Two days after Mark Duggan’s death, a small protest by his friends accelerated into riots across north London. With no experience of civil unrest, Godwin reassured Kit Malthouse at the end of the first day that the situation was under control. The following day, a Sunday, the riots spread to north-east London and then down to Brixton in south London. Despite indiscriminate looting and burning, the police failed to intervene effectively and a police commander in north London went on holiday. At the end of the weekend, Godwin resisted asking outside forces to send reinforcements to the capital. That night, in a telephone conversation Malthouse reassured Boris that there was no reason to abandon his holiday. Neither man grasped that Stephenson’s and Yates’s departures had destabilised the Yard. Nor did they consider their reliance on Godwin, who had emerged as an artless officer whom Stephenson no longer trusted. Without considering their successive misjudgements over the previous two years, Boris was relieved to be told that the police had London’s streets under control, and for the next hours he continued to drive through the Rockies without questioning his reliance on Godwin. Naturally, the same questions should have been asked by Theresa May and the Home Office, but the department, still unreformed since John Reid the Labour Home Secretary judged it ‘unfit for purpose’ in 2006, was incapable of taking any initiative.
On Monday morning, thousands of masked looters began to rampage across the capital, setting buildings alight and attacking people. Among the targets in flames was a beloved family-run furniture store in Croydon which had survived the Blitz. Cowed, 6,000 police abandoned areas to the mob, doing nothing but watch rampant criminality. That night, Cameron and May headed back from their holidays to London. In Canada, Boris realised the severity of the situation and decided to return to Britain on his own. ‘I was watching the TV news in Calgary waiting for a plane,’ he wrote. ‘I felt a sickening sense of incredulity that this could really be happening in our city … I felt ashamed.’1
On Tuesday, the prime minister chaired an emergency Cobra meeting in the Cabinet Office. Theresa May was there but, since Boris was still flying back to London, he was represented by Malthouse. Godwin’s mistakes had heaped humiliation onto the three politicians but the police chiefs at the meeting were unapologetic about their failure to restore order. While Malthouse endorsed the Yard’s strategy of retreat from the mob, Cameron was extremely critical. He ordered an extra 10,000 police to be deployed on the streets immediately. To promote herself after the meeting, May told the waiting media that she had cancelled all police leave.
After Boris arrived at Heathrow, he joined May and headed for Clapham, a scene of shocking destruction. Together they listened with glazed looks to the residents’ fury about the police absence as bricks had smashed through their windows. As the crowd began to jeer and heckle, May walked backwards and then disappeared. Boris was left to take the blame although the final responsibility for the police failure was in fact hers. On the street, Boris refused to criticise the police. They had, he said, performed ‘brilliantly’.2 The fault, he said, was the government’s, and especially May’s, for cutting police budgets and officers.
That night, the police struck back at the politicians. Scotland Yard described Cameron’s criticism of the police as a ‘miscalculation’. On BBC TV, Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, declared that the three politicians’ dramatic return to London was ‘an irrelevance in terms of tactics that were by then developing’. He continued, ‘The vital distinction between policing and politics remains. The police service will make the tactical decisions.’ Brusquely, he scolded May about cancelling police leave. ‘She can’t do that,’ said Orde. ‘She doesn’t have that power.’ The extra police, he added, had been ordered not by Cameron but by Godwin. In dealing with the riots, he said, the police had been hampered by the European human rights laws. No one accepted that feeble and inaccurate excuse. Everyone was outraged by the TV footage showing police officers idly watching the rioters and not using their statutory powers to impose law and order. Orde’s reproach on TV coincided with the end of Cameron’s dinner with Boris in Downing Street.
Among Cameron’s positive qualities were his integrity and friendship, regardless of Boris’s disruptive opposition. Cameron had cooked steak and potatoes for the two of them. Yet, despite their laughter and teasing, at the end Boris refused to abandon his own interests.
On morning radio hours later, Boris criticised the government for imposing the police cuts – by then 1,126 had gone. The cuts, he said, saved £2 billion, which represented a 20 per cent reduction in the police budget. ‘Mayors always want more money,’ Cameron replied angrily. Boris, he discovered, was irked by the accusation that the riots were his ‘Hurricane Katrina moment’ (referring to George W. Bush’s failure to act speedily in 2005 after New Orleans was deluged), a charge that would be used against him in the following year’s mayoral elections. Boris assumed the media story deriding his late return to London from his holiday was put out by the government. In reality, it originated in the Guardian. ‘He was being paranoid,’ Cameron recalled in his memoirs, ‘and frankly at this stage of the proceedings a massive irritation.’ The mayor, continued Cameron, ‘was veering all over the place’. Cameron refused to cancel the police cuts.3
The mayor arrived ten minutes late at that Wednesday’s Cobra meeting, or as one police chief smiled, ‘fashionably late, performing to show that he was independent of the government’. The sight of the mayor, sweaty and puffing as he took off his cycle helmet and protective clothing, irritated Theresa May. Cameron was also visibly annoyed. The mayor had missed Godwin’s briefing and then contributed to a moment of farce. People in east London, the politicians were told, were suspicious of officers whose uniforms carried the word ‘Heddlu’. ‘What’s Heddlu?’ asked Boris. ‘You should know,’ snapped Cameron. ‘You once stood in a Welsh seat. It’s “police”.’
The next day, 11 August, the riots in London were over. Thousands of extra police and mass arrests suppressed the mob. The costs were an estimated £200 million, but the damage to Boris’s reputation at that moment was incalculable. Criticised for delaying his return from holiday, he was also attacked on the BBC for lacking sympathy for both the rioters and their victims. His behaviour appeared to endorse the caricature of him as a lazy toff. In truth, his continuing incomprehension about Scotland Yard’s dysfunction reflected his misunderstanding of governance. Typically in these serious circumstances, no one would dare to explain his mistakes to his face. Critics were not readmitted to his office.
Boris did not blame Kit Malthouse for his late return from Canada. Instead, he turned on the BBC for calling the looters ‘protestors’ against politicians and bankers. ‘People were not stealing because Gerald Kaufman, a Labour MP, had claimed a flat-screen TV on his expenses,’ he wrote. Seventy-five per cent of those charged had previous convictions. They were known criminals, members of ‘a feral underclass’, not rioting to alleviate their poverty. ‘The young rioters were betrayed by the educational system and their families who failed to give them discipline or hope or ambition.’ He blamed London’s ‘chillingly bad’ schools, turning out illiterate and innumerate youths, for creating rioters.4 He refused to blame the police. They were the victims of ‘squeamishness’, he believed. ‘We politicians speak with forked tongue to the police.’ His solution: ‘Robust policing is essential.’
With that mindset, Boris’s priority in choosing a new commissioner, with Theresa May, was again to reduce crime. Once again, he showed no interest in transforming the Yard. He agreed with May to exclude the ideal candidate for that task – Hugh Orde, Ulster’s successful police chief. Orde was not forgiven for criticising Boris, Cameron and May in his BBC TV interview. That left Bernard Hogan-Howe from Merseyside as the last man standing. Once again, Boris failed to scrutinise the candidate’s qualifications: he had never served as a senior front-line policeman or as a detective but had been responsible for human resources. He was also regarded by some police critics as a bully who, said many in the Yard, ‘always thinks he’s right’. Although Hogan-Howe disliked politicians, he skilfully conceded to them, especially their demands for cuts. There was neither boldness nor pragmatism in Boris’s choice. Hogan-Howe was appointed to fill a void.
Only Boris understood that his lack of interest in Scotland Yard’s fate was influenced by his obsession with the party’s leadership. So often, he was focused on his rival George Osborne, and the recurring fear that his dream of entering Downing Street with a wave to the flashing cameras might end as a nightmare, cheated of the chance. Just before the party conference in October 2011, Osborne called Boris. ‘Please, no fireworks,’ the Chancellor pleaded.
‘What’s it worth?’ asked Boris.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Osborne.
‘Well I’m sitting in front of a blank screen and I’ll write to support an EU referendum on Lisbon if you don’t give an additional £93 million to the Met.’
‘Are you joking?’ asked Osborne.
‘I need to fulfil an election pledge,’ replied Boris.
Osborne succumbed.
‘The best-paid column I’ve never written,’ quipped the mayor.5
The party conference was a lull before the storm. In his showcase speech, Boris delighted his fans. ‘Pay your car tax or it will be towed away,’ he warned. ‘You’ll get it back in a small box for Christmas.’ Pause. ‘From crusher with love.’ His great pleasure was Theresa May’s embarrassment after she claimed, in a rant about immigration, that one particular illegal immigrant could not be deported because their human rights to stay in Britain were protected by the court’s refusal to separate them from their pet cat. That was untrue. Seeing a rival crumble always pleased Boris.
His crunch moment was a fringe meeting on the EU. His promise to Osborne was forgotten. Europe’s leaders, he believed, were living in ‘a fool’s paradise’ advocating a closer union to solve the euro crisis. That, he told his admirers, was ‘absolutely crazy’. To halt the federalism, he called for a referendum on the Lisbon treaty and, for the first time, an in-out vote. Reports of the speech quickly reached Cameron. Boris, he said in fury, was playing with fire, pandering to the party’s Eurosceptics. David Nuttall, a Tory MP, was planning to introduce a motion in the Commons to hold an EU referendum. Cameron intended to order a three-line whip to defeat the Eurosceptics. Boris was not aligned with Nuttall but he wanted to be recognised as a contender for the leadership. Asked whether he would run for Parliament in 2015 and be the next party leader, Boris replied, ‘There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hades of a return … I don’t think I’ll do another big job in politics after this.’6 Naturally, he was not believed.
In Westminster, meanwhile, Cameron was struggling to control his party. Although Nuttall’s motion was defeated, the EU’s crisis emboldened the Eurosceptics. To save the euro, the EU leaders decided in November to strengthen their fiscal union. Without consulting Britain, they proposed a new treaty with new regulations to be imposed on the City, including extra transaction taxes. Cameron’s protests were ignored. To save himself, on 11 December, Cameron vetoed the treaty. The 26-to-1 vote marked another step on Britain’s drift away from the EU.
Boris praised Cameron for ‘playing a blinder’ and predicted that the eurozone would break up within one year.7 To reinforce his position, he attacked EU regulations protecting European sugar-beet producers. Tate & Lyle, the famous British sugar refiner, needed sugar cane and not sugar beet to make its golden syrup. But the EU’s high tariffs on imported sugar cane, Boris protested, penalised the company. To prove his Euroscepticism, he joined Iain Duncan Smith at the end of January 2012 in Downing Street, to urge Cameron to resist the EU’s latest treaty changes and agree to an in-out referendum. Cameron rejected the idea. After the meeting, both Duncan Smith and Cameron were puzzled about Boris’s Euroscepticism. His real motive, they suspected, was self-interest. At that moment, everything was focused on Boris being re-elected mayor for the second term.
Over Christmas, Ken Livingstone had leapt to an 8-point lead. Boris was panicking. Grandstanding was the only way he knew to win back voters, even at Cameron’s expense. During a visit to the Olympic Park, Cameron watched Boris climb up to a ten-metre diving platform to promote his successful legacy plans. Down below, Cameron swallowed his irritation about being upstaged.8