From capering to caped crusader

25 April 2009

Matthew Parris says Mayor Johnson must now focus obsessively on fixing London’s transport system

In more ways than one, the suffix ‘ism’ is not easily appended to the word ‘Boris’. Indeed ‘Borisism’ sounds so ungainly that some may pray that no such phenomenon ever needs to be described.

If so, the prayer has been answered. After his first year in power the most powerful Tory in contemporary British politics — the individual Conservative with the biggest personal mandate in history — has to his credit a solid list of plans actioned and things done. To this may be added a more colourful list: of poses struck and capers capered. The achievements are serious; the public profile vivid; and nobody can accuse Mr Johnson of being either feeble or dull.

But none of this adds up to even the beginnings of an ism. We fast got a feeling for what Thatcherism was going to be; and Majorism, though it never quite took wing, scurried busily around empowering citizens, framing charters, starting public-spirited lotteries, and beginning the broadening-out of the idea of a decent sort of Conservatism for a post-millennial age. But Borisism, were it to be posited, would stubbornly fail to add up to more than the sum of its parts. The accumulation is formidable, the recollections colourful, but no ideology links them. No theory unites them. No analysis of modern Britain underpins them.

That has not been in every way a problem. We do, after all, feel we know the man. This combination of strong personal recognition, and weak association with any hard philosophy, has left him free to execute pol-icy U-turns with no more than a wink and an implied chuckle that ‘needs must when the Devil drives’. Even broken promises may be forgiven when there’s no central strategy to be abandoned and the personality stays strong. It worked for Eva Perón and it’s worked so far for our London Mayor.

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