BRITAIN:Many believe Boris Johnson may see his mayoral triumph as a step to greater things, writes Frank Millar
THE BORIS buzz is charging through City Hall and across the city's divided inner and outer boroughs as Londoners ready themselves for a new mini-Conservative government in the capital.
There is excitement in the air all right and, maybe in some quarters too - not least in the Conservative Party - a mild shiver of apprehension. One Tory friend took time out from the champagne celebration on Friday night to text: "Great result. But oh God, what have we done?"
He was only joking, sort of. And the potential for a Boris cock-up will certainly have occurred to many Conservatives beyond those dispossessed Thatcherites who would welcome just about anything capable of destroying David Cameron's leadership.
The new mayor's writer-sister Rachel recalls that the little boy Boris once told her he wanted to be "world king". For the time being he'll have to be satisfied with running London with his £11 billion (€14 billion) budget. Yet even before he formally assumed office at midnight last night, many who know him well were already speculating about how he might think to use his new office as a stepping-stone to the Conservative leadership as a future prime minister.
Boris's former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore speaks of Johnson's "will . . . driving egotism and ambition" and ventures: "He could end up being prime minister. I think that is what he most of all wants."
Biographer Andrew Gimson agrees Boris ultimately will have his sights set on Number 10. He told yesterday's Mail on Sunday there was an "implicit rivalry" between Boris and Cameron and that Cameron would be "wary" in the future of the potential threat posed by his fellow old-Etonian because "Boris is a very, very big beast and there are not that many big beasts in the Tory party."
Stephen Glover, who wishes both the Tory leader and the Tory mayor well, cautions Johnson against permitting success, if it comes his way in office, from turning into "overweening vanity".
Writing in Saturday's Daily Mail, Glover confided: "My worry is that, ensconced in his own domain, flattered by the media, Boris may set himself up as a kind of alternative Tory leader to his old rival, saying slightly different things, speaking off script when it suits him and generally regarding himself as his own man who need not defer to Mr Cameron."
Biographer Gimson's limited reassurance for Mr Cameron is that Johnson will only ever get to win a future leadership vacancy if he has first made a success of the mayoralty. And there was plenty of evidence of the new mayor's serious purpose and intent when he spoke minutes after his sensational victory over Ken Livingstone had been formally declared.
For all the heat generated on the hustings, Livingstone and Johnson both distinguished themselves with gracious speeches showing that politics can sometimes be done rather differently. Boris saluted Ken for his achievement, courage and "sheer exuberant nerve" as "a very distinguished public servant and distinguished leader of this city". Choking back a tear, Ken promised Boris that the coming years as mayor would be the best of his life. The outgoing mayor also demonstrated some stature in taking the blame for defeat upon himself and declining to blame Gordon Brown or the Labour Party for the fact that, perhaps, his best years are now behind him.
Beyond such pleasantries, it was clear that the inaugural speech of the Johnson era had been the subject of considerable thought and planning. The new mayor did not imagine "for a minute" that his success meant London had been transformed overnight into a Conservative city.
He hoped rather it showed the Conservatives had changed into a party that could be trusted again after 30 years "with the greatest, most cosmopolitan, multi-racial, generous-hearted city on earth in which there are huge and growing divisions between rich and poor".
Suggestions that Boris might be homophobic had always seemed particularly preposterous when whispered by Livingstone supporters. Certainly many of them had seemed blissfully unaware that Ken was being seriously damaged, not least among gay voters, because of his past association with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim scholar who seemingly has no problem with Muslim states executing gays. Rachel Johnson also displayed irritation with the suggestion of racism against a man married to a woman "who's half Sikh Indian" and whose children "are a quarter Indian".
Pledging to work "flat out" to win the trust of "the vast multitudes" who voted against him, Boris also promised to "dispel some of the myths" that had been created about him along the way.
It promises to be fascinating watching him do that, while he gets to grips with a potentially problematic relationship with metropolitan police commissioner Sir Ian Blair, tackles those terrible "bendy buses" and tries to make good his promise to stamp out violence and harassment on the transport system. Following the fatal stabbing of a 15-year-old boy in south London just hours before his election, however, Boris said on Saturday that his number one priority would be the fightback against the problem "of kids growing up without boundaries and getting lost in tragic and self-destructive choices". The mayor's powers may be distinctly limited but Boris Johnson, as we know, is a man of towering ambition.
For now, at least, Londoners on all sides of the political spectrum will be hoping it plays to their advantage.