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Sunday 8 November 2009

The hard choices that face the Father of the Mayor

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

In one of those post-vote TV interviews I was kindly invited to give, I opined, only half-frivolously, that a man who could master Ancient Greek and Latin as well as Boris has can certainly run London. I say only half-frivolously because in the days when Britain ruled more than a quarter of the world rather successfully (from our point of view at least), a classical education was considered a more than adequate training for the job of handling populations certainly as large and diverse as London’s.

By chance, Clive Williams, headmaster of Ashdown House, the Sussex prep-school which Boris and three of his siblings (Rachel, Leo and Jo) attended, telephoned me as I sat down to write this article to congratulate me on becoming First Father.

‘What about this charge, Clive,’ I asked, ‘that Boris doesn’t pay attention to detail?’

‘Codswallop!’ Clive replied. ‘You can’t write Greek and Latin prose as well as Boris did without having a supreme ability to master detail. If you’re going to get it right, you have to be meticulous.’

I ought to make it clear that my main concern during Boris’s campaign, apart from any practical help I might give, was not to rock the boat with some unwise remark which could be seized on by the Livingstone camp. For example, various articles appeared about my Turkish antecedents. They correctly pointed out that my grandfather, Ali Kemal, was the last interior minister of the last Turkish Sultan, but quite incorrectly suggested that my father, and therefore Boris’s grandfather, was a Turkish immigrant. He wasn’t. He was born in Bournemouth in 1909. But any comment from me at that point might have given rise to the unhelpful headline: ‘Boris’s dad denies he is a Turkish immigrant descended from Circassian slaves!’

There was just one occasion when I thought I might have a larger role to play. One afternoon Boris’s campaign people rang me and asked me to make a speech in Greenwich to a gathering of 400 potential Tory voters when it seemed that Boris would be delayed in Westminster by vital House of Commons business.

I drove down with Dan Ritterband, Boris’s chief of staff, ready to give the speech of my life. They gave me a set of notes on the main themes (bendy buses, crime, congestion charge, etc.) but I planned to throw in some unscripted remarks as well, such as a promise to rip up as many speed-bumps as possible!

Happily, Boris showed up with minutes to spare, so I missed my moment of glory. But I had a mean time in Greenwich that night anyway.

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