‘Let’s melt down the railings to make bicycles’

I met Boris Johnson in his office in City Hall overlooking the Thames and Tower Bridge. Our former editor seemed a more thoughtful and sensible character than the man who used to practise cycling with no hands down Doughty Street at lunchtime, but there were signs of the old Boris tucked around his mayoral office: ping pong bats (the Mayor likes to unwind by trying and failing to beat his personal assistant, Ann Sindall); a book of love poems by the late Woodrow Wyatt; a bust of Pericles in the corner, looking out over this 21st-century Athens.

Do you identify with Pericles?




It would be absurd to say that I identify with Pericles. But I have had a spooky veneration for him, ever since I read the funeral oration at the age of about 12 — the bit where he bangs on about Athenian democracy, and equality under the law, and a society based on merit. I remember my skin crawling with excitement because it was so obvious to me, back then in the Cold War, that Athens was like America — open, generous, democratic — and Sparta was like the Soviet Union — nasty, closed, militaristic, totalitarian.

Even though I later learned that it was all really propaganda cooked up by Thucydides, that speech still seems to me so fresh and modern, and far better than any speech I ever heard in the Commons.

Thirty years later I was in the British Museum shop, and in an ecstasy of pretentiousness I bought the last plaster bust they made of Pericles. The hat he is wearing is from some American mayor.

What would Pericles do to make London the school of the world?



But London already is the school of the world. We have more of the world’s top 100 higher education institutions than any other capital, a constellation of universities that draws more students from around the planet than any of our rivals.