Cycling home at night through Clerkenwell in mid-June 2015, Boris was accosted by a black-cab driver. The driver ranted that the mayor was failing to stop 100,000 Uber drivers swamping the capital and not paying any taxes. ‘Why don’t you fuck off and die, and not in that order,’ Boris shouted back, unaware that he was being recorded. Boris refused to apologise: ‘I think it comes under the heading of getting the ball back over the net,’ he explained.1 Despite the affection many cab drivers had for him, Boris regarded the trade as ‘Luddites’ who staged loud protests inside City Hall. Yet by the end of the year, his sympathies had changed. Both the Home Office and Downing Street refused to engage with the cab drivers’ legitimate complaints. Cameron, he suspected, had been influenced by Rachel Whetstone, a close friend of Cameron’s and recently employed as Uber’s director of communications. As for Theresa May, she had declared war.
In mid-July, Boris was telephoned by May. In ten minutes, she said, she would be making an announcement in the Commons that she had refused to license the three water cannons.2 Rushing over to Westminster, he sat on the back benches while the Home Secretary, adopting a dramatically serious voice, told MPs that the vehicles were not only blighted by sixty-seven faults but the British police would never willingly ‘hide behind military-style equipment’. Whatever was acceptable in Belfast, she said, Londoners were policed by consent and would resent being pounded by water. ‘Silly cow,’ said Boris to a colleague, forlornly shrugging off the humiliation. ‘Absolute nonsense,’ he wrote the following day in the Sun. London’s police use tasers, clubs and firearms, so what’s dangerous about water? he asked. ‘Does anyone consent to be tasered, for heaven’s sake?’ May’s intention to damage his bid for the leadership was blatant. ‘She wants to blunt the end of your nose,’ said Will Walden. In a telephone conversation with Cameron, the prime minister explained that he would instantly license the cannon if they were required, but it was pointless to overrule her that day. In public, it appeared that Cameron had switched to support May as revenge for Boris’s unhelpful attitude towards the EU; while Osborne, the principle rival, announced a £9.35 living wage to undermine Boris’s £8.80 living wage in London. (Five months later, Boris increased his London living wage to £9.40.) On that day, compared to the substance of May and Osborne, Boris was cast as a fool. He consoled himself that Churchill was sixty-five when he became prime minister.3
By focusing his ambitions in Westminster, once again the latest chicanery at Scotland Yard had been allowed to develop unchecked. Bernard Hogan-Howe’s senior officers were destroying the lives of eminent men. Claiming to possess evidence which was ‘credible and true’, the Yard had committed a team of detectives to Operation Midland, which got underway in November 2014. Their task was to investigate the allegations that a group of prominent public servants – including the former prime minister Edward Heath, and Lord Bramall, the former head of the army – had participated in a VIP paedophile ring which tortured boys. By early 2015, the Yard’s ‘credible and true’ evidence was proven to be wholly fabricated. The lives of the public figures had been destroyed by the Yard’s misconduct. Among the casualties was Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary. Not only was Brittan wholly innocent but he had died in January 2015 before being told he was cleared.4 ‘I cannot honestly remember,’ Hogan-Howe replied about whether the Yard had apologised to Brittan. Hogan-Howe also refused to apologise immediately to Lord Bramall, even though twenty policemen had raided his home with a search warrant obtained with an untrue statement. Bramall had been accused of participating in an orgy at the very moment he was laying a wreath on Remembrance Sunday.5 Belatedly, Boris whispered that Bramall deserved a ‘full and heartfelt apology’ but Hogan-Howe resisted. Thereafter, Boris mysteriously remained silent about those gross injustices. By contrast, in his chase for headlines, he was vocal about soaring knife crime but silent about the crime detection rate falling by 21 per cent since 2008.6 He would blame May for denying any connection between rising crime and declining police numbers and her ‘politically correct squeamishness’ for ending stop-and-search. ‘That turned out to be a very grave mistake,’ he said.7 Hogan-Howe, however, escaped censure.
Boris’s reluctance to hold openly officials or political opponents to account for their errors undermined his claims to be a principled standard-bearer. There seemed to be a link between concealing his own transgressions, especially his adultery and his lies, and his refusal to censure accountable public servants for their wrongdoing. To his good fortune, no one in the media mentioned that weak link in Boris as a politician. Staging celebrations became his smokescreen for avoiding bad news and not challenging those responsible for creating problems.
The good news he celebrated on 4 June 2015 was the near completion of Crossrail’s tunnelling. Forty metres beneath London, Boris and Cameron acknowledged a remarkable feat of engineering. During their performance for the media, Boris was assured by Andrew Wolstenholme, Crossrail’s chief executive, that Crossrail was ‘being delivered on time and within budget’. By then, Boris knew that was not quite accurate. At the regular Thursday meetings, Terry Morgan, Crossrail’s chairman since 2009, explained a series of problems. ‘Bombardier’s trains,’ said Morgan, ‘are awful.’ Built in Derby in a £1 billion contract, the trains would be delivered late, not least because they could not meet the special requirements for Crossrail’s unique computerised signalling system. Every train needed to automatically shift between three different computerised signalling systems along the seventy-three miles. Boris was told that Crossrail’s mechanical engineers had underestimated the problems and their software writers in Scandinavia and Italy had made a succession of serious mistakes which they were still unable to rectify.
Another problem, Morgan knew, were the Underground stations. In Bond Street, Costain, the contractors, possessed neither the skills nor the finance to deliver their promises of completing on time and on budget, made worse by the Jubilee Line tunnel sinking. The costs of their badly run contract were increasing by over 300 per cent. Similarly, the costs of Whitechapel station were rising by 600 per cent.8 To complete the project by 2018, Crossrail’s executives adopted a ‘can-do’ mentality and minimised their financial controls over the contractors. As Daniel Moylan, Boris’s representative on Crossrail’s board, warned, ‘In big projects you can’t take anything at face value. There is a psychological tendency to believe that everything is going well.’ Boris preferred to ignore Moylan’s warning.
During the Thursday meetings, Morgan discovered that Boris was prepared to hear everyone’s opinion and in turn emphasised the importance of controlling costs. But he was not keen to hear about difficulties. ‘I had to be careful when telling him about the problems,’ recalls Morgan, ‘because he didn’t understand risk.’ Mindful of his political reputation, Boris asked, ‘Why are you telling me this? Are you passing the problem to me?’ Morgan recoiled. ‘I had to give him confidence. I had to leave him optimistic that we could fix the problems. I never told Boris it would be late or over-cost.’ In telling Boris what he wanted to hear, Morgan minimised the risks. ‘The project is on-time and on budget,’ he reported. Crossrail’s assumption of progress, a subsequent NAO report concluded, ‘bore little resemblance’ to the truth. ‘Can-do became unrealistic.’
Boris’s refusal to hear bad news reflected his reliance on Mike Brown, TfL’s new chief executive. Amid new strikes on the Tube, aimed to prevent the introduction of all-night trains despite the promise of extra pay, Boris relied on Brown to supervise Crossrail on his behalf. Just as Brown, a surveyor, could not overcome the Tube unions’ obduracy, he also could not resolve Crossrail’s engineering problems. He was not entirely to blame. The government had assigned the supervision of the project to the Department of Transport, staffed by notoriously incompetent civil servants. All these were familiar frustrations for government ministers, but Boris appeared to be uninterested in the the grinding administrative chore of holding Brown or anyone at Crossrail to account.
With the same ‘can-do had become unrealistic’ attitude, Boris had fallen into a trap of his own making with the Garden Bridge. At the end of 2014, construction of the bridge had been approved by Westminster Council and Lambeth on condition that the bridge’s upkeep would be privately funded. To hasten the project’s construction, Eddie Lister had spent large sums to swiftly obtain engineering reports to match planning regulations, in spite of the pledge of Sadiq Khan, Boris’s expected successor, to scrap the ‘white elephant’.9 Furious about Khan’s opposition, Boris snapped, ‘The garden bridge is ringed by demented enemies … Surely London can have another iconic landmark?’ After opinion polls showed that a majority of Londoners endorsed the project, Khan switched. ‘I fully support the bridge,’ he said.10 Even Nick Clegg became a reluctant enthusiast, as did Simon Jenkins, albeit he suggested that the bridge should be built at Battersea because there was no apparent demand for a footbridge at Temple.11
Originally, Boris had pledged that no public money would be spent on the Garden Bridge. That vow was broken once he relied on £60 million from the Treasury and TfL towards the total cost of £175 million (£85 million had been pledged by private donors). He still called his £60 million cable car ‘a howling success’ although only 300 passengers a day were using it at a loss of £6 million a year; and he waved aside the Boris Bikes’ subsidy of about £3 for each journey. Rather than being free for ratepayers, the bill by the end of eight years was £195 million.12 To deliver his legacy, obstacles were pushed aside, even legal requirements identified by Lister. One key obligation was that before construction of the bridge could begin, all the ‘funding is in place’. At the last minute, Boris was told, the trustees of the bridge could no longer provide a cast-iron guarantee of private funding for the bridge’s maintenance for the first five years. The solution devised by the mayor’s office was to substitute that a ‘funding strategy [was] in place’. No one was fooled. The project was jeopardised.
All the effort put into the bridge, the cable car and other iconic schemes dreamt up by Boris provided useful media headlines, promoting City Hall as a hive of creativity and activity. Boris loved to dream that his legacy as mayor would be remembered by future generations. Proposals spewed from City Hall. Plans for thirteen new Thames crossings – bridges, ferries and tunnels, including a tunnel to replace Hammersmith Bridge – plus Crossrail 2, a new concert hall, 400,000 homes and ultrafast broadband. But there was silence about Old Oak Common, considerably more important for London than a bridge or a cable car. At stake were not only 24,000 new homes but a huge transport hub. Daily, about 250,000 people would be passing through the interchange of HS2, the Tube, Crossrail and the GWR railway line from west England to Paddington. The west London wasteland was Boris’s greatest potential legacy. In early December 2014, Steve Norris mentioned to him a meeting due to be held near Whitehall and chaired by Patrick McGoughlin, the Transport Secretary. ‘This meeting will decide Old Oak’s fate,’ said Norris. ‘You must come.’
Crossrail had won permission to build a vast marshalling yard in the centre of the Old Oak Common site, its most valuable area. On behalf of a consortium of builders and developers, Norris wanted the government to deck over the marshalling yard with concrete platforms to allow the construction of shops, offices and 12,000 homes. To support the decking, deep concrete piles would be poured into the ground. The estimated cost was £200 million. Everyone at the meeting on 17 December knew the advantages of the proposed development. To deliver the financial and social advantages, George Osborne would need to approve the investment. But to Norris’s horror, ‘Boris showed no enthusiasm or even interest. He took little part in the meeting. He said practically nothing. He just let Peter Hendy present an absurd argument to fob us off and then just handed it over to Lister. Lister was keen but unusually Boris overruled him. “We can’t delay Crossrail,” Boris said. After that meeting, it was a dead duck.’ None of the cast in the meeting – Boris and the representatives of the Transport Department, the Treasury and Crossrail – were prepared to take the initiative. Instead of a stunning £10 billion development, Old Oak Common was relegated to become a railway depot with a few tower blocks.
Boris’s reluctance was personal and political. The benefits, he calculated, would not happen during his era – meaning there was no immediate reputational legacy – and all three local authorities were Labour councils. Regeneration for those politicians meant rich people – not Labour voters – buying the new homes. Without any electoral advantage, the Labour council leaders would stymie the private developers. ‘Old Oak,’ concluded Terry Farrell, ‘is probably the biggest cock-up I have seen in my career of fifty years in London. Over the past five years everyone just talked and talked. It’s just been five wasted years of pass the parcel.’ If only, he lamented, Boris had devoted as much attention to Old Oak Common as his Estuary airport or the Garden Bridge, 24,000 new homes might have been built.13 ‘You spent too much time on the bridge instead of Old Oak,’ Len Duvall complained to Boris. ‘Just because Lumley fluttered her eyelashes.’
No actress or major developer was lobbying to transform Old Oak Common. Unlike Paul Reichmann, the Canadian visionary who lobbied Margaret Thatcher to develop Canary Wharf, Boris was not targeted, despite New London Architecture magazine labelling him ‘the lackey of London’s development lobby’. Tilting in the developers’ favour, he had approved nearly 400 towers. ‘It’s all about numbers,’ observed an aide. ‘Nothing else mattered.’ To deliver Boris’s pledge of completing the construction of 100,000 homes before his mayoralty ended, Lister had even endorsed a monstrous tower developed by Irvine Sellar, overshadowing Little Venice where Boris’s maternal grandparents had lived. Other potential casualties included the demolition of historic buildings in Spitalfields including Norton Folgate, a street dating from the 1530s. Supporting the developers of forty-three-storey tower blocks in Bishopsgate, Boris overruled the local council anxious to protect an ancient viaduct. ‘The bloated, bulging light-blocking buildings,’ wrote Rowan Moore, the architectural expert, would cast swathes of London in a permanent shadow.14 Ironically, the damage caused to London’s heritage by the towers coincided with Boris’s protests against the destruction by Muslim extremists of Palmyra, the city in Syria founded 5,000 years earlier.15
His plea for Palmyra justified a dash to Israel to mark the end of his mayoralty and his re-emergence into national politics. Having worked on a kibbutz as a student, Boris’s sympathy for Israel was unconditional: ‘Whatever the criticisms of Israel may be,’ he said on arriving in Tel Aviv, ‘some of them justified and some of them less so, it is still the case that Israel is the only democracy in the region, the only free country, the only pluralist society.’ After opening the stock exchange and cycling around Tel Aviv, he vocally opposed the boycott of Israel organised by ‘snaggle-toothed, corduroy-wearing lefty academics’. Then he headed to the West Bank to meet the Palestinian leaders – and trouble. To his surprise, the Palestinians were upset by his opposition to the boycott and his praise of Israel as ‘a remarkable country justified by an incontestable goal: to provide a persecuted people with a safe and secure homeland’.16 His visit to Ramallah was cancelled on ‘security grounds’.17 Visibly distressed by the imbroglio, he discovered that pleasing everyone, especially the BBC, was impossible. Norman Smith, the BBC’s correspondent in Jerusalem, announced that the Palestinians’ snub amounted to ‘the death of Boris Johnson’. Boris’s misfortune was compounded by his inability to meet Jennifer Arcuri. She had travelled separately to Israel to use Boris’s name for establishing business contacts. They had hoped to meet at his hotel but tight security prevented Arcuri getting to his room.
The end of Boris’s eight-year term could have been heralded by a list of his considerable achievements. London had overtaken New York as the world’s most popular city; he had built 94,001 affordable homes in eight years, slightly more than Livingstone despite the 2008 crash, and bequeathed a construction boom to produce a total of about 40,000 homes a year to meet London’s annual population increase of 100,000 people; the Tube was vastly more efficient with sound finances and the drivers had finally agreed to all-night trains; the Olympic Park was under construction; Routemasters had replaced the bendy buses; and, by raising the living wage, increasing apprenticeships, mobilising thousands of volunteers and encouraging education and culture, especially the Mayor’s Music Fund to help talented children from low-income families, he had reduced the capital’s poverty. In 2008, four of Britain’s six poorest boroughs were in London. After Boris’s terms, none of the nation’s poorest ten boroughs were in London.
Success came at a price. With the approval of 71 per cent of Londoners, cycle superhighways stretched across the inner city despite the uproar of wealthy City denizens stuck in their stationary limousines.18 To seal his success, in February 2016 Boris welcomed the Queen at Bond Street to open Crossrail and name it the Elizabeth Line. Part of it, he announced, would be opened the following year. Crossrail’s executives standing near him knew that was untrue. Several stations were not yet built, none of the trains had been tested and the signalling problems remained unsolved. Completion was further delayed by a transformer erupting in flames.
Despite his achievements, his legacy was about to be buried. Just as in 2008, David Cameron’s choice of Tory mayoral candidate was bizarre: Zac Goldsmith. The attraction to Londoners of a multimillionaire who had never worked in his life was questionable. Goldsmith’s only advantage as the MP for Richmond was his passion for the environment, hardly a pressing issue for those Labour voters who had supported Boris. Boris did not raise any doubts about Goldsmith’s selection and encouraged his use of Lynton Crosby against Sadiq Khan, the MP for Tooting. As a product of Labour’s political machine, Khan lacked the appeal of Boris or Livingstone. Indeed, he could boast few outstanding qualities except his background as the self-made son of Pakistani immigrants, an advantage in a city where about 60 per cent of the population were immigrants. Lynton Crosby, who was automatically hired to run Goldsmith’s campaign, thought otherwise. Labelling Khan an extremists’ ally, he highlighted Khan’s appearance on platforms with anti-Semites. Crosby’s campaign backfired. The lacklustre Goldsmith was written off by the metro-elite. Khan was elected with 57 per cent of the vote. In turn, the metro-elite and Labour voters gave Boris no credit for anything.
Even committed Tories barely praised Boris. Writing in The Times, Clare Foges described his legacy as ‘curiously slim … he has been pretty useless as a public administrator’. The bikes, she wrote, were Livingstone’s idea; Livingstone secured the funding for Crossrail; and Johnson delivered affordable housing only because Livingstone obtained the funding from the Labour government.19 Each of Foges’ assertions was completely untrue. ‘Horror stories’, wrote Matthew Parris, circulated about negotiations with government departments by Boris ‘where he so failed that he left having conceded hundreds of millions more in cuts than the department had planned to be in its final offer’.20 That was not a complaint heard from Cameron or Osborne. Once again, misinterpretation overrode any balanced judgement, thereby underestimating his achievements as mayor. Few wanted to accept that over time he could improve. Some also misjudged the realities of his ambitions. ‘I think I’m totally different from eight years ago as an MP,’ said Boris, recognising the lessons he had learned as mayor. ‘More interested in making government work.’ The last thought would prove to be wishful thinking.21
His departure from City Hall coincided with Jennifer Arcuri’s exit. Their last meeting was at his house. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said stepping into the street and without revealing her decision to move on. Wanting a child, she had found her future husband and they moved to Cheshire. Soon pregnant, she decided there would be closure and blocked his calls. ‘I assumed that Boris would stay married,’ she would say, ‘and I made sure he wasn’t caught.’ His last text message would be sent on 29 December 2018. ‘I miss you and I need you,’ he’d write. She deleted the text. Silently, a passionate relationship ended.
On his last day as mayor in May 2016, Boris opened the cycle superhighway along the Victoria Embankment. Smiling as he watched the first bikes zoom along, a Lycra-clad cyclist shouted at him, ‘You’re a prick.’ Then he had lunch with Lynton Crosby, the architect of his election victory in 2008. Uppermost in their minds was the next leadership campaign. What about a book about his achievements as mayor? he was asked. ‘I don’t believe in boosterism,’ he replied. Back full-time in Westminster, Boris’s first task would be to build support among Tory MPs.