Matthew Parris
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That has not been in every way a problem. We do, after all, feel we know the man. This combination of strong personal recognition, and weak association with any hard philosophy, has left him free to execute pol-icy U-turns with no more than a wink and an implied chuckle that ‘needs must when the Devil drives’. Even broken promises may be forgiven when there’s no central strategy to be abandoned and the personality stays strong. It worked for Eva Perón and it’s worked so far for our London Mayor.
But I wonder for how much longer, while the idea of what Boris Johnson stands for stubbornly fails to cohere? Can you entirely and indefinitely personalise an administrative campaign in one of the world’s great cities without the compass of strategy? Shouldn’t there be some sort of cognitive meshing between what a Tory mayor represents in London, and what a Tory government would represent for Britain? The lightness of being Boris is a wonderful thing, but without an underlying political purpose to anchor the being, might the lightness become unbearable?
What, in short, is the meaning of Boris? Against the superficial evidence, I would contend that one can detect the hint of a Johnsonian philosophy lurking beneath the dazzle and the giggle, and it needs to be firmed up. Boris’s instinct is to see — and tackle — administrative problems in terms of real, flesh-and-blood human instances.
He should make a virtue of it. He could even make an ism of it. What would the politically unaligned London voter select, from one of those focus-group checklists, as being among the Mayor’s positive qualities? If he were a biscuit, it would be a homemade biscuit — perhaps a gingerbread man with one leg missing after a bungled dunk in the tea: he’d be an odd biscuit but at least he’d be his own biscuit. And, beyond idiosyncrasy, many floating London voters presented with the preamble: ‘If I were to meet the Mayor on a bus and say what was upsetting me about the way London’s run, he would…’ and asked to choose from: ‘(a) look bored and promise to notify his staff; (b) make a party-political point out of what I was saying; or (c) listen properly, and if he agreed, go into battle for me’ — would opt for (c).
When the giggles subside, and when the quietly rather steadfast pursuit (beneath the bumbling surface) of his own advantage is excused as necessary in an ambitious man, a philosophical thread does still fitfully run through Mr Johnson’s public life. He consistently, often indignantly, and I think sincerely, takes the side of the individual against the injustices, stupidities and insolence of office. Boris would have stood side-by-side with Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case. After the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes, when Johnson had called the Metropolitan Police ‘trigger-happy’ and the Commissioner (Sir Ian Blair) had demanded a retraction, Johnson’s considered reply read: ‘I have absolutely no intention of doing so. It is hard to think of any other description of a catastrophe in which a completely innocent man ends up with seven bullets in his head.’
There is of course an extent to which standing up for the citizen against the big guns of officialdom is the politics (and ideology) more of opposition than of government. But being Mayor of London is in one sense a job of opposition. You don’t have many powers; your own police force is very largely controlled by the government; your grip on your city’s transport system is cruelly constrained by central government’s grasp of the purse-strings; and your own power to raise or spend even a modest proportion of the billions the metropolis contributes to the public finances is minuscule.
But there’s one thing you do have: the best witness box in England from which to mount a defence of the city’s put-upon inhabitants. If this is Mr Johnson’s instinct — and I think it is — then he would do well now to raise it to, and dignify it with, the status of a personal political creed.
My advice to Boris is to gather in a more systematic way the reputation for being in politics to stand up for the individual against the madnesses and meannesses of the big political and bureaucratic guns. And the area in which I think he must take this campaign urgently is transport. Public transport is a daily misery for literally millions of Londoners. The city has a magnificent transport infrastructure but it’s under huge pressure, fraying at the seams, and (especially on the Underground) running things pretty close to the edge. The national press virtually ignores it as a ‘London story’, while London’s daily Evening Standard has (curiously) only ever been fitfully interested.
But transport is a huge part of millions of Londoners’ lives, and so often an unhappy one. The Evening Standard’s transport editor ought to have been elevated by his paper into A-list status: one of the city’s top ten media figures; a known face raging daily against the indignities commuters suffer; following stories systematically; mounting undercover snoops; demanding investigations; uncovering organisational and financial scandals.
The Mayor of London should fill the void. He should act like a campaigning transport journalist. He should be unafraid to embarrass even his own Transport for London team. London commuters should imagine him as the kind of politician they might find themselves sitting beside on a severely delayed tube train — and pour out their woes; the kind of Mayor we might see peeping through the holes in the hoarding that hides the escalator repairs that aren’t in fact happening; the politician we might encounter under a bus shelter with a stopwatch, checking whether official service frequency is borne out by the reality. From capering to caped crusader: that’s the transition which, after a year in office, Boris now needs to make.
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