The two Old Etonians appeared together at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Standing in front of the red-uniformed pensioners, both knew that the dozens of journalists and photographers were waiting for the moment – a phrase or grimace – that would expose their rivalry. Boris had already ridiculed Cameron’s election showpiece – ‘Big Society’ – as ‘piffle’. ‘Any questions for the mayor?’ asked Cameron angling to score a revenge point. A pensioner demanded a better service from the 211 bus. Unfortunately, although Boris was stuck for an answer, he was not embarrassed. ‘Ask whether Dave will fund Crossrail,’ Boris urged another pensioner. Cameron ignored the comment. His opposition was well known. The sparring match ended in a bloodless draw. Cheekily, Boris wrote the following day an article praising Cameron for building a happy, united party for Europhiles and Eurosceptics to work in harmony.1
*
‘Shouldn’t you send Dave a text wishing him well?’ Guto Harri asked Boris on election day.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re old friends.’
‘I don’t see why I should wish him well.’
After some persuasion Boris sent a text: ‘Good luck Dave and don’t worry, if you bog it up I’m standing by to fill the gap.’ To reinforce his own qualifications, Boris listed the previous four prime ministers who, like himself but not Cameron, had been King’s Scholars at Eton.
‘It’s all gone tits up – call for Boris,’ Rachel Johnson tweeted as the prospect of a Tory majority faded. Vapid and unfocused, the Tory campaign against an unpopular government failed to secure an overall majority. Cameron could become prime minister only if he formed a coalition with Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader. Pouring poison, Clegg claimed that Cameron’s people operated a Boris loyalty test: ‘If you don’t like Boris you’re in.’ In reply, Boris dubbed the Lib Dems ‘a bunch of Euro-loving road-hump fetishists who changed their opinions in midstream like so many hermaphroditic parrotfish’.2 He said nothing publicly about Cameron beating him to Downing Street. Despite their common cause, Cameron regarded Boris as ‘full of jealousies and paranoias, which so often influenced his behaviour’. There was an unreliability and habitual mess about Boris which made Cameron laugh but also fuelled his unequivocal declaration: ‘I didn’t always trust him.’ That distrust also stemmed from Boris’s habit of speaking in sound bites and not following through on the substance. ‘I have a nine-point plan,’ Boris explained about driverless Tube trains, but he could not remember the points. Some assumed ‘nine points’ was an invention. Boris shared the same low regard for Cameron. After the new prime minister declared ‘I want a Boris in every city,’ the mayor replied, ‘I hope I can survive your endorsement.’3 After he was once again beaten at tennis by Cameron, Boris quipped, ‘He needs to sink a few thousand in his backhand,’ proving in Cameron’s opinion that although Boris was funny and attention-seeking he was keen to embarrass others to save face.4 As for Osborne, with whom he had little in common, Boris knew that he owed the new Chancellor a debt for helping to organise his mayoral election campaign and, although they were potential rivals for the leadership, he could not now squander the possibility of getting significantly more money for the capital.
Soon after the election, Boris cycled to Downing Street for what was later described as a ‘social call’. Looking as scruffy as usual, he parked his bike against the railings, took off his helmet and, carrying his rucksack, entered Cameron’s headquarters. The agreed agenda was money for Crossrail, the Tube and housing.
Quickly, they agreed to change the GLA Act which forbade the mayor spending money on housing. A new law would devolve power and guarantee money for housing to London’s mayor. That was an easy victory for Boris. The real battle was about transport. In Boris’s opinion, Cameron, like many politicians, used too many taxis and chauffeured cars and so was unsympathetic to funding improvements of public transport including Crossrail. Getting more money for London was obstructed by Osborne’s austerity cuts. Although the budget cuts in London were lower than in the rest of the country, Osborne had so far not allocated any new money for Crossrail or the Tube. During their conversation, Boris could see that Cameron was looking at the Treasury’s briefing paper setting out his opening offer and the maximum Boris could receive. Naturally Boris wanted to see it and Cameron refused. Lunging to grab it, Boris fell on the desk and Cameron pulled away. Wrestling on the ground to get hold of the document, both would later claim to have won ‘the battle of the paper’ but either way Boris left the building defeated. Continuing Labour’s policy, the government would not fund the Tube’s £1.4 billion repair programme and would frustrate Crossrail by cutting £5 billion from its budget.
In retaliation, Boris publicly threatened a ‘Stalingrad defence’ – presumably he meant that everyone would die in the ditch (except himself). Next, as his arguments with Osborne and Cameron intensified, he told newspapers that he was considering not running for a second term and returning to the Commons. In a mayoral election, Boris said, the Tories would be vulnerable to Labour unless he secured the money. The arguments became further embittered with the inclusion of Philip Hammond, the class-conscious Transport Secretary. In his opinion, Boris was a buffoon. Puzzled that Osborne bothered to take Boris seriously, Hammond, a dry accountant, pressed the Treasury’s demand that London’s transport budget be cut by between 25 and 40 per cent and Crossrail be cancelled. ‘I cannot and will not accept that,’ retorted Boris in an open declaration of war. ‘We have no choice but to make these improvements and any delay is a false economy.’5
In the midst of those negotiations, Boris displayed his seditious art of communication. Invited to address the Structure Finance Association, he arrived with his shirt hanging out, just thirty seconds before he was due to speak. ‘Now what’s this all about?’ he asked looking at a room of crusty financial experts. ‘Anyone got a pen?’ As he scribbled, he heard, ‘Pray silence for Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.’ Boris bounded to the lectern holding a scrap of paper. ‘I’m delighted to be here,’ he said, glancing behind him to read out the name of his hosts. In a speech about London, he included three jokes, one of which was his current favourite about Larry Vaughn, the mayor of Amity. In the film Jaws, the mayor refused to close the beach despite the shark, to protect the town from economic catastrophe. ‘OK, in that instance he was actually wrong,’ chuckled Boris, ‘but in principle, we need more politicians like that mayor!’ As a libertarian, he hated the ‘health and safety’ brigade’s imposition of limits on free choice despite the danger. He got a standing ovation.
This was very different from his performance at BP’s annual champagne celebration at the Victoria and Albert museum. He winged the twenty minutes with chunks of Latin and said nothing about the fate of oil or anything else, leaving the audience puzzled.
Prone to sudden bouts of depression, Boris’s performances varied hugely, reflecting his internalised torment. Not surprisingly for a man defeated twice in his bid to be London’s mayor, Steve Norris’s explanation was less sympathetic: ‘There was a recklessness in his approach and his language, not fuelled by malice but simply the greed of a polymath eager to consume every dish on the table, even though there was no possibility to digest them all. So he was not just the mayor, but a key national politician, and also a journalist, author and ran a mistress. He grabbed every opportunity.’ Boris’s hosts never knew what problem was uppermost in their speaker’s mind in the moments before he arrived – and at around this time Boris was having to deal with another dilemma of his own making.
In June, he had taken Marina to watch the football World Cup in South Africa. To their friends sharing the trip, they appeared a close couple. But the image of a contented family man was shattered by the Mirror’s headline on 15 July: ‘Is Bonking Boris to Blame?’ The newspaper reported that Pierre Rolin had left Helen Macintyre after he had taken a DNA test. Contrary to Macintyre’s assertion, Rolin discovered that he was not the father of Stephanie, her blonde-haired baby daughter, born in November 2009. ‘I can’t stop,’ shouted Boris at journalists as he cycled from his home. ‘I need to go and give a speech.’ Hours later, Boris appeared at a street party and, amid laughter, was photographed holding a baby girl. Lacking any contrition, he was angry that what he saw as prurient hypocrites had another excuse to seize his scalp.
Rolin had discovered Macintyre’s deception while coping with the debris of his collapsed business. ‘I was completely snowballed. I think he has no moral compass,’ Rolin said about Boris. ‘He thinks he is completely entitled and thinks he’s above it all. He will one day be accountable for all this and one day the truth will catch up with him.’6 On Stephanie’s birth certificate, Macintyre had omitted the father’s identity.
The routine in Islington was familiar. On Marina’s orders, Boris moved into a rented flat, a hundred yards away. ‘Kicked out of the house like a tom cat,’ said a friend. From there, Boris ordered takeaway curries, waited for his housekeeper to bring his ironed clothes and occasionally, when Marina was out, returned to the house to see his children.7 Tough and stoical, Marina appeared soon after at Rachel Johnson’s book launch near Covent Garden. She ignored Boris while he ebulliently posed for photographs. Asked why Boris had left the party without her, she smiled ‘There’s only one seat on his bicycle … It’s just the way we do things.’ Boris remained silent. After his denial six years earlier of the affair with Petronella, he explained, ‘I took a sort of vow ages ago that when bowled any sort of ball like that, the great thing to do is to watch it very carefully for as long as possible as it flies through the air, and then you stick your bat straight out, put your foot forward, block it and return to your crease.’8
Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail’s editor, would not tolerate Boris’s silence. To uphold family values, Dacre believed, ‘Politicians with scandalous private lives cannot hold high office.’ He was contemptuous of a man with ‘the morals of an alley cat’.9 He directed Stephen Glover, a columnist, to pour scorn on the adulterer. Under the headline ‘Selfish, lazy, arrogant’, Glover declared ‘My friend Boris thinks he can get away with anything (but I don’t think he’ll ever be PM)’. While admitting that Boris had never claimed to be virtuous, Glover denounced on Dacre’s behalf Boris’s ‘wild recklessness … born of a monumental arrogance’. Dacre was furious about Boris’s ‘utter conviction that he is a genius – and has persuaded others and the whole nation of his myth’. Anyone entering the jungle with Boris would not last fifteen minutes before he ‘ate … you, but with a smile on his face’. Echoing Dacre’s opinion, Glover concluded that ‘we expect little of Boris, other than to be entertained. He has a Mickey Mouse job as mayor of London, and his finger (thank God) is very far from the nuclear button.’ In Dacre’s opinion, Boris was ‘impossibly far from being prime minister’.10
In public, Boris agreed with Dacre’s conclusion. In a live radio interview on the same day, he refused to answer questions about Stephanie’s paternity but agreed that his ambitions were torpedoed. ‘I’ve got more chance of being reincarnated as Elvis Presley or as an olive as being prime minister,’ he admitted, reusing a familiar expression.11
Quite deliberately, in his own unceasing search for publicity, Stanley Johnson found himself in the spotlight. Asked for the first time whether Boris had merely copied his father and whether he, Stanley, had been unfaithful to Charlotte, Stanley replied, ‘These questions are not good. I was wholly faithful to Charlotte in all important respects.’ Adultery was not the only habit Boris inherited from Stanley.
Unexpectedly, Len Duvall, a Labour member of the London Assembly, was sympathetic. Boris, he said, clearly wanted to show his ‘appreciation’ of Helen and thought he would not get found out. The affair, said Duvall, did not expose Boris as bad but vulnerable – a man craving love and attention.12 Although Duvall’s perception of human weakness was rejected by the Daily Mail, the GLA standards committee was more tolerant. Hiring Macintyre on GLA business was described as an undeclared conflict of interest. Boris’s promise to ‘bear in mind the definition of a close associate for the future’, concluded the GLA’s investigation but not the saga. Helen’s application for an injunction to prevent the media naming Boris as Stephanie’s father was rejected by a High Court judge. The judge decided that Helen had already publicly disclosed the father’s identity through the media and that it was ‘a matter of public interest which the electorate was entitled to know when considering his fitness for office’. During her evidence, Helen had accepted that by embarking on an affair with Boris, she was ‘playing with fire’ and the affair was certain to attract media attention. Nevertheless, she appealed against the judgement and delayed any media reports. By then, Boris appeared to be immune to embarrassment. ‘I now see all these disasters are temporary, you can move on,’ he said, adding: ’As I discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities, and indeed opportunities for fresh disasters.’13
Luck always played a big part in Boris’s career and to his further good fortune, the debate about his adultery and the questionable record of his administration was knocked off the front pages by the revelation that Andy Coulson, the head of communications for David Cameron since 2007, was accused of telephone hacking while editor of the News of the World. Rocked by the outrage, Cameron held on to Coulson. Osborne, equally responsible for hiring Coulson, was also vulnerable. Downing Street’s instability boosted Boris’s struggle to overcome Osborne’s refusal to fund Crossrail.
Sheer willpower finally secured the Chancellor’s agreement in mid-October 2010 to approve the project, on condition that completion was delayed by one year and the budget reduced by £1.5 billion. In addition, Osborne agreed to fund the Tube’s improvements on condition that TfL staff would be reduced by 3,000 people, to save £5 billion over four years.14 ‘If you see a desk for sale in the Holloway Road,’ Boris told the next party conference, ‘it very likely comes from Transport for London,’ 4,232 TfL desks, he claimed, were sold.15 To help Boris’s re-election, Osborne would say, he agreed that Boris could claim to have won a bloody victory. The Chancellor was also pleased with his triumph. At Boris’s suggestion, the government had closed the LDA, saving £500 million a year but the Treasury returned only £130 million to London. Whitehall civil servants would chortle to the media that Boris had lost the money by failing to master the details.16 Insiders doubted that Simon Milton was so foolish and assumed it was all part of the deal.
Immediately, the jubilant Crossrail team ordered six 1,000-tonne machines to bore two tunnels under central London. Completion of the tunnels was set for 2015, nearly thirty years after Margaret Thatcher had initiated the project. There would be no political kudos for Boris in time for the 2012 election. His media celebrity sustained his political popularity but his re-election depended on proving substantial achievements as mayor. He needed to remove the negatives.
For months he had wavered whether to fulfil his election pledge and abolish the western congestion zone covering Notting Hill Gate and Kensington. Opposed by the majority of residents and businesses, TfL had alleged that it generated £55 million a year. Uncertain of the bogus benefits, Boris needed to win re-election and so reluctantly abolished it. The traders rejoiced.
He had also failed to honour his pledge to open three rape crisis centres. A summons from Clarence House solved that dilemma. Just as he was parking his bike, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, appeared. Taking Boris by the wrist, she said ‘You and me, upstairs now.’ In the course of the next hour, she told Boris how she had been assaulted on a train when she was seventeen. ‘I did what my mother told me. I took my shoe off and hit him in the nuts. And then I reported him to the police at Paddington.’ If Boris financed two rape centres, she promised, she would open them. ‘Oh God, what a woman,’ Boris told Guto Harri as they cycled back to City Hall. The ducks were falling into a row for the next election.
In another stroke of luck, Livingstone was reselected as the Labour candidate. The living ghost refused to disappear. Since there was no chance of Cameron departing before the 2015 general election, and as mayor he would shine during the Olympics, Boris declared he would run for a second term.17 The polls predicted a Boris victory. He would campaign, he said, to make London a ‘less selfish’ place by persuading more citizens to sign up as volunteers for charities and good causes. The issues on which Livingstone could attack him were the Tube and housing.
To save money, Boris had announced that he would close the Tube’s ticket offices, a clear breach of his election pledge to keep them all open. Since the general election, Hendy had persuaded him that Oyster and debit cards had removed the need for tickets. To save £400 million a year, the 800 staff should be sent on to the concourse to help passengers, to replace staff who resigned.
Coinciding with his re-election announcement, Bob Crow, the Marxist leader of the RMT, the Tube’s principal trade union, declared a strike to retain the ticket offices. In an obvious political manoeuvre to take revenge for Gordon Brown’s election defeat, the militants aimed to sabotage Boris’s chance of re-election. The strike would paralyse London. ‘Can’t we fire them all?’ Boris asked. ‘No, I can’t replace them all,’ Hendy replied. Attrition and recruiting more women was the only answer. In a bloody, bare-knuckle struggle with Crow, Hendy was determined never to let Boris negotiate with the trade unions. ‘If you let Crow into your office,’ Hendy told Boris, ‘he’ll never leave. You can’t trust what Crow says. He never ends a dispute, he just ends the strike. You have to call their bluff.’ Livingstone naturally ridiculed Boris’s refusal to meet Crow, although Livingstone’s own negotiations with the militant had not prevented countless strikes. To disarm Crow, Boris urged Cameron to pass a law deeming that a strike was legitimate only if 50 per cent of the entire workforce voted in favour, rather than a straight majority of those voting – in the current strike about 14 per cent voted to strike.18 Cameron agreed but then reneged. ‘A lily-livered government,’ pronounced Boris.19 Hours later, Boris received a text from Cameron: ‘Remind me to be helpful to you on May 3’, referring to the date of the mayoral election. The strike crippled London and then talks resumed. The cycle was endless. With rising fares, Boris was vulnerable.
That vulnerability increased after the government announced a cap on housing benefits which cost £15 billion a year. In London, a single mother with six children by different fathers was photographed outside her multimillion-pound home in Kensington, funded by the taxpayer. The government proposed to limit the total benefits to £21,000 a year. Welfare beneficiaries should not enjoy a lifestyle denied to the employed working class. Those working, said Cameron, should not subsidise those who chose to be unemployed or had children recklessly. With estimates that 82,000 households could be forced to relocate out of central London, Boris criticised Cameron’s policy as ‘draconian’. Fighting for every vote, his rhetoric became exaggerated. In a BBC radio interview, he damned the government’s ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’. That struck home. The prime minister, said Cameron’s spokesman, was ‘bristling with anger’.
Cameron delivered his revenge at the Spectator’s awards ceremony two weeks later. The magazine, said the prime minister, had been praised for writing seriously about sex: ‘After all, there’s been enough of that going on in your office.’ He focused on Ian Gilmour, who edited the magazine in the late 1950s and went on to become a Tory MP and Cabinet minister. Gilmour, educated at Eton and Oxford, was a man of inestimable charm with an enviable head of hair, always bursting with brilliant turns of phrase, yet dismissed by Margaret Thatcher. ‘But what went wrong for Ian?’ asked Cameron. ‘I suppose he rubbed up the prime minister the wrong way and never really recovered. Shit happens. Anyway there’s always the chance of Boris becoming our ambassador in Pristina, I suppose.’20 Boris hated being the target of laughter. Even worse, he had by then been under pressure to recant. His words about ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’ in the BBC radio interview, he said, were distorted. To divert attention from the humiliation, he blamed the BBC.21 ‘I don’t listen to Today or watch Newsnight or BBC News,’ he wrote. ‘It’s just not important anymore.’22 One of the mayor’s subsequent aides observed, ‘To Cameron, Boris was a cuddly irritating shit like a brother; a man who drove a hard bargain with good and bad ideas. Both Cameron and Osborne had to indulge Boris because he was a huge asset and everything good he did was good for the Tories.’
*
Walking across the road from Southwark Council’s headquarters to City Hall in early summer 2010, Peter John, the newly elected council leader, had been looking forward to meeting the mayor. A political earthquake had altered their shared priority in housing. As part of austerity, the Tory government had cut £6 billion from the budget of affordable housing. Boris would lose £100,000 for each new home built in London. The upside was his agreement with Osborne that under the proposed Localism Act, Bob Kerslake’s Homes and Community agency would be marginalised and the government’s powers over housing would be devolved to London. In an agreement between Boris and Osborne, the GLA was given for the first time a £3 billion annual housing budget and 625 hectares of land.23 Eighty specialist staff were recruited to manage development and boost building without Whitehall’s control. Boris also negotiated for London to keep a larger share of the business rates. With real power and money, Boris welcomed Peter John as an ally. For his part, John approved of Boris ‘love bombing’ developers to get investment. ‘He was flirting with you,’ an aide told John as they walked back to their offices. ‘Must be because I laughed at his jokes,’ replied John.
Boris had entered what he called a ‘parallel universe’. All his decisions on housing were criticised by the media but the boroughs and the building industry were supportive. His challenge was to persuade the boroughs and developers to start building houses. At a property exhibition in Cannes, Peter John surged towards Boris. ‘We could build 20,000 homes and more if you extend the Bakerloo Line from Elephant & Castle down to Lewisham and then towards Bromley.’ Boris stopped and listened. ‘We would call it the Boris Line,’ said John. ‘Absolutely, let’s do it,’ said Boris. He had already persuaded the government to fund a branch of the Northern Line to Battersea and also support the Silvertown tunnel under the Thames to North Greenwich. The next victory was an Act of Parliament to extend the Bakerloo Line. New housing would follow. The downside was those projects wouldn’t be completed for twenty years, long after his mayoralty.
Pulling levers fed his hunger for instant gratification. With great fanfare, he arrived in the Olympic Park to unveil his ‘Eiffel Tower’. The competition for the sculptural observation tower, financed by Lakshmi Mittal (his initial £10 million loan had increased to £16 million), had been won by Anish Kapoor, the Anglo-Indian sculptor. Kapoor was Boris’s second choice after Antony Gormley refused to make his tower accessible to the handicapped and then became ‘catastrophically difficult’. Most in Boris’s office, including Neale Coleman, sympathised with Gormley. ‘Boris has a weakness and enthusiasm for huge projects,’ recalled Coleman. ‘In Kapoor’s case, he had an excess of energy for an ill-conceived and worthless flashy project. Everyone thought it was crazy and too expensive.’24
The result was a 115-metre red tower, called ‘The Hubble Bubble’ by Boris because of its similarity to a shisha pipe, but officially called ‘Orbit’.25 Costing £19.1 million, it was described by critics as a ‘towering, twisted mass of metal’, ‘Meccano on Crack’, ‘gruesomely awful’, ‘meaningless, ugly, banal, clunky, downright embarrassing’, and a piece of art which is ‘useable’ and so ‘lost any integrity’. Undaunted, Boris hailed the tower as the symbol of ‘a city coming out of recession and the embodiment of the cross-fertilisation of cultures and styles that makes London the world capital of the arts and the creative industries’. Without telling Kapoor, he planned to turn the sculpture into a helter-skelter for paying visitors. When Kapoor found out, he was not pleased.
In his passion for ‘big things’, as Peter Hendy called them, Boris remained captivated by the idea of a cable car across the Thames. In unison, his close advisers led by Coleman knocked the idea but their advice was ignored. Once attached to a scheme, Boris could not be moved. Having initially sought sponsorship from James Murdoch of News International, in the end the £25 million cable car across the Thames was approved without Murdoch’s money after the hacking scandal broke, and the Emirates Air Line, operated by TfL, opened in June 2012.
Soon after, while cycling at 10.30 p.m. across London, Boris called Hendy.
‘Let’s build another cable car.’
‘Let’s not,’ replied Hendy. ‘Let’s do Crossrail 2.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ said the mayor.
That did not deter his plans for a pontoon promenade with buildings along the Thames from St Paul’s to the Tower, a fifteen-acre floating ‘town on stilts’ around the Royal Victoria Dock and, later, a twenty-two-mile ring road under London. Not surprisingly his usual critics lampooned his unreality. His reaction to those decrying his zany vision was unorthodox. So often, he complained, the loudest objectors to all his ideas were the socialist prophets of doom who ignored life’s improvements since 1950. The protestors refused to acknowledge that most people were richer, taller, healthier and their incomes had increased. Infant mortality was down, and life expectancy was up. The world had become a better place. He associated that progress with diluting state control and removing regulations. As a libertarian, he decried as anti-liberals those demanding health warnings on wine bottles, a ban on smoking in parks, forbidding an unaccompanied male to sit next to a child on an airplane, and demanding booster seats for ten-year-olds in cars. Imposing regulations, he believed, was the madness of a ‘bossy and nannying’ state. He associated his critics with antisocial extremists.26 The Occupy movement of ‘hemp-smoking fornicating hippies’ was less attractive to him than bankers; prison sentences, he argued, should be longer; and he ridiculed the ‘Stone Age religion’ obsessives about global warming. He applauded President George W. Bush for his ‘decision to crumple up the Kyoto protocol’. He was outraged that government lawyers were supporting British Airways’ refusal to allow a female employee to wear her small crucifix.27 Even the victims of hacking by the News of the World were lambasted for complaining. Believing that the allegations were politically motivated by Labour against News International, he dismissed the scandal as ‘codswallop’. After Andy Coulson resigned from Downing Street in January 2011, Boris refused to pursue a claim against News International for hacking his own telephone, through which they discovered his affair with Anna Fazackerley. He feared the publicity would expose ‘some extremely unpleasant interference in my private life’. Revisiting his adultery was unappealing.28 No other British politician spouted so many competing and sometimes illogical opinions, especially from one lauded as a master communicator.
Finding a common thread in all those activities and ideas was a challenge. As a man on a mission to establish his unique electoral appeal, or ‘Borisism’, and simultaneously understand for the first time the issues facing the less fortunate was an unusual political adventure. Unconventional and untainted by a fabricated morality, Boris’s free spirit was beyond Cameron’s comprehension. Despite the formal bonds of Eton, Oxford and the party, Cameron’s secure English traditionalism had nothing in common with a mixed-race outsider shooting daily from the hip to survive. Naturally, Cameron did not trust a man he could not understand. At the time, the gulf of misunderstanding between the two did not matter. In his ineffable manner, Cameron’s gift was to make the coalition work. But having failed utterly to rout Labour, Cameron’s mistakes made Boris’s re-election harder.
*
By spring 2011, one year before the next mayoral election, the mayor’s initiatives had been resonating with some Labour voters. Boris, the Guardian grieved, had defied those ‘convinced that the gaffe-prone Johnson would make a hash of it’.29 But in April, he suffered a serious blow. Simon Milton, his chief of staff responsible for saving his reputation, died of cancer aged forty-nine. No one could entirely replace the wisdom and experience of the former president of the Cambridge Union. The best substitute was Eddie Lister, the leader of Wandsworth Council for nineteen years. Lister, a Thatcherite cost-cutter, had the experience to protect Boris, solve problems and implement decisions. He inherited an efficient machine but with limited achievements to present to the electorate. Better things than bikes and improved Tube services would need to be promised for a second term. Winning, however, had become uncertain. Boris feared that Londoners were fickle and his future was on a knife edge.
David Cameron understood the importance of Boris’s victory. Although Boris’s 7 per cent lead over Livingstone was encouraging, austerity was damaging the Tory Party. In the capital, the Tories were running 20 per cent behind Labour. In May, Cameron invited Boris and Marina to dinner. There was no hint of the Johnsons’ estrangement the previous year. Their reconciliation had been sealed with a family holiday in India and Boris’s declaration after his return to the marital home, ‘I think I am very lucky and happy.’30 Cameron, the perfect gentleman, made no reference to their personal troubles. His purpose was to remove the disruptive rivalry with the mayor, aggravated by a poll making Boris more popular than Cameron, at 57 per cent to 43 per cent.31 Cameron’s initiative failed.
To win re-election, Boris had decided to decouple from the government. He had already criticised Cameron’s intervention in Libya, warning against repeating the ‘appalling mistakes of Iraq’ by boasting ‘mission accomplished’.32 On the eve of more Tube strikes, he once again accused ministers of being ‘adolescents’ for failing to introduce tougher anti-strike laws. Only 11 per cent of the Tube’s 3,429 drivers had voted for the latest strike. The law, Boris advocated, should impose a 50 per cent threshold. At the last moment, the strike was called off but Bob Crow won the final round. To prevent strikes during the Olympics, Boris agreed that the drivers’ basic pay would be increased to £52,000 plus a bonus. For sitting in a cab while a computer controlled the train, most drivers were earning £65,000 plus long holidays and other perks.33 To Boris’s anger, Cameron was not prepared to take on the trade unions and the trains were still unreliable. Just after he was photographed in a Jubilee Line train to publicise the new signalling system, another train on the same line broke down in the morning rush hour, causing misery for thousands travelling to Canary Wharf. That would inevitably risk votes.
Getting positive attention was not always easy. The media kept repeating the same negative anecdotes and occasionally he even had to push his way through a crowd towards the photographers. At an event in west London’s Botwell Green Library with Peter Andre, the singer, he could see the photographers deliberately cutting him out of the photo. Determined not to be outshone, he sat himself right next to Andre. Even so, most newspapers featured photos without him. He certainly would not invite Cameron to help his election campaign. In fact, soon after their dinner, Boris addressed 780 former members of Pop, the society of Eton prefects distinguished by their spongebag trousers and brightly coloured waistcoats, on their 200th anniversary. Not having been elected to Pop, Cameron was not among them. Inevitably, Boris could never resist highlighting Cameron’s invisibility at the school. ‘Never apologise to the ordinary members of the school,’ Boris said in his after-dinner speech alluding to Cameron. ‘Greasing is the key to success in life.’34
Soon after, as a goodwill gesture to Marina, Boris booked a summer holiday, driving a Winnebago motorhome with his family through the Canadian Rockies. As he set off at the end of July, he had overseen massive turmoil at Scotland Yard. The problems, he hoped, were resolved. Instead, the unforeseen presented the greatest threat to his re-election.
Under Met commissioner Paul Stephenson, he believed, the headlines had improved. Operation Blunt Two, the police’s stop-and-search exercise, had curbed knife crime and the murder rate had reduced by 50 per cent to just one hundred per year, the lowest since 1969. In six weeks, 26,777 people had been searched, 1,214 had been arrested and 528 weapons were seized. During the year, over 10,000 knives had been confiscated. These were good headlines. As usual, there was also bad news. Sky News had followed Stephenson and an army of policemen in a drugs raid. The police burst into the wrong address. ‘Don’t worry,’ Boris told the apologetic commissioner, ‘you’re speaking to the great custard-pie man of British politicians – just lick it off.’
Relations with Stephenson had been temporarily shaken after a special constable read Boris’s description in a Telegraph article of his purloin of Saddam Hussein’s cigar case during a visit to post-war Baghdad. ‘You must give it up,’ he was told by the constable, citing the crime of seizing an antiquity. ‘This is political correctness gone mad,’ replied Boris. ‘No, it’s the law,’ insisted the policeman. For several weeks, Boris resisted and then surrendered. The cigar case’s fate remains unknown.
That triviality was overshadowed by substance. Contrary to his election pledge, he was forced by Osborne’s austerity immediately to reduce the force by 455 policemen. ‘Barking,’ he said. Within a £3.4 billion budget for London’s police, the saving was a gesture but alarming before an election. Police numbers would influence crime statistics and headlines were his priority. Notably, in his discussions with Stephenson, he never raised the fundamental changes required to eliminate Scotland Yard’s incompetence. In spite of the evidence in 2011 that the Yard was still reluctant to reform itself, Boris remained uninterested in the flaws of its governance.
First, Scotland Yard had lied about the death of Ian Tomlinson, a gentle, elderly newspaper vendor. In the midst of policing a demonstration in central London in April 2009, a policeman had fatally struck Tomlinson from behind. For a week, Scotland Yard had denied the truth until the Guardian produced a handheld video of the assault. Stephenson took one week to suspend the delinquent police officer, not for the assault but because he had been previously disbarred from employment by the Met. To avoid embarrassing Stephenson, Boris did not demand an inquiry into Tomlinson’s death.
The Yard’s ineptitude had also been exposed after the conviction in March 2009 of John Worboys, a London black cab driver. He had raped nearly a hundred women passengers after offering them spiked drinks. Dozens of women had reported Worboys’ attacks to the police but had been ignored. The officers in question were not fired by Stephenson and Boris did not insist they were sacked.
Finally, in April 2009 Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick had been photographed walking along Downing Street holding an open folder revealing the details of an imminent secret anti-terrorist operation. In the furore, Quick’s home was identified by the media as the base for his family’s wedding business. To City Hall’s surprise, Stephenson did not want to fire Quick for that double breach of security. Instead, he proposed to promote him to run the Territorial Support Group of 800 specialist police officers. Hearing that Theresa May, the Home Secretary, had mentioned, ‘Quick must go’, Boris summoned the BBC and announced Quick’s resignation before the policeman had a chance to submit it. ‘It’s a matter of sadness,’ Boris told the BBC, ‘as he had a very, very distinguished career in counter-terrorism.’35 Quick’s departure was not a signal of City Hall’s uncompromising purification of the Yard. Rather, Boris was taking revenge for Damian Green’s arrest and a recent embarrassment in Parliament.
Despite his impulse to win people’s affection, there were some characters who excited Boris’s unmitigated venom. One was Keith Vaz, the dishonest Labour chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. During his editorship of the Spectator, Boris had shamed the ‘ludicrous’ MP with his ‘snout in the trough’ over his family’s management of a questionable visa business and his month’s suspension from Parliament for misconduct in 2002. Not surprisingly, Vaz had long sought his revenge, and Boris’s involvement after Green’s arrest in November 2008 was a good reason to summon him before the committee the following February to settle some scores. The mayor was asked whether, in conflict with his role as chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, he had spoken to Green after his arrest. ‘I must invoke the doctrine of the Holy Trinity here,’ replied Boris. ‘I am all three-in-one and one-in-three.’ The MPs were left speechless. By refusing to answer the question, Boris appeared to incriminate himself. Worse, asked whether he had discussed Green’s arrest with David Cameron when they met later that same day at a church service, Boris gave the wrong answer.
At first, Boris denied making any comments to Cameron.36 Later, he admitted in a letter to Vaz that he had made a mistake. They had spoken about Green both at the church service and also earlier on the same day on the telephone after the arrest had taken place. Either deliberately or because he failed to prepare himself, Boris had given the committee false information.37 Boris’s admission was publicised. Accused of lying, the media reported he would be recalled by the committee.
At 7.10 p.m. that same day, Boris telephoned Vaz. ‘I’m so fucking angry,’ Boris screamed at Vaz for making him look a fool. Unaware that Vaz had allowed someone to record their conversation, a transcript of their heated exchange was quickly released. Boris was caught out. Although he was cleared of a conflict of interest, he was exposed as unreliable and unwise.38
To avoid future embarrassment and manage his other commitments, in January 2010 Boris handed over the chairmanship of the police authority to Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor for police since 2008. Malthouse, a former accountant and one of Simon Milton’s protégés at Westminster Council, shared Boris’s indifference about cleaning up the Yard. Without their fingers firmly on the Yard’s pulse, neither anticipated how matters could quickly get out of control.
After delegating his power, Boris was not troubled about Stephenson’s battle with Home Secretary Theresa May over Operation Blunt. Convinced that stop-and-search was disproportionately targeting black youths, she accepted her civil servants’ advice that the Met remained racist. In her meetings with Stephenson, May voiced her doubts that the senior officer was enforcing diversity. Fearful that 55 per cent of London’s young blacks were unemployed, Boris had attempted to discuss the festering violence with May but, hiding behind her officials, she refused to engage with the mayor. Boris retreated, unaware that her anti-police rhetoric and demand for a reduction of police numbers had reignited a schism between Stephenson and his ranks. Her obduracy was undermining Stephenson’s faltering attempts to cure his tarnished inheritance from Ian Blair. And then, in November 2010, the wobbly edifice was shaken by the abrupt departure of Stephenson. Struck by cancer, he took leave for treatment. His temporary replacement was Tim Godwin, an intelligent but inexperienced officer. Over the following seven months, neither Boris nor Malthouse was aware that Stephenson’s absence had sparked the resumption of acrimonious warfare among the Yard’s senior officers. As Godwin’s credibility evaporated, morale deteriorated. Theresa May was similarly blind to the disarray. Fearing dire consequences of Godwin’s waning authority, Stephenson returned prematurely to the Yard. Although still manifestly weak from cancer, the decent officer walked into a storm.
For some months, there had been suspicion that Scotland Yard’s investigation of the News of the World hacking operation against hundreds of celebrities had been deliberately buried. There had been few criminal convictions and News International’s emphatic denials of any wrongdoing had been corroborated by Scotland Yard’s announcement that the allegations of a cover-up were not supported by the evidence. That changed in January 2011. Under pressure from the victims, politicians and the Guardian, Scotland Yard reluctantly reopened its inquiry. By July, a series of discoveries and arrests had enmeshed Rupert Murdoch’s empire in serious crimes, not least hacking the phone of Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old Surrey schoolgirl, soon after her murder in 2002. Dowler’s phone had been hacked with the knowledge of the News of the World’s senior staff including Andy Coulson, the editor.
Tim Godwin and Stephenson underestimated the gravity of the hacking. Neither could grasp that a handful of senior Scotland Yard officers had repeatedly failed to discover the truth. They were not helped by Boris’s affection for Murdoch, encouraged no doubt by his need for the tycoon’s media support, and his perfunctory dismissal of the victims of bugging. ‘I bet that virtually the whole of Fleet Street was involved (and may still be involved),’ he wrote inaccurately.39 In that vein, Stephenson dismissed the cover-up allegations as ‘white noise’ and a distraction from investigating terrorism and murder.
On 14 July 2011, Neil Wallis, the former executive editor of the News of the World, was arrested as a hacking suspect. On the same day, Stephenson admitted that in 2009 he had hired Wallis, alias the ‘Wolfman’, as a speech-writer and adviser. For some, that link between Scotland Yard and News International explained the police’s refusal to investigate the hacking. The crisis at the Yard could no longer be ignored. The Met had recently been criticised for allowing violent anarchist demonstrators to attack Tory Party headquarters and later dangerously threaten Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, in her car. In the commissioner’s absence, his loss of control over the Yard had become glaring. Summoned by Boris, Stephenson’s explanations of the Yard’s conduct were unconvincing. At the end of the ninety-minute meeting, no instant solution had been agreed. Pertinently, Boris refused to take responsibility for the Yard’s conduct and Malthouse remained silent.
Hours after their meeting, Stephenson admitted to a media inquiry that he had accepted three weeks’ hospitality in a friend’s health resort to recover from his illness. In normal circumstances that gift could have been brushed aside but Neil Wallis was also the resort’s public relations executive. Wallis’s double relationship with Stephenson was damning.40 On Sunday 17 July, Stephenson resigned. ‘This will go down as the most honourable resignation since Carrington,’ Boris told Stephenson, the fourth commissioner in ten years, referring to the Foreign Secretary’s resignation in 1982 for failing to anticipate the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands.
Andy Coulson’s employment as the Downing Street spokesman now linked David Cameron to the News of the World’s sleaze. In City Hall, Boris denied any error of judgement or responsibility for the crisis. But he lacked any track record to demonstrate his attempts to cure the Yard’s malaise. With his back to the wall, he needed a scapegoat. The media had alighted on John Yates, the Yard’s assistant commissioner. In 2009, after a cursory search through the records, Yates had declared that there was no reason to reopen the hacking inquiry. Two years later, Yates’s mistake appeared inexcusable. ‘You’re affecting my brand,’ Boris told Yates. ‘You’ll have to go too.’ Malthouse added, ‘Resign or you’ll be suspended.’ To his lasting regret, Yates resigned on Monday 18 July, the day after Stephenson’s resignation. Shortly after, Boris invited the loyal officer for a drink in City Hall. ‘I’m terribly, terribly sorry,’ said Boris, giving the impression, as he had years earlier while politely drinking tea with John le Carré, that while plunging the knife he still wanted to be loved.
The hacking storm headed off in other directions, searching for other culprits. Stephenson returned to sick leave, while Boris, unconcerned by the Yard’s disarray and Godwin acting again as commissioner, set off with Marina and their four children for their summer holidays in the Canadian Rockies. On the eve of departing, he had agreed without protest that London’s police numbers would be reduced by 1,900 – another breach of his election pledge to increase the number of officers to above 32,500.
With unfortunate policies and unsuitable people in authority, Boris had not properly understood the consequence of ignoring explicit warnings. The mishaps of Ian Tomlinson, John Worboys, Bob Quick and the News of the World’s hacking all signalled the decay at Scotland Yard but Boris and Malthouse failed to come to the obvious conclusion. A few days later, on 4 August 2011, an undercover policeman shot Mark Duggan, a twenty-nine-year-old black criminal, in Tottenham, north London. No one had foreseen the outcome of failing to remove the putrefaction at the Yard.