On the road with Boris

Boris defines the ‘new Conservatism’ by being a real human being

Toby Young

18 July 2007

Toby Young, our campaign correspondent, says that the candidate’s prospects
in the London mayoral election hinge on his appeal as a great communicator,
and on the hysteria of the Left, which completely misunderstands him

The staff member in question turned out to be Jo Tanner, a PR woman who has been given the unenviable task of co-ordinating press and publicity for Boris’s campaign. Until last month she’d done the same job for Nicholas Boles, the Conservative who had been planning to run for mayor himself, but she’d never encountered anything like this. Sure enough, when Boris eventually showed up — about 15 minutes late — he was pounced on as if he was David Beckham arriving at LAX. (Or should that be Posh Spice?) The ‘photo call’ consisted of Jo trying, unsuccessfully, to manoeuvre the candidate into position, then, when it became clear that he wouldn’t be given the room to pose for any pictures, abandoning that plan and concentrating on trying to clear a path through the mob so Boris could escape on his bicycle.

Predictably, this stunt was described as ‘shambolic’ in the news reports that followed — and, of course, that doesn’t matter in the slightest. A central part of Boris’s appeal is that he’s the antithesis of a typical politician — a bumbling amateur rather than a slick professional. It makes him seem authentic and genuine, someone who’s incapable of ‘spin’. It’s why people regard him as one of them, as opposed to one of them. Indeed, the chaos outside City Hall on Monday may have been orchestrated by Jo Tanner to achieve precisely this effect — though I doubt it. If Boris has a ‘brand’, it is because he’s incapable of being anything other than who he is, not because he has successfully cultivated a particular image. What you see is what you get — and that includes the impression that what you see is what you get.

This even applies to his dilly-dallying about whether to run or not, something a lot of commentators have written off as a piece of stage management. The catalyst was David Cameron’s decision not to promote him in his 3 July reshuffle — and Boris no longer had to worry about upsetting Mr Boles who withdrew from the race for health reasons on 1 July — but it really does appear to have taken him two weeks to square it with his constituency party and persuade his wife and family to give him their blessing. The Mayoral election isn’t until 1 May 2008, and in the intervening nine months he is bound to be subjected to a blistering degree of scrutiny. Boris is an A-list celebrity who’s been caught with his pants down before — and the fact that he’s running for Mayor will give the tabloids all the licence they need to turn his life upside down.

Assuming Boris manages to stay out of trouble, will his raffish, down-to-earth charm be enough to propel him into office? His first hurdle will be persuading the party to adopt him as the official candidate. According to his friends, he has no wish to run as a Tory independent, not least because it would permanently blot his copybook with the party