian designer of the French bikes, to provide 6,000 bikes ‘at no cost to the taxpayer’.13 Forty-one improvements would be added by Kulveer Ranger, Boris’s bike tsar responsible for setting up the scheme, to prevent their theft and make them more attractive.
‘Boris Bikes’ produced a huge flutter of publicity. Asked whether he suffered any doubts, Boris replied, ‘I’m not very big on self-doubt.14 What was my biggest anxiety? God … I don’t want to sound as if I am a monstrous zeppelin of self-confidence, because obviously one constantly worries that something is going to go wrong … but that doesn’t mean that I don’t worry and I don’t work very hard because I do.’
No one was allowed to tell Boris that his bikes could not be self-financing. The five-year sponsorship deal with Barclays Bank would deliver only £25 million a year, a quarter of City Hall’s expectations. The ratepayers’ burden over the next eight years would be over £100 million. His manifesto pledge that the scheme would be ‘at no cost to the taxpayer’ would be broken. ‘We always knew that as public transport the bikes would need a subsidy,’ acknowledged Kulveer Ranger. The bad news was ignored in his pitch to launch not only the new bikes but also two major cycle highways across London and a £116 million campaign to promote cycling. For Boris this was a genuine cause. As more cyclists crowded onto the streets, an increasing number were being crushed underneath lorries. Better visibility from lorries’ cabs would help protect cyclists but, Boris discovered, EU laws prevented the British unilaterally ordering modifications. Brussels bureaucrats, beholden to the truck manufacturers, were refusing to impose new regulations. That became another reason to wage war against the EU but would not hamper the publicity blitz to unveil his innovation. Some commentators carped that the idea was inherited from Livingstone, which was untrue. The success entirely belonged to Boris. Two years later, Barclays chairman Marcus Agius complained that despite their £50 million sponsorship since the start of the scheme, they were known as ‘Boris Bikes’. ‘Give me another £50 million,’ Boris snapped back, ‘and I will change my name by deed poll to Barclays.’15
Boris Bikes gave him a temporary high. Re-election, however, depended on building new homes. Overcoming the obstacles required political compromises. Builders were going bankrupt in the ongoing fallout of the financial crash, and the handful of surviving developers would only submit plans for luxury flats in tower blocks.16 Before the election Boris had said about tower blocks, ‘I’ll stop this madness.’17 One year later, fearing that no homes would be built in London, his opposition to tower blocks waned. A conversation with the mayor of Denver persuaded him about political reality. Elected mayors, said the American, were judged ‘through the warped crystal of the city’s downtown skyline’. Electors wanted to ‘see the glowing red lights on cranes’.18
At his regular Friday morning meetings, Boris listened to the presentation of big schemes. Steve Norris witnessed the process: ‘He had never sat with a developer before, or ever considered planning. At one of the early meetings, the folder was opened and it was clear that Boris had not read it. He took decisions on the hoof and delegated the implementation to others.’ In rapid succession, he approved three towers in Waterloo, a forty-two-storey tower at Wandsworth, the sixty-three-storey Columbus Tower in Canary Wharf, and a twenty-five-storey tower in Ealing. ‘Boris is not keeping his promises,’ complained Simon Jenkins, the National Trust’s new chairman. He was fearful that Boris would also approve a 300-metre tower in Battersea, part of the Nine Elms redevelopment, visible from Hyde Park.
Prince Charles also intervened. Over the previous year, Charles had invited Boris to Clarence House to tell the mayor of his opposition to developers’ modernist plans. In 2009, Charles sought Boris’s support to stop the emir of Qatar’s £3 billion philistine development of Chelsea Barracks designed by Richard Rogers. Boris contributed to Charles’s success in changing the architect and the design, but he ignored Charles’s opposition to the 180-metre Gherkin in the City and approved a 150-metre tower in the Paddington Basin developed by the Reuben brothers. Campaigners would battle to reduce those heights but the outcome was delegated to Simon Milton. ‘I’ll sort it out,’ Milton reassured Boris. Milton’s skill, tact, intelligence and political expertise were invaluable to Boris, as was his wit on watching a video of Boris falling into a muddy river in Catford while trying to clear litter. ‘I’ve got the Standard’s headline,’ Milton quipped. ‘“River Crisis – Mayor steps in”.’
Boris’s reliance on Milton was a template for his style of government. Unlike most politicians, he knew his own vulnerabilities and identified Milton as a man who could protect him. Milton had expertise, and delivered advice and criticism in a way which enhanced Boris’s self-esteem. Milton knew the trick was to deliver advice palatably. Boris stepped away from anyone who suggested that he didn’t know his facts. The messenger was instantly scrutinised for loyalty, and judged whether to be allowed back into the room. Many critics failed the test and were jettisoned. Loyalty was rewarded but ultimately Boris would turn 180 degrees if necessary, because at the end of the day Boris was always and only loyal to himself. As Number One, he chose when to be generous and when to keep people out.
For the Tories’ most popular politician, the scene was set for the general election in May.