LONDON:Boris Johnson's critics say his achievements as London mayor are laughable, but the controversial Conservative is preparing for re-election, and his eccentric if calculated way of doing business, and a number of populist strategies, have him ahead in early polls. MARK HENNESSY, London Editor, watches him work an audience
CANDIDATES SOMETIMES produce books before an election, seeking to portray themselves as leaders with vision, but London’s mayor, Boris Johnson has opted for a sometimes bawdy history of the city he leads.
However, it is still part of his campaign to hold on to power next year. On a recent chilly night, the effervescent Johnson has come to the Institute of Education near Russell Square to promote his work, Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World. The hall is not full, but it is enthusiastic, lapping up Johnson’s intelligence wrapped in self-deprecation, his rapid-fire delivery of seemingly endless anecdotes and Latin and Greek quotations, and, clearly, his fascination with the city he has run since 2008.
The book feeds Labour’s charges that the former Conservative MP has idled in City Hall, devoting his energies, instead, to never-ending self-publicity; with former Labour cabinet minister Liam Byrne saying it was “truly astonishing” that he could have found the time.
Johnson, as is his wont, has not taken the charge lying down, declaring: “If some Lefty, snivelling opponent tells you that you can’t combine writing and politics you can remind them that Churchill wrote journalism throughout his career.”
For most politicians, a self-comparison with Churchill would be met with withering contempt, as happened recently to Liam Fox in his dying days as defence secretary. Johnson seems, for now at any rate, to escape the normal rules.
At the book publicity event, for instance, he recounts his hero-worship of the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. He had sought an audience with the guitarist at a celebrity-filled awards ceremony late at night. Johnson was “pretty far-gone” with alcohol.
“To my great pleasure, I was allowed to sit next to him. Later, I discovered that Stephen Fry had also tried to sit next to him but he was rebuffed on the grounds that Keith Richards’s bodyguards thought he was David Cameron,” he recounted to rolls of laughter.
The book, his City Hall aides insist, was started before he beat Ken Livingstone in a bitter battle three years ago, but Johnson dates it differently, putting its genesis down to his experience as mayor. “Whenever I was giving speeches or thinking about the successes [of the city] I was always finding that there was some historical echo that was very useful. Though history doesn’t repeat itself there are lots of lessons from the past.
“For me, what came through most strongly, was how London served as a kind of an arena of talent,” he says, insisting that in its 2,000-year life, the city has progressed because it attracts the most restlessly vain and ambitious.
Imagine, he says to audience chuckles, “a nuclear cyclotron, or a nuclear reactor where the little particles, whatever they are called – that’s right, the neutron, the proton, the quark, the neutrino – are all fizzing around. London is the place where they collide with the most creative energy and you have the most incredible flashes of excitement and genius. [It] was London’s ability to attract genius that led to this cross-fertilisation, catalysis, whatever you want to call it.”
This hunger for celebrity and fortune tormented everyone from William the Conqueror to Chaucer, and scientist Robert Hook, while William Shakespeare became the force he is because of brutal competition from Christopher Marlowe and other dramatists. “He wasn’t some guy with a bad hair-cut sitting in a garret in Stratford-upon-Avon, or some hick town,” says Johnson, before emitting a child-like chuckle, admitting that he should not say any more lest he offend Birmingham.
Shakespeare and his challengers were engaged in a battle for “bums on seats”, he says: “The better your play did, the more you got paid. There was a direct, commercial competitive incentive for Shakespeare to write the best stuff. You see that time and time again.”
Johnson’s detractors, notably Livingstone, who hungers to return to office, find him guilty of the same vainglory he praises in Shakespeare, but without the achievement, scorning his record in office. Next May, he will join Livingstone once more in battle, although Johnson is currently ahead in the polls.
Repeatedly, in almost any forum, the mayor points to the success of the loss-making, if popular bicycle-sharing scheme – inevitably known as Boris Bikes, while he has similar ambitions to repopulate London’s streets with the Routemaster’s classic hop-on hop-off platform, still so fondly remembered by commuters. The new double-decker buses start running in London in 2012.
In both written word and conversation, he rejoices in delighting, sometimes shocking, his audience, just like one of his heroes, Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote in the vernacular, rather than Latin, to reach “the largest possible audience, and he wanted to make them laugh”.
Johnson recounts how King Alfred the Great had struggled with stomach pains, resorting “to scammony for constipation, gutamon for stitch, spikenard for diarrhoea, tragacanth for corrupt phlegms” during his trials with the Vikings.
“Overmastering his innards, and perhaps with the fumes of four-star [petrol] already shooting from his rear-end, Alfred came roaring out of the marshes,” writes Johnson, to smote the Vikings at Edington in 882. Consumed with guilt by his sexual urges, Alfred prayed for a distracting disease – a plea that was met with “piles so sizeable that after a particularly agonising hunting trip to Cornwall he stopped at a monastery and prayed for another disease”.
Johnson is forgiving of human frailties: the scientist Hook had “a kind of odd sweetness to his nature” despite the fact that his “sexual relations were peculiar” since his niece, Grace, was his mistress. His namesake, Samuel Johnson’s declaration that he would, if he could, spend “my life driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman” articulates for Johnson “the eternal dream of the British male” and “the manifesto of Jeremy Clarkson.
“For all their famous hypocrisy, the British also love a person who seems honest about his pleasures, however vulgar,” he goes on, while his audience look knowingly at a man said to have fathered a love-child.
However, the book, and the publicity it has brought, is also an election manifesto, with its optimistic predictions for London’s future, as long as the mistakes made after the second World War, when the city’s fabric was left untended, are not repeated. “We didn’t invest in the Tube. Look at the docks in the 1960s and 1970s. They had brought riches to London, [but] thousands of jobs migrated to Rotterdam. We closed down the beating heart of the empire in my lifetime.
“My view is that we will be making a tragic mistake if we fail to address transport infrastructure,” he declares passionately, focusing particularly on London’s need for a new airport, and pointing to the lack of routes to Asia. He backs the construction of one in the Thames Estuary “where the bad effects on human beings could be minimised and where the birds would have little fear”, though few others in power agree with his £40 billion dream.
However, Johnson argues that Londoners must think like Victorians, particularly Joseph Bazalgette, who told staff building the 1,000 miles of sewers that he had designed that “we are only to going to do this once, and there is always the unforeseen. He multiplied the width of the tunnels by two. Recent studies have shown that if he had kept to his original calculation then the network would have reached capacity in the 1960s. It is a tribute to the Victorians that it is only today that we are building again on this scale,” he writes.
If his book celebrates those who became rich within London’s borders, Johnson insists that it must guard against the creation of a two-tier society – even if many would argue that London has long since succumbed.
Despite it being unfashionable to do so today, Johnson is a champion for London’s bankers and financiers. But he urges them to follow the example of Dick Whittington, known incorrectly as the mayor of London who had a cat.
“He was basically the Philip Green [the owner of Topshop] of his day, but infinitely richer, if you can imagine that. The House of Whittington were the people you went to for robes.
“Everybody in those days – in the late 1400s – was keen on having some very fancy schmutter, and Dick Whittington was a sort of ‘Suits you, sir’ type of guy and very canny at turning bits of fabric into must-have accessories.”
His money-making skills were one thing, but Whittington – who funded the English victory at Agincourt – ascended to a different league by lending his fortune to the cash-starved crown and then persuading it to exempt him from a wool-export tax. “It was like putting the chief executive of Goldman Sachs in charge of the Financial Services Authority, basically. It was an incredible situation. He died a stupendously rich man, by the standards of the time,” he says.
However, Whittington, who is remembered today in countless Christmas pantomimes “with Ann Widdecombe and what’s his name . . . Jason Donovan”, would not be recalled at all if he had been just a businessman, however talented. Instead, the four-time mayor, deemed a cat-lover because one was, perhaps, painted into a finished portrait to cover a “gloomy” skull, is loved because he made gargantuan charitable donations – a lesson that should be learned by today’s billionaires, Johnson contends. “Having ripped off the state, having very cunningly become the beneficiary of the scam that he was running with the wool subsidy, he gave and gave,” he goes on, pointing to the 32 elderly people living today in an East Grinstead almshouse “thanks to the bequest of a man who lived in the 14th century”.
“That is a lesson for all those bankers. They should stump up, they should endow London hospitals and schools, shouldn’t they?” he says, to applause. “By the way, there are no cats allowed .”
Once again, Johnson gets the final laugh.
Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World, by Boris Johnson, is published by Harper Press (£20)
