In late January 2013, Boris, Cameron and Osborne were sharing cheese fondue at the Alte Post in Davos. Three men, united in leading the Tory Party and utterly divided by their ambition, had exhibited their childlike rivalries at the previous night’s dinner hosted by Martin Sorrell, the advertising executive. Inevitably, Boris was late. ‘Oh look,’ shouted Osborne, ‘the leader of municipal government in England has arrived.’
‘Would you like a drink?’ Boris asked.
‘Yes please,’ replied Osborne.
‘Then get one,’ snapped Boris.
The banter could not camouflage their insoluble dilemma – to find a route out of the party’s EU maze.
Two days earlier, one hundred Tory MPs had threatened to vote in the Commons to leave the EU unless Cameron negotiated to repatriate sovereign powers. Responding to that threat, Cameron believed he could rely on the German Chancellor Angela Merkel to agree to favourable terms for Britain’s future membership. In particular, Cameron wanted the immigration rules changed. Both in private and in a speech before visiting Britain, Merkel and her officials had given encouraging assurances to Cameron.
Boris’s position before Davos was, as ever, unclear. In some speeches before Christmas, he supported a referendum on a new treaty while explicitly opposing a straightforward in-out referendum. In other speeches he said, ‘It’s between staying in on our terms or getting out.’ His antagonism towards the EU, an organisation he said was ‘riddled with fraud’, had been fuelled by Merkel’s sophistry. While she pledged to do whatever necessary to keep Britain inside the EU, she had also agreed that Cameron’s veto on the fiscal union should be ignored to save the euro. Closer integration of the eurozone nations, she believed, was vital.1 Then matters worsened. Osborne’s attempt to defeat the EU imposing a limit on bankers’ bonuses was defeated by twenty-six votes. The EU’s blatant disregard of vital British interests was another watershed in Britain’s relations with Europe. ‘Brussels cannot control the global market,’ cursed Boris, unfashionably championing the City. ‘These are transparently self-defeating policies.’
Although Germany was prepared to negotiate, the French government was stubbornly against. Not only did Paris deny Britain’s right to renegotiate its EU membership, but the socialist government led by François Hollande demanded that after the new fiscal union was created, the City would be banned from trading euros. Over 40 per cent of euro trades were done in London but the French wanted the trading compulsorily transferred to Paris. If the relationships were that sour, Boris commented, Britain should walk away. Leaving ‘would not be the end of the world’.2 But then, just before arriving in Davos, he declared that he hoped Cameron could negotiate a new treaty placing Britain as an active member of the single market on the ‘outer tier’. In the hope of a deal, he added, ‘I think this option [of leaving] is neither particularly necessary nor particularly desirable nor particularly likely.’3
Now, as he gossiped with his two unloved friends – Cameron and Osborne, both Remainers – he lacked their certainty. The majority of their party members were Eurosceptics. Boris straddled the two sides. Neither his opportunism nor Cameron’s referendum pledge appeared to compensate for the party’s unpopularity among electors. Their conversation failed to clarify how they could win an outright majority in the next general election. Squaring the circle appeared to be impossible. Boris, the government’s antagonist-in-chief, left the restaurant first, without paying his share. ‘I have got to cough up,’ he said later unconvincingly. He had rushed off to meet an Englishwoman. She would never forgive him for making it a one-night stand.
Four weeks later, the electors’ judgement about Cameron’s European policy was devastating. A by-election at Eastleigh in Hampshire had been triggered by the resignation of Chris Huhne, a prominent Lib Dem MP, who had been charged with perverting the course of justice having lied to the police to avoid a driving offence. Despite Huhne’s comfortable majority, Cameron expected to win the seat. During Boris’s campaigning visits to the constituency, he confidently attacked the ‘yellow albatross around the Tory neck’, the disloyal coalition partners who constantly undermined the Tories. The Lib Dems’ only function, he said, was ‘to fulfil a very important ceremonial function as David Cameron’s kind of lapdog-cum-prophylactic protection device’. He sensed the unspoken disenchantment among Tory voters with Cameron on several issues: austerity; pandering to the Greens by increasing electricity prices despite the devastating effect on industry; giving billions of pounds to the Third World rather than help deprived Britons; and most all, his enthusiasm for Europe. Indignant about Cameron’s slur that UKIP supporters were ‘closet racists’, many Tory voters were lured by UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage. The result was a seismic shock. The Tory vote fell by 13.9 per cent and UKIP’s rose by 24.2 per cent. With the Conservatives divided, the Lib Dems narrowly won the by-election despite a fall of 14.4 per cent in their vote.
Boris watched Cameron, beleaguered and baffled, flap helplessly. Under pressure from the party supporters he loathed – the Eurosceptics – Cameron had no option but to again agree to an in-out referendum. The alternative would be the party’s disintegration. For the moment, Boris remained faithful, urging Tories not to panic about Farage, an ‘engaging geezer’. Only the Tories, he said, could deliver UKIP’s ambition to leave the EU.4 In that seminal moment, he asked ‘Do I want in or out?’, and presented the arguments for both views. On the one hand, Britain should stay in the EU to attract investment, frictionless trade and global influence. On the other, Britain should leave to save money, make its own laws and no longer blame Brussels for being much less productive than Germany. That last reason, he thought, was critical. Most of Britain’s problems, he said, were self-made by ‘chronic short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure’. Britain needed to reform itself.
With two years to the next election, Boris needed to convince doubters that he was not a buffoon but a substantial alternative to Cameron – a Eurosceptic Thatcherite in tune with the disillusioned Tory heartlands. Britain’s fate depended on renegotiating its relationship with the EU.5 ‘We must threaten to leave if the EU refuses to give us what we want,’ he concluded.6 To those who dismissed him as a narcissist without a strategy or beliefs but simply an actor making up the lines as he played himself, he offered the alternatives to prove he was a genuine politician prepared to listen.
In that mood, he arrived in Paris in mid-March 2013 to address a meeting hosted by Bertrand Delanoë, the capital’s mayor. First, there was lunch with Peter Ricketts, the British ambassador. Boris pumped the ambassador for information and interrupted lunch to dispatch an aide to buy a toy red London double-decker bus. During his speech that afternoon, in a mixture of English and ‘Churchillian French’, he spoke about London’s open welcome for business. Holding up the toy bus, he told his audience that London’s biggest bus company, RATP, was French-owned. The applause was warm.
Back in London, the Court of Appeal ruled that in the public interest the electorate was entitled to know about his child with Helen Macintyre. By then, Boris was regularly visiting his daughter, encouraging her interest in music. When considering Boris’s fitness for office, decided the judges, ‘It is fanciful to expect the public to forget the fact that … a major public figure had fathered a child after a brief adulterous affair (not for the first time).’ The judgement mentioned Boris’s responsibility for ‘two conceptions’. Many would deduce that the judges meant there was another ‘unknown’ child fathered by him. Others realised that the judges were referring to his and Petronella’s aborted child. Nevertheless, since he refused to state how many children he had fathered, the hunt for the ‘unknown’ child continued.
His current lover, Jennifer Arcuri, had secured £10,000 sponsorship from London & Partners for an event in October 2013 at the ExCel convention centre where Boris would be speaking. Arcuri’s company would get another £1,500 from London & Partners for an event in the Commons. There was no evidence that Boris influenced the London & Partners employees to award that money, but the two women responsible heard Arcuri boast about her friendship with the mayor. Since he was visiting Arcuri’s Shoreditch flat, sometimes after a drink in a bar, he should have declared their relationship. ‘Validate me,’ Arcuri asked him by declaring the GLA’s approval of her company. He refused. ‘I’d have to declare an interest,’ he told her.7 Boris would later tell BBC TV, ‘There was no interest to declare.’
By the end of the year, Arcuri had decided that Boris was not a womaniser but just after her because, as he said, ‘I feel so horny.’ Instinctive and sensitive, she saw a self-obsessed man for whom relationships were difficult. He lacked close male friends and relied on her, but only on conditions. Until he was certain of his emotions and could trust her, allowing anyone into his personal life was regarded by him as a weakness. She would need time to persuade him to lower his guard. But any affection or love, she realised, would become a double-edged sword. She saw him as an introvert, a depressive who enjoyed solitude, and someone who needed to be alone. Paradoxically, particularly on those days of his greatest public successes, he could decline into an intense depression. His moodiness reflected the frustration of his thwarted ambition. ‘Do you want to be prime minister?’ she asked. ‘I’m a very competitive person, so it’s natural,’ he replied.
Natural, perhaps, but Will Walden’s charm offensive had not sealed the deal with the media, especially the BBC. That became pressing as Theresa May’s popularity as the ‘Stop Boris’ candidate rose. Posing as the successor to Cameron, May dismissed the mayor as a ridiculous figure who changed his mind every five minutes. In an attempt to counter that narrative, he reluctantly agreed that his family should co-operate with Michael Cockerell, a BBC political documentary reporter, for a fifty-minute profile. Among the obvious risks was the hazard that Stanley would use Boris’s fame to promote his own journalistic career. Similar fears were expressed about his sister Rachel. ‘There are no boundaries,’ advised one City Hall aide, ‘about how RJ and SJ will exploit you for their own profit. They do anything to live off you.’ Occasionally, their antics were excessive. In the Star newspaper, Rachel had recalled as children noticing while showering with Boris that he was impressively endowed. And during the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal in New York in 2011, in which Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, Rachel had written in the Spectator that she found the French politician sexy. Boris, she added, had told her that ‘Women cannot resist men who obviously like women.’ By implication, the chambermaid who alleged that she had been attacked by Strauss-Kahn was asking for it. Labour politicians piled into Boris. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Boris shouted at Rachel. ‘You’ve ruined me.’ Rachel retreated, admitting her ‘embarrassment’ over the ‘terrible confusion about the comments’.8 Despite all this, he agreed to the BBC documentary without considering other good reasons for caution.
At the end of the formal inquiry into phone hacking and the tabloid newspapers, Lord Justice Leveson had recommended severe restrictions on the media. Boris was outraged. Leveson’s proposals, he wrote, would end press freedom and delight Vladimir Putin. To his further disgust, the BBC was reporting Leveson in approving terms.9 That was the same BBC, he wrote, which had suppressed its own investigation into Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia in 2011, ‘luxuriated’ in the downfall of the bankers, enjoyed the humiliation of MPs over their ill-gotten expenses and ‘felt tremendous satisfaction’ as the hacking scandal unfolded. His anger against the Corporation’s political prejudice and sloppy journalism was aggravated by the BBC’s refusal to be embarrassed by revelations of its ‘blind-eye culture’ as the Jimmy Savile scandal unfolded.10 Dismissive about any culpability, in November 2012 the same tainted senior BBC executives approved the broadcast of Newsnight’s accusation of child abuse committed by a ‘senior Conservative’, named in off-the-record briefings by some involved in producing the programme as Alistair McAlpine, the seventy-year-old former Tory treasurer and close associate of Margaret Thatcher. The story was totally untrue, broadcast, despite warnings, by the BBC. Wracked by misery, the innocent art-lover died from a heart condition fourteen months later. Boris denounced the senior BBC executives for approving transmission because, for those left-wing producers, McAlpine was a guilty Thatcherite toff. ‘The story was too good to check,’ complained Boris. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ chimed the denizens in Broadcasting House – by which they meant it was tragic for the BBC. Boris noted that Chris Patten, the BBC’s self-important chairman, had not properly acknowledged ‘the appalling calumny which hastened McAlpine’s death’. Patten, demanded Boris, should apologise ‘on his knees’ and all the BBC producers responsible for the defamation be sacked.11 In the event, no BBC executive was publicly censored or dismissed, and the director general, George Entwistle, was forced to resign only after doing a radio interview in which he compounded the impression that he was not in charge of the organisation he was supposed to be running.
In spite of all this, Boris was persuaded to trust Cockerell to produce a fair documentary. The result was genuinely endearing. Stanley found his 8 mm cine film of Boris as a young child and Rachel revealed that her brother had said ‘I want to be world king.’ Max Hastings performed his traditional cameo. ‘Lock up your willy,’ he had told Boris and, since all his sensible advice had been ignored, he believed that Boris could not be trusted near the nuclear button in case he confused it for the bell to summon the maid.12
The documentary generated huge media attention ahead of its transmission on 25 March 2013. In anticipation, Boris accepted an invitation to appear on the BBC TV’s Sunday morning The Andrew Marr Show, the day before the documentary was broadcast. The interview, he was told, would be about ‘the Olympic legacy, housing and general politics’. He was ambushed. Eddie Mair, the interviewer standing in for Marr, who was recovering from a stroke, proved not to be an admirer. Reciting the depressing miscellany of duplicity (including Boris’s fabricated quotation in The Times and the alleged conspiracy with Darius Guppy), Mair continued, ‘Let me ask you about a barefaced lie,’ referring to his denial to Michael Howard about the affair with Petronella, ‘Why did you lie to your party leader?’
Boris was floored. He could not deploy his usual defences: deviation, run his hands through his hair, crack a joke, or recite a Latin phrase. He looked shaken, even wounded, his dignity dented as Mair delivered the verdict: ‘Aren’t you in fact making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted? You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?’
Mair’s conclusion – ‘nasty piece of work’ – was dynamite on live TV. In the past, Boris would have disrupted an interviewer’s artistic impertinence with a quizzical look: ‘I know what you’re doing here, but I’m in control.’ But Mair suffocated that tactic. Unable to think on his feet, he retreated, too confused to retaliate. After taking a minute to recover, he replied with remarkable self-control that Mair’s questions were ‘trivial’ and ‘hysterical’, and the interpretation of events was not ‘wholly fair’. The allegations were old – two of them happened over twenty years earlier. On The Times fabrication, Boris replied ‘I mildly sandpapered something somebody said, and yes it’s very embarrassing and I’m very sorry about it.’ For the Boris haters, Mair’s performance was heroic. The Guardian declared Boris was politically dead. Simon Heffer twisted the knife: ‘Mr Johnson is selfish, two-faced, a proven liar and has a private life too baroque for one who aspires to the highest office.’13 Only Stanley came to his aid. The interview, said his father, was ‘disgusting’ and his son’s private life was irrelevant. ‘It was a stitch-up,’ Will Walden complained. The BBC producers had lied to tempt Boris on to their programme – to accuse him of lying.
Forty-eight hours later, the storm had passed. Mair was praised by Boris for ‘a splendid job’ and ‘a fair interview’. Mair, he said, ‘was perfectly within his rights to have a bash at me – in fact it would have been shocking if he hadn’t … If a BBC presenter can’t attack a nasty Tory politician, what’s the world coming to?’ As he said a year later during a speech in the City:14 ‘It’s been an amazing day for me as it began, as it has so often in my life, with me finding myself in a colossal hole partly of my own making.’
*
‘The great trick in politics is never to talk about your opponents,’ Boris later explained. ‘Don’t give them oxygen.’15 Contradicting his own homily, he nevertheless spoke a lot about UKIP’s Nigel Farage and the danger posed by Labour’s Ed Miliband. Labour’s hateful reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s death in April 2013 displayed raw enmity. Reflecting the broadcaster’s bias, the BBC’s editors embraced those hissing that Thatcher was a byword for selfishness and bigotry. Contributors were chosen by the BBC to dismiss Thatcher’s transformation of Britain from the sick man of Europe into a dynamic trading centre. The preponderance of voices ignored the booming City, the Channel Tunnel, construction of Canary Wharf and the reduction of personal taxation from 83 per cent to 40 per cent, and instead emphasised Thatcher’s legacy, as portrayed by Labour, of destroying Britain’s industry and society itself. For Boris, the BBC epitomised the enemy, echoing Miliband’s sermons of protest and protection of special interest groups in the public sector. Crucially, the opinion polls showed that for many Tories, only Boris, not Cameron, could replicate Thatcher’s promise to reverse Britain’s decline since the 2008 crash and renew the country’s enterprise and aspiration.
In an attempt to sharpen this perceived contrast between himself and the prime minister, Boris wrote ‘2020 Vision: The Greatest City on Earth – Ambitions for London’. The eighty-four-page glossy document promised new rail connections across London including Crossrail 1 and 2, new crossings over and under the Thames, hundreds of thousands of new homes, improved schools, more apprenticeships and volunteers, London as the world’s tech capital and even fracking for natural gas. He opposed HS2, the high speed train to the north.16 As a Heseltine Tory supporting state intervention when necessary, he also praised the free market economy, wealth creation and help for the needy. Regularly, he chaired the London Enterprise Panel in order to attract investment, create 250,000 new apprenticeships and install superfast broadband.17
There was substance to that ambition. Six months after the Olympics, the Park was a vast construction site for Boris’s ‘Olympicopolis’.18 Beside homes, schools, offices, tech centres, museums and parks, there would be a university campus and a theatre. Livingstone’s accusation that Boris’s record had produced no achievements was rebuffed.fn1
Ed Lister, Boris’s chief of staff, matched that mood of expansion and confidence – conjuring the grandiose romanticism of Olympicopolis across the capital. Walking down Blackfriars Road with Peter John, he excitedly imagined the thoroughfare redeveloped with ‘a canyon of towers, just like Manhattan’. Shortly after, looking over the Old Kent Road, Eddie Lister lamented, ‘it’s so low, undeveloped’. Restricting clusters of skyscrapers to the City, Paddington or Croydon had previously been acceptable but Lister wanted to abandon those limitations. He did not seem concerned that the fifty-storey Cheesegrater in the City approved by Livingstone had ruined the view of St Paul’s from the west, or that the wall of tower blocks along the Thames approved in 2005 had destroyed communities. Tasked in 2013 by Boris to build 100,000 new affordable homes by the end of his mayoralty, to overtake Livingstone’s 90,000 homes, Lister approved the construction of more towers. Failure to build the additional homes, he feared, would accelerate the surge of young families joining the white flight from London. High house prices and bad schools would hollow out the city.
The obstacles inherited from the Labour government were substantial. City Hall calculated after the 2011 Localism Act that historic failures by Whitehall to release derelict land and unused buildings owned by the NHS and the Ministry of Defence across London had prevented the construction of 25,000 homes, plus 2.5 million square metres of office space, and more schools and community centres. The new Act empowered the mayor to designate five abandoned hospitals to be designated for homes.
By 2013, permission had been granted to build 200,000 homes but only half were under construction.19 Without government money, no British developer could build them. Only foreign investors, Lister persuaded Boris, would finance the towers. Accompanied by British builders and developers, the mayor flew to India and China to sell new luxury homes with rents up by 20 per cent in one year.20 ‘Don’t beat up foreigners coming to London,’ Boris told his Labour critics. ‘They bring money and jobs. Don’t collapse in a xenophobic frenzy.’21 The choice was either taking their money or ‘Mumbai, Dubai and bye bye’.
In that expansionary mood, David Cameron was attracted in 2013 to stand alongside Boris and the Malaysian prime minister to open the £8 billion Battersea project for 3,992 homes. Boris was proud that he had convinced a Malaysian developer to commit to the project with the promise of a £1 billion government-funded extension of the Northern Line into the redeveloped Battersea power station. He was untroubled that Battersea was a development for the foreign super-rich with just 550 affordable homes, or that mostly overseas non-taxpayers were lured to the buy-to-leave investments priced at £350,000 for a studio flat and £6 million for a penthouse. Without foreign investment, he reasoned, there would be fewer new homes and fewer new jobs. He was not worried either by the fate of a fifty-storey tower just completed at St George’s Wharf, Vauxhall. One hundred and thirty flats sold to foreigners could be left empty and the five-storey penthouse, bought by a Russian for £51 million, might remain unoccupied or rented. None of the 214 flats were ‘affordable’.fn2 Knight Frank, the estate agents, revealed that 69 per cent of new flats in London were sold to foreigners over the previous two years.22 Critics screamed in dismay. ‘They’re gloomadon-poppers,’ snorted Boris, asserting that only 7 per cent of all homes in Britain were bought by foreigners. Building statistics, everyone knew, were totally unreliable.23 The need to house an additional million people in the near future was, however, irrefutable. To satisfy that demand, Boris accepted Lister’s advice and approved gigantic towers in White City, on the Shell Centre site opposite Westminster, and the partial demolition of the Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange built in the 1920s. On Lister’s recommendation, Boris even met Richard Desmond. Desmond, a deeply unpleasant and dangerous businessman prone to swearing, who had impersonated Nazi goose-stepping with colleagues and published a defamatory article in his newspaper in a vendetta with a fund manager, was eager to develop a large site on the Isle of Dogs. As with his holiday trips courtesy of Evgeny Lebedev, Boris ignored the warning that any association with Desmond would end badly. By March 2014, 256 towers were proposed, approved or under construction.24 Two years later, critics claimed that Boris, alias ‘the lackey of London’s development lobby’, was building over 400 towers.25
The battle between luxury and affordable homes, and between the Labour boroughs and Boris, became particularly fierce over the fate of the huge Post Office site at Mount Pleasant in central London. Lister stipulated that only 14.4 per cent of the 681 homes would be affordable, and even those tenants would pay £2,800 per month for a four-bedroom flat. Wanting 30 per cent affordable homes, Camden’s Labour councillors delayed the project with endless appeals. By contrast in Southwark, Peter John was relaxed about a £50 million penthouse in the Shard tower: ‘I wouldn’t turn away the 10,000 jobs the Shard brought to Southwark.’
By 2016, Boris would have completed 94,001 homes, near to his 100,000 target; and the boroughs built a further 101,525 ‘affordable’ homes over his eight years. City Hall’s statistics recorded that Livingstone had completed 24,009 houses in 2005 while Boris finished 41,371 houses in 2016 and 18,270 affordable homes in 2015, the highest since 1981. Chasing headlines bore a cost.
One great casualty of Lister’s affection for towers and Boris’s emphasis on numbers for political kudos was potentially the biggest prize in west London. Old Oak Common was a vast 650-hectare wasteland sprawling from Wormwood Scrubs prison up to the North Circular road. Crossed by railway lines, roads and a canal, Old Oak Common was a decaying industrial zone and the headquarters of Cargiant, a multimillion-pound car dealership employing 800 people. At his own expense in 2011, Terry Farrell, a prominent architect, had produced a development plan for Old Oak Common. Presented to Stephen Greenhalgh, Hammersmith Council’s Tory leader, Farrell showed how 24,000 homes and 55,000 jobs could be created on the site. Excited by the same rich possibilities as had been identified at Canary Wharf thirty years earlier, Greenhalgh sought to enlist Lister and Boris. They replied with polite disdain. To transform that area demanded a detailed plan, political commitment and money. After Boris’s re-election in 2012, Lister was more sympathetic to the project but knowing that Boris was uninterested, he was reluctant to engage the mayor.
Unlike Margaret Thatcher who ‘seized’ ownership of Canary Wharf, an abandoned area bedevilled by the debris of old docks and industrial waste, Boris was deterred by Old Oak Common’s complexity. Designated in 2012 as the possible transport interchange point for Crossrail, the Tube and HS2, Boris was unenthusiastic about also transforming the area into a residential and commercial metropolis, like the King’s Cross of West London.
That changed in 2013. Stephen Greenhalgh had joined the mayor’s team in City Hall. Under his pressure, Boris finally published a thirty-year plan to develop Old Oak Common following Farrell’s outline. To make it happen, he needed to lobby the government to create a development corporation similar to the Olympic Park’s. By then, his relations with Cameron and Osborne were strained by their disagreements over the EU and his constant demand for finance for houses and the Tube. He could have dispatched Lister to gather support in Whitehall for Old Oak Common but he had yet again become distracted, this time by the fluttering eyelids of the actress Joanna Lumley.
Six days after his re-election, Lumley – who was an old friend of Stanley Johnson – had sent a flattering letter to Boris offering ‘a thousand congratulations’ about ‘the wonderful news for London’. In her letter, she urged Boris to support a ‘green pedestrian bridge’ with trees and plants that would bestow ‘great loveliness’ across the Thames between Temple and Lambeth. She concluded, ‘Please say yes.’ Asked how Boris reacted, she explained: ‘I’ve known Boris since he was four, so he was largely quite amenable.’
After the success of the Olympics, the ‘Living Bridge’ matched Boris’s longing for more grand projects around London. Thomas Heatherwick – who had designed Boris’s Routemaster and the acclaimed Olympic cauldron with 1,000 moving parts – had already been chosen by Lumley to design the bridge. Building a new 366-metre link between the north and south banks of the Thames, Heatherwick told Boris, would bring ‘human nourishment’ to those who used it. With naive enthusiasm, Boris exclaimed, ‘Surely, we can build a bridge?’ and set the hare running. At Davos in January 2013, he met Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive. The two agreed to meet in California to discuss Apple sponsoring the project.
Nine weeks later, clutching Heatherwick’s rough drawing, Boris and Lister flew to California to seek £60 million, the bridge’s total estimated cost. By ‘chance’, Heatherwick appeared in the Apple building. Cook agreed to Boris’s proposal on condition that an Apple shop was located on the bridge. Heatherwick rejected any branding and negotiations broke down.
On his return to London, Boris refused to disclose to elected members of the Assembly why he had travelled to California and who had accompanied him.26 Knowing that he had broken the rules regarding public procurement, which required a formal tendering process, he wanted to conceal Heatherwick’s presence. The secret did not last long. ‘Boris told me that he had bumped into Heatherwick in California,’ Len Duvall would recall, ‘and he had said to him, “Come with us to Apple.”’ Lister also said, ‘It was just he was there.’ Duvall described that ‘improbable’ explanation as ‘immature rather than a lie’. Eventually, Boris admitted on LBC that he had arranged to meet Heatherwick in the Apple building because the bridge was ‘my idea’ and it was ‘essential’ that Heatherwick gave Apple a detailed description.
Once that plot unravelled, Boris set out to raise money from private individuals. At the same time, Heatherwick and Lumley asked George Osborne for money. Flattered by the pair, the Chancellor visited Heatherwick’s studio. The pitch was sublime. Seven million people were expected to cross the bridge every year, more than visited the Eiffel Tower. The inevitable congestion generated by people queuing to see 270 trees and thousands of plants, and the annual £3 million maintenance costs, were not discussed. After being presented with a unique chair designed by Heatherwick, Osborne committed £30 million of taxpayers’ money to the project.
‘I’ve got a great deal from Osborne,’ Boris told Duvall, ‘so we’ll go ahead.’ By the end of 2013, the estimated cost had risen to £150 million. Just as his original pledge for the bikes, which included the commitment of ‘no cost to the taxpayer’ had evaporated and London’s ratepayers were billed £11 million annually for the bikes (compared to zero public funding in Paris); and the cable car’s estimated £25 million cost had soared to £60 million and was losing £50,000 a week because no one was using it; his promise to fund the bridge entirely through private money also disappeared. Boris persuaded Peter Hendy that TfL should contribute £30 million. Hendy did not dare to contradict the mayor’s enthusiasm.
Committed to build the bridge, Boris again circumvented the official rules. Contractors should by law be chosen by public tender. To protect Heatherwick and Arup, the favoured engineers, Lister and his officials did not override Boris’s decision to bypass the legal tender process and appointed his favoured team.
In the time spent on the bridge, housing and so much more, Old Oak Common, and the great, enduring opportunity it represented, was simply pushed aside. In summer 2013, Boris’s focus switched again to the party conference and his positioning for the leadership. With a general election due in eighteen months, there was every reason to show loyalty to Cameron – for now.