The hard choices that face the Father of the Mayor

07 May 2008

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Stanley Johnson is adjusting to his new constitutional position in the life of London: not least deciding which clubs to avoid at lunchtime in order to dodge Boris’s journalist foes

Well, as the Daily Mail front-page headline put it on the day after the night before, Boris had ‘the last laugh’.

I know it is hard for me to be objective, but some of the press comments seemed to me to be worse than sloppy. By chance, Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and I were both invited by the BBC to be part of a small group of commentators at City Hall on election night.

‘I think calling Boris a sociopath was extremely impolite and probably actionable,’ I protested.

‘I’m not going to talk to you,’ Polly replied, ‘you’re Boris’s father.’

I wanted to pursue the issue but Emily Maitlis of Newsnight whisked her off for an interview.

In my new father-of-the-mayor role, I find I am faced — as the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown would say — with increasingly ‘tough and difficult decisions’.

To give an example, when I leave my house around 12.45 p.m. to cycle through Regent’s Park and down Regent Street for lunch, there comes a moment near Leicester Square when I have to choose whether to go to the Garrick or the Beefsteak.

If I go to the Garrick, there is a danger of meeting Simon Heffer. Heffer’s first charge against Boris was that he is a buffoon. Well, having been comprehensively worsted on that front, Heffer’s particular gripe now is the question of Boris’s ‘competence’ to run London. I know Heffer is not talking about me but still I regard myself as implicated by reasons of paternity, if nothing else.

If, to avoid Heffer, I put on the brakes, and aim for the Beefsteak instead, I run the risk of encountering Bruce Anderson. Writing this week for example, in the Independent, Anderson seems to be no less disobliging as far as Boris is concerned than Heffer. Anderson appears to believe that Boris is bound to screw things up. The line seems to be that he is ‘not a details man’. If they start talking about ‘management skills’, I shall know they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

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iskidmore

May 9th, 2008 11:16am Report this comment

why does every promotion of Boris bring his talentless family swooping out of the shadows. Its worse than the Waugh

robert

May 9th, 2008 7:22pm Report this comment

Absolutely right, isk! If there's one thing that is guaranteed to make Boris fail, it's his awful talentless family: Rachel in the Sunday Times (why?) and Question Time (no, seriously) - or this bumbling, arrogant, presumptious fool

D Short

May 9th, 2008 9:29pm Report this comment

Yes, she was pretty hopeless on Question Time. I couldn't believe how dumb she was. I also noticed she used her Sunday Times column this past week to wail that people only come up to talk to her to get an intro to Boris. Exactly the same point she made in another column next year.

Boris has more than just four children as dependants!

Ronald

May 13th, 2008 10:09am Report this comment

I think your contributors are both being hard on Boris's father. That's a priceless line about Polly Toynbee, the most grim, self-righteous and self-important of commentators.

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