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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

Last July, soon after Boris had announced he would be a candidate for the post of mayor of London, the editor of The Spectator very kindly invited me to give my reaction in the columns of this magazine. In the article I wrote then, I described the circumstances of Boris’s arrival in this world, in a hospital on New York’s East Side, around 70th Street.

I recalled that, as a modern man, I was perfectly ready to be present at the birth but that unfortunately I missed it, having slipped outside for a moment to buy a pizza. So the first view of Boris that I had was in the crèche of newborn babies. I couldn’t see much of him, since he was neatly wrapped in swaddling clothes. I did, however, note that for security reasons the soles of his feet had been dipped in black ink and his ‘footprints’ taken.

‘It didn’t occur to me at that moment,’ I wrote, ‘that I might be looking at the insteps of a future mayor of London.’

Well, those tiny feet have marched a long way since then! As I suspect most people know by now, the Conservatives under David Cameron, with Boris leading the charge, took London and over 250 seats in the country as a whole, signalling emphatically a revival in the fortunes of the opposition and a considerable crisis for the government.

As the proud father, I was interviewed on a couple of occasions by the BBC and Sky News and invited to comment on the results. I argued that I had probably known Boris as long as anyone, apart from his mother. Over more than 20 years I had read most of his articles in the national press and all of his books, including The Dream of Rome, and it was absurd to suppose that just because he wrote in a readable and often humorous way, or just because he appeared on programmes like Have I Got News for You, he was somehow not a ‘serious person’. I have a lot of time for journalists. Some of my best children are journalists. But when the press and media pursue an easy headline in defiance of the evidence, I can’t help thinking that they are guilty, at the least, of sloppy thinking.

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