Three months before the 2012 mayoral election, Boris faced the prospect of watching the Olympics on TV, rather than in the stadium as mayor. The chance of defeat was real. London had endured days of rioting, repeated Tube strikes, fares had increased by 40 per cent and the polls put the Tories 17 per cent behind Labour in the capital. To be certain of victory, however, Livingstone still needed to land some punches. Boris’s good fortune was Livingstone’s inability to find new angles to malign his opponent, both politically and as a person.
Boris had originally intended to campaign on building Boris Island, his Estuary airport, the cable car across the Thames and a pledge to finance more culture and street parties. Then he summoned Lynton Crosby. The Australian derided Boris’s ideas. The real issues, he pronounced, were the police, crime, housing, transport and the economy. Just stick to five points, he ordered his client. Stay on message, focus on limited issues and suppress your instincts. ‘Lynton’s taking the bubbles out of the champagne,’ Guto Harri later reflected, making the campaign more tribal and less interesting. Occasionally, the authentic Boris did burst out of Crosby’s shackles.
Walking along the pavement or as he cycled across London, excited pedestrians shook Boris’s hand, took a selfie or shouted their opinions during what he called ‘a rolling focus group’. Cartoon caricature or celebrity, they loved his star quality. Regardless of his personal life and betrayal of his wife, women liked the rogue. Cheered by taxi drivers and multimillionaires, his raw political instincts offered optimism. Passionate, unafraid and never seemingly cruel, voters did not necessarily believe he was the mayor for the poor but people trusted him because of his scruffy appearance. Neither waxen nor a stereotype, he appeared to speak honestly, avoiding politicians’ clichés. The best rhetorical approach, Boris believed, was to use simple words that people understood. ‘If you want to be heard you have to speak plainly.’ ‘It doesn’t matter where you come from as long as you know where you’re going,’ said a man who never apologised for his Etonian background.1 He certainly never mentioned his childhood suffering.
London was thriving. The City was recovering after the 2008 crash, and cranes filled the skyline. Boris’s critics gave him no credit for that revival and he was forbidden by Crosby to stray off his script. The simplicity of Boris’s message was the daily target of the metropolitan moralisers. Left-wingers highlighted the absence of any political ideology or ‘core message’. The critics on the right, especially Matthew Parris and Max Hastings, agreed that his charisma alone might bring victory, but nothing else. They disliked the man and denied there was a message.2 His critics were deaf to his compassionate, cosmopolitan Conservatism – an amnesty to illegal immigrants, a higher minimum wage, lower taxes, better education and Euroscepticism. That message did appeal to some Labour voters and he relied on them to reject Livingstone. ‘You can’t trust Ken,’ Boris repeated again and again. Livingstone had left City Hall in a toxic atmosphere and his key promise to cut fares depended on Cameron supporting a £1.2 billion Labour giveaway. That, said Boris, was unlikely.3
‘Don’t vote for a joke’ was Livingstone’s line in 2008, but few now believed Boris was a joke. In his search for new weapons, Livingstone deployed the class card. Four years earlier, Boris had referred to his £250,000 annual Telegraph fee as ‘chicken feed’. That comment, and Boris’s support for bankers, was flagged widely by Livingstone in interviews. Livingstone also attacked the Routemaster buses, which suffered from design faults including ventilation failures. In late February, the campaign was a stalemate. The Evening Standard, by then a freesheet with declining influence, provided little support. Crosby launched the nuclear option.
By undisclosed means, Andrew Gilligan, Livingstone’s nemesis, discovered that Livingstone charged for his work through a limited company. Rather than paying 50 per cent income tax, Livingstone was liable only for the lesser 20 per cent corporation tax on his profits. His effective tax rate was 14.5 per cent. Although his scheme was wholly legitimate, Livingstone had waged war against ‘rich bastards’ and ‘tax dodgers’ who should ‘not be allowed to vote’. Combined with the creeping realisation that Livingstone’s association with Muslim extremists reflected his anti-Semitism, his exposure as a hypocrite hit his poll ratings.4
Sensitive to his fate four years earlier, Livingstone struck back. During a live radio discussion Livingstone accused Boris of also avoiding taxes. ‘You are absolutely lying,’ Boris told Livingstone. ‘You’re a bare-faced liar.’ As the two descended in a lift after the programme, Boris screamed ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ Livingstone’s allegation was completely false. As the idea of ‘Livingstone the tax dodger’ took hold, Boris pulled 6 points ahead in the polls.5
And then the polls during late April swung against him again. Newspaper headlines in March 2012 about Osborne’s ‘omnishambles’ budget highlighted a flawed ‘Granny’ tax penalising thrifty pensioners, a costly charity tax, punitive North Sea oil taxes, a cut of the top rate of tax to help the rich, and VAT levied on pasties. In addition, there was a strike by fuel delivery men, horrendous queues at Heathrow and talk of a double-dip or even triple-dip recession. Boris could only be grateful that, on Cameron’s orders, Osborne had abandoned a mansion tax, an annual levy on homes regardless of income or ability to pay. ‘Two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk,’ scorned a disgusted Tory MP.6 ‘George is doing this to sabotage my campaign,’ Boris quipped to Guto Harri. Was Crosby conflicted, Boris wondered, because Osborne was paying him more for the next Conservative general election campaign?
‘You’re overdoing the gloom,’ Boris told the prime minister. Cameron, Boris believed, was not a proper capitalist. He should ease up on austerity and encourage employment and investment in infrastructure. Cameron saw it differently. Boris, he sighed, was ‘full of jealousies and paranoias’. City Hall, Cameron believed, was ’dysfunctional’.
At times Boris struggled against not only Cameron but also the BBC. ‘I sometimes felt,’ he wrote, ‘that my chief opponent was the local BBC News’, whose reporters in his view were ‘statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, Europhile and above all overwhelmingly biased to the left’. Under Chris Patten, the BBC’s presumptuous chairman, the Corporation had become unstable. Patten’s reckless interference in the management was failing to restore professional editorial control of news and current affairs. One solution, Boris urged, was the appointment of a Tory as the BBC’s next director general who did not believe that the taxpayer should pay for everything. ‘If we can’t change the BBC,’ he wrote, ‘we can’t change the country.’7 Haplessly, Patten would appoint George Entwistle as the director general, a disastrous choice. Entwistle lasted just fifty-four days before he was forced to resign after his gaffe during a radio interview about his mismanagement of the BBC’s defamation of the senior Tory Alistair McAlpine.
After the election polls closed on 3 May, Boris and his supporters headed to a West End club. His confidence of victory was rattled by reports from various counts that the vote was tilting towards Livingstone. Boris waited nervously with Crosby. In City Hall, some officials began clearing their desks, convinced he had lost. Suddenly, two batches of uncounted votes from Tory wards in Brent, a Labour council, were discovered. They had been ‘accidentally’ placed in a store by council employees. Victory was confirmed at midnight. He had won by just 62,538 votes, a 3 per cent victory thanks to support from traditional Labour areas. ‘Only Boris could have won a second time,’ said Stephen Greenhalgh, a Tory council leader. ‘Boris told me, “We kind of got by in the first term, now we must focus on what we can deliver.”’
The following year, Livingstone recounted that after the election Boris wanted to make up about their argument about tax avoidance: ‘He was worried that I was angry with him, and this is a breathtaking weakness in a politician. He wants to be loved even by the people he’s destroying.’ Others would say it was more nuanced. Boris clasped his enemies close to defuse the antagonism.8
Boris’s victory protected Cameron from humiliation. In the local elections nationally, Labour won 38 per cent of the votes against the Tories’ 31 per cent. Middle England was angry about Cameron’s obsession with gay marriage and wind turbines. He had ignored their opinions, especially their Euroscepticism. Boris was their hero. The polls showed that only Boris, as the party leader, could defeat Labour. Asked by ITV whether his next ambition was to be prime minister, Boris denied it ‘Definitively, categorically, emphatically, without hesitation or doubt. Will that do?’ The next day, Max Hastings wrote, ‘It is dismaying that he has become the most popular Conservative in Britain … It is crazy to speak of him as a prospective prime minister.9 If Boris reached Downing Street, government would become a permanent pier-end panto, probably with a striptease thrown in … Surely the British people deserve better than a comic, cad and a serial bonker, however entertaining.’ Hastings would have been relieved to have heard a conversation between Cameron and Boris at City Hall. ‘I’m going to do this job,’ Boris told Cameron, ‘and that’s me done with public life. I’m leaving public life after this. People say I want to be an MP.10 I don’t. I’m not going to do that.’
Six weeks later in New York, Boris revealed in an interview that his true ambition was to be prime minister: ‘That’s the awful fact.’11 He counted on the Olympics to boost that ambition.