Matthew Parris
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It was this. ‘If anything’ (I said) ‘is to sink the Johnson candidature, it will be an impression of careless jollity — and he’s better than that. Frankly, we at The Spectator would all be doing Boris a favour if we pretended not to support him at all.’ I added that no Etonian should be allowed within five miles of his campaign. ‘Boris,’ I said, ‘is not a snob, Londoners are not inverted snobs, and Johnson could even turn his toffishness to his advantage if the inevitable class-based Labour and Liberal Democrat attacks on him appeared unwarranted; but he must make sure they do appear unwarranted. The Spectator cannot help him here, except by steering clear.’
Well, so far so good; this magazine and Boris have indeed more or less left each other alone, and the appearance of an amateurish toff leading a rather elitist campaign has been studiously avoided. So has playing to the gallery. I recommended that Boris Johnson must not act like the TV celeb that Londoners knew and loved, ‘but surprise such expectations in an early and signal way’.
So he has. He and his team have gone as far as is humanly possible to strip the Boris brand of the taint of shallow celebrity. Boris has avoided the West End, lurked in the suburbs, bored for Britain, and shown a livelier appreciation than many thought likely of the vital importance of being earnest. Now he is within scent of victory.
And so it is with embarrassment that I use this column now to unsay much of that. It is time — or almost time — for the old Adam to out. Column number one remains operative for three weeks longer — until (d.v.) Boris wins. It is then that this column, column number two, must be activated. On 2 May Mr Johnson must climb from the campaign slime, still the dreary grub he has forced himself to resemble, and at the tip of a green reed quiver momentarily in the spring sunshine. Then he must take wing as the iridescent municipal dragonfly for which his whole life has been, so far, a preparation.
I’m serious. There isn’t any point in being Mayor of London unless you can shine. There isn’t much you can do as Mayor of London unless you and your personal imprint become the story.
Ken Livingstone has understood this. Much has been written in recent months about Mr Livingstone’s alleged tendency to treat the mayoralty as a personal fiefdom, favouring special advisers who are part of his palace guard and running the organisation and its public relations as though an extension of his own personality. I make no comment (and am in no position to) about the allegations of impropriety among certain of his advisers. I am not advocating impropriety. But the central thrust of the attack on Livingstone has been for personalising the business of being Mayor, and it is this attack that I suggest is misplaced. Boris Johnson can promise what he likes about banishing the Cult of Ken from the corridors of City Hall’s riverside glass palace, but it is the Cult of Ken that achieved most of what has so far been achieved for the mayoralty, and unless the Cult of Ken is replaced by the Cult of Boris, a Conservative mayoralty will never outshine its Labour predecessor.
Big city mayors are tribal chiefs or they are nothing. The post runs against the spirit of a national constitution, unwritten or written, like a rock in the stream of orderly governance. It must wrest from central government above, and local government below, such influence as it can.
Most important powers over citizens’ lives are vested in one or the other. The London mayor cannot importantly change the law, or ordain that Crossrail be built or cancelled, or do much about street-cleaning, licensing, housing or education. A constitution that in other layers of government tends to encourage party organisation, cabinets and teams, has in the case of the metropolis allowed for a sort of elected monarch with limited powers. From his glass palace, there are not many levers a London mayor actually has his hands on — even in public transport. Unless he can get a bit of personal tide running in his favour, unless he can foster the idea within and outside City Hall that getting the mayor on-side makes a difference, then he and his office are easily thwarted or sidelined.
It follows that the mayor of London needs to surround himself with a palace guard and to make clear by example that, in the words of that Chicago hit, ‘There’s a lot of favours I’m prepared to do/ You do one for Mama/ She’ll do one for you./ When you’re good to Mama/ Mama’s good to you.’
It worked (speaking of Chicago) for Mayor Daley. It has worked time and again for New York, as Rudy Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg — men who have succeeded in attaching themselves personally to big ideas and the policies which followed — can testify. The populist and homosexual socialist Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, with his sandy beaches by the Seine in summer, is in the same mould. Powers and circumstances differ from great city to great city, but in every case a successful mayor has pushed against the limitations of his powers by the power of his personality, and the ability to build around himself something of a cult. A dash of demagoguery is needed.
So, resiling not a jot from what I wrote here in July last year about the need for Boris Johnson to be serious, I’d counsel (after 1 May) against any thought that he needs to be dull. A future London mayor will tread the path that Ken Livingstone has pioneered, or he will go nowhere. Livingstone has been a fine mayor. Mr Johnson’s bedside reading, as he prepares for a few hours’ sleep after the hustings hell of 1 May, should be Tennyson:
Today I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
He dried his wings: like gauze they grew;
Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.
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