So Boris, is this a dress rehearsal for No 10?

Geordie Greig
24 Apr 2009

A year after becoming Mayor, Boris Johnson can still be very funny. "This job beats the crap. No, hold it, you can't say crap in the Evening Standard. It beats the, well, it comfortably beats the existence of a shadow minister for paper clips or drains or forward planning Eastern Europe or whatever I once was," he says. As always, Boris is a combination of chuckle-and-awe or charm-and-disarm, the populist with intellectual smarts.

The key question remains a year on: is he a serious politician? No one doubts that Boris could raise a smile on Have I Got News For You, but can he run London? Can he manage London's £12.2 billion budget, a staff of 30,000 and a population of 12 million? And crucially, can he make London better?

There has been a distinctive sea-change in leadership style and some headline results. The booze-free Tube. Curtailing Ken's congestion charge in west London. Firing the Met police chief. Green initiatives aplenty. But the bendy buses are still on the road, his Routemasters are still on order and the big issues of safety, transport and the police remain thorny ones.

On the eighth floor in City Hall, he sips a glass of white wine from the cellar left behind by Ken Livingstone and puts his case, demonstrating his serious and light side, sometimes within the same sentence. "I got elected so that London could feel safer and made speeches up and down the city - paralysing people with tedium - all so that people could feel safer on buses." He momentarily reverts like Caesar to talking in the third person: "Now it is up to the Mayor to deliver on this promise." He concludes: "The official crime statistics showed a big fall in crime on public transport. This was probably really due to banning alcohol on the Tube and doubling the number of people in uniform on public transport." QED, he is hoping for a Boris bounce.

The Mayor is on a roll. His trouser leg is torn, blond thatch tousled, shirt untucked, eyebrows rise and fall like an express lift, his mind whirrs - always an original performer. "I am really proud of what we have done." And he is certainly putting in the hours, rising at 5.30 every morning ("I pad about the house and read up for the day") but shows no sign of fatigue. "Becoming Mayor was like having a baby in that you have this shattering sense that the world will never be the same again. I am not kept up at night but I suppose there are teething problems, but all in all it is a bouncing baby showing every sign of considerable intellectual and physical promise."

He is unfazed by the enormity of his task. "The scale of what you can do, from housing to police, from the environment to providing London with rooftop gardens, is astonishing. I have an absolute vision of how I want this city to look and feel as a result of our efforts; less clutter on our streets, fewer ghastly black railings preventing you from moving around, beautiful urban realm projects with shared space for cyclists, pedestrians and motorists. Add in a cycle-hire scheme and you will start to see a fantastic effect on how people move around the city."

Even planning meetings sound fun under Boris. "It's like having a 34-strong field in the Grand National -- all the ideas of the things we want done - like electric cars, more cycle lanes, a safer city - all shiny brilliant chestnut stallions roaring off, some of them hitting the fence and taking a bit of a tumble. Some may even overtake each other. But once the race is on there is no stopping." The pumped-up prose and political brio is intoxicating but is London better under Boris? He can do the talk, but can he deliver?

Even London in the recession sounds OK in Borisland. "Everywhere is suffering but London is suffering less than other regions. That is unlike 1990 and unlike the Eighties."

How do Londoners greet him? "Well, on the street many call me Boris, but some actually say 'Mayor. Or Mr Mayor.' 'Tory tosser' has faded from their lips, we don't hear that so much." His press officer does not intervene as Boris is always potential political box-office dynamite. He is beyond anyone's control unless totally silenced. How does he explain his traffic-stopping presence? "Presence, what presence?" he says, jumping up, pointing out 'presents' he has received, playfully miscueing the word. "One Stetson hat from a Texan mayor, a crystal apple from Mayor Bloomberg, are all presents." He switches straight back to serious mode. "My point is that this mayoralty is concentrating on the priorities, trying to cut waste in City Hall for the first time in eight years, freezing council tax. People care about that. It matters. Why should people have more and more of their tax taken at this very difficult time. Getting rid of the Londoner newspaper, a crazy communist-era free sheet that Ken used to put out, saved money. Look at the other important saving: we have been able to freeze our share of the precept and keep crime falling. That is what people really care about. That is a material benefit."

His simple gestures like embracing St George's Day play well. "People should feel confident and realise they are going to get through this recession. St George was, as you know, a Cappadocian merchant who made a fortune while flogging bacon to the crusaders. It does epitomise the entrepreneurial genius of this country and particularly London. The resilience that saw London through the Blitz, the Great Fire, the Black Death, the depression of the Thirties. London always comes back and comes back at the cutting edge of the world economy and I am sure it will again. My message is be confident; some day this recession is going to end."

So if it is all so good he will presumably stand for a second term? "If by the end of next year I feel we are restarting greatly to make a difference on youth crime and the alienation of youth then I am going to think about it. I will think 'are we on the right track?'" So he could be a one time mayor? "Nothing is excluded," said Boris.

So is this all a dress rehearsal for his entry to No 10. Boris hesitates. "In the immortal words of Michael Heseltine I cannot foresee the circumstances in which I would be called upon to serve in that office. If like Cincinatus. I were to be called from my plough, then obviously it would be wrong of me not to help out. But the truth is I have a massive, massive job, an intellectual emotional challenge that I am hugely enjoying. I do not spend any time scribbling on the back of envelopes working out how I could be Prime Minister because it is not on my agenda, it really isn't."

So what has been tough about being mayor? "Cuts and personnel changes were certainly difficult. Cuts at TfL alone £2.4billion. Some decisions I have really agonised about. It's not worth rehearsing them now but you have got to blast on. What you learn is what people want you to do, a bit like being an editor, they don't care what decision you make, they just bloody well want a decision, and you have to give them the lead."

Do you mean like firing Met Commissioner Ian Blair? Boris shows he can do diplomatic and opaque. " I have great admiration for Ian in the way he accepted there was an opportunity for someone else to offer new leadership of the Metropolitan Police force."

But hold on Boris, you fired him. Silence, mild bluster but Boris sticks to the official line. "He did great things with safer neighbourhood and policies on women and rape. No question he was a ground-breaking policeman and I pay tribute to many of the things he did but he and I agreed when I became chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority it was opportunity for new impetus."

So no regrets about leaving the Spectator for full-time politics? "One of the reasons I became an MP was that I could not stand the sensation of being a creature of some proprietor, whereas if you are an MP you are just accountable to your voters." He chuckles in self reflection." Pure prudence also if you remember " And of course, Boris was fired by the Times and later threatened with the sack when he edited the Speccie and became an MP at the same time against his proprietor's wishes. But in the end he had his cake and ate it.

And the best bits of being Mayor? "Meeting parolympians after Beijing and bringing back the flag from China was one of most surreal and marvellous moments of my life." And the difficult times? "The early teenage deaths through stabbings in London were horrendous, meeting the parents of kids who had died was very moving. Nobody felt anyone was doing anything about knife crime, people were dying in gang wars and it just seemed to be endlessly ignored. Parents of these kids felt it so wrong that their children seemed to count for nothing. We said we were going to try to do something about it. The truth is you can't end it, but we have made a difference."

Whatever Boris says or does he is under Ken Livingstone's watchful eye, a constant witness of his question time in the London Assembly. He says bring it on. "I mind when Ken is not watching me. He was a no-show the other day and I felt rather offended. I felt I had lost my mascot, my talisman. I need him there. He is my Memento Mori, the guy who used to ride behind the charioteer whispering in his ear 'Remember man what dust thou art.'"

Is Ken not a threat? "I would be insulted if he was not after my job. It would be like someone saying they don't fancy your girlfriend."

Boris loves the political game and being mayor means he is centre stage for all parties. "I am a nightmare for Labour, the worst thing that could happen. They set up the mayoralty and it has been captured by the Conservatives. It has been a pretty difficult process for them coming to terms with this." But Boris is not always so hearty and carefree. Last week he almost broke his hand when he thumped his desk in sheer anger at an article on roadworks in London's streets written in the Standard by Simon Jenkins. Johnson ruefully confesses. "My hand is in very robust shape; the truth is he wrote a piece about roadworks. If he had made one phone all to City Hall or the utility companies he would see what we were doing. I was holding a packet of cheese and onion flavoured crisps at the time but I did whack my hand on the table in a sort of Basil Fawltyish way. Anyway." So speaks a columnist whose forte is still piquing the establishment through his own journalism.

Back on message again, this time his London legacy "No point in being mayor unless you care and want to do some good stuff. If we have bang-up Olympics and delight the world it would be a great thing, and then also a package of things round cycling, including cycle hire scheme. Oh and make London a greener and cleaner and fairer, better place to bring up your kids. Lot of work to be done to help the bottom of the socio-economic pile. I don't know if I am going to try to do a second term but when I look at the inequalities of academic achievement and the huge gap in self-expectation that there is between children of bourgeois families and of less well of families I would like to do something about it."

Boris has a dream. "I will give a lot of mayoral energy into after-school clubs and literacy and numeracy and trying to spread the benefits of things I had as a child. Why is it subjects like Latin and Greek are restricted to a minority of schools. It is absolutely disgraceful. Why is it that advanced mathematics is almost dead in Camden in the maintained sector. Think of the social and economic consequences of that. It is massive. I think the Mayor should have a role in trying to address that inequality. I do. It is not currently within my competence but it is certainly not off my agenda." Now that sounds likes political ambition beyond City Hall. As he wants to turn his dreams into reality who does he turn to for help. Does he like Mr Blair do God. His last word plays both funny and straight: "It is the foolish man says in his heart there is no God."

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