Handshake fatigue

On the campaign trail with London’s would-be mayors

The mayoral election is, to my eyes, two pantomime dames bickering about who gets to eat the scenery. I join it at the church hustings, St James’s Piccadilly. Boris Johnson enters, hands deep in hair, five points ahead in the polls. He sits down and gives the audience that swift, forensic look. Ken is at the other end of the table — he is tanned in a tan suit, a man who might walk into a desert and be lost. Brian Paddick and Jenny Jones separate them; it’s safer that way.

The chair, George Pitcher, is a Richard Curtis-themed vicar, with glowing cheeks and the swollen remains of a once fine profile. He looks like a Spitting Image puppet and he is clearly on a mission to be the most charismatic man here, which is terrible news for Boris. The audience is full of Hogarth types; there is a mass over-representation of spats.

Pitcher introduces Boris: ‘Like most Londoners, he went to Eton and Oxford,’ he says. ‘Do you worship Mammon or God?’ Boris looks entirely defeated, and says he pays his taxes. ‘I’m sure we all pay our taxes,’ says Pitcher nastily. I think Pitcher hates Boris. He hates him so much he attacks the woman who was fired for wearing a cross to work when boris defends her. ‘I think it was necklaces that were banned,’ he says, thinly. It is interesting to watch Boris getting angry, because he is not good at it. He mouths a bit, and goes still — a dangerous Weeble wibbling.