Another voice

The promise Boris must make if he is to become mayor of London

4 August 2007

Boris Johnson could make a great Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty, and a great mayor of London. But he’ll need to get the pitch right. I’m afraid the first thing he’ll have to do is steer well clear of The Spectator.

Boris certainly doesn’t lack courage. I’ve known him, not well, but for many years, and (if I may add to his father Stanley’s self-confessedly affectionate estimate on these pages recently), I’d sum it up like this. Cleverer (of course) than he pretends, somewhat less doggedly amiable than he pretends, as learned as he seems, not always as confident as he seems, more easily depressed than he appears, he has a real passion for wronged individuals and the overlooked. He would have been a brave defender of Dreyfus. He can be a good friend in need. However, he sometimes finds arguments in principle, in the abstract, or about ideology rather tiresome. Personally energetic, he can be philosophically lazy. As mayoral candidate, he would need a small, crack team of policy-people and a really tough chief of staff; and he would have to let them run him.

The public-school jibe could be really damaging. No Etonian should be allowed within five miles of his campaign. Boris is not a snob, Londoners are not inverted snobs, and Johnson could even turn his toffishness to his advantage if the inevitable class-based Labour and Liberal Democrat attacks on him appeared unwarranted; but he must make sure they do appear unwarranted. The Spectator cannot help him here, except by steering clear.

A Tory friend of mine was rather unexpectedly saying, over supper the other evening, that the one thing he admired about the new Prime Minister was he really does try, does struggle, and has been struggling all his life. Gordon Brown gives the impression that this job is everything to him — that it’s a huge effort, but the only thing he’s ever wanted to do, the thing without which he would count not just his career but his life a failure. He cares so much that he cannot pretend. This earnestness (my public-school friend said) was quite unfamiliar in the circles in which we moved, and wholly admirable.

London doesn’t need or want another pearly king. Mr Livingstone, for all his self-advertisement and eccentricity, is deadly serious, and brave, and Londoners know it. For the Conservative party to calculate that Livingstone’s a joker, a celeb, and wins, therefore the Tories need a celebrated joker too to trump him, would be to fall into a terrible trap. To succeed, as he might, Boris Johnson must not play to the gallery, but surprise such expectations in an early and signal way.

Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.