JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (52 page)

Occasionally there would be a reversion to type – the suit would be creased, the hair ruffled, the delivery more bumbling and the odd statistic or fact forgotten. His first face-to-face television encounter with Ken and Paddick – on ITV’s
London Talking
programme – was a case in point. Boris showed a new forcefulness when he tackled Ken on rising crime and the spate of teenage murders. The first week of January 2008 alone had seen two deaths and Boris scored a hit when he said the Mayor, ‘must get a grip on this problem, it breaks my heart to see so many kids growing up scared, and so many adults scared of kids.’ Boris was also witty, though clearly still not fully on top of his brief: he fluffed answers on questions about bus conductors and flannelled when asked why he had not previously shown much interest in London before (before his mayoral campaign began, Boris had mentioned London in Parliament just 15 times in six years as an MP).
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Not normally an orator, Paddick was nervous up against two men he called ‘heavyweights,’ but came across well as both serious and prepared. Ken was considered to have had the best line, opening with: ‘If you don’t believe that London’s improved over the past eight years, then don’t vote for me.’ That said, it was widely considered to have been Boris’s night. He had waffled too much and forgotten a couple of answers, but he had surprised his audience with his passion and seriousness of purpose.

Throughout January, the
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continued its series of stories about Ken and his staff – joined by further disclosures from Channel 4
Dispatches
and BBC London. They ranged from freebie holidays for a deputy to using GLA funds to pay for a character assassination – all were damaging for Ken. On one night, though, the spotlight moved onto Boris’s turf at one of the
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’s ‘Influentials’ debates. Michael Eboda, the former editor of the black newspaper
One Nation
, warned Boris that in a multicultural city like London the piccanniny references would come back again and again to haunt him. Boris now knew
better how to handle such an attack and wasted no time in giving his rehearsed apology for any offence his words may have caused, while insisting they had been taken out of context. ‘If you look at the article as written, they really do not bear the construction you’re putting on them,’ he said. ‘I’m absolutely 100 per cent anti-racist: I despise and loathe racism.’

But soon afterwards, and despite all the revelations, another poll showed the Mayor with an increased lead of four points. Ken’s advantage was then helped by the news that Boris had accepted his office space in County Hall from Shirayama Europe, a company previously in dispute with the Mayor. Boris was swift to deny any wrongdoing: ‘This is a donation and has been registered as such. This type of story from Ken’s campaign goes to show how low they are prepared to go.’ Indeed, Boris was making a virtue of fighting a clean war. The fact was, though, that Team Boris did not need to do much digging on Ken – Gilligan and others were more than prepared to do it for him.

For Boris, the next poll proved a mixed blessing and suggested that there was still more rebranding to do. A ComRes survey of business leaders for the
Independent
found that they still thought of Boris as a ‘buffoon.’ Nevertheless they preferred him to Ken, whom they considered divisive and too Left-wing.

February saw Boris placing crime at the top of the agenda, where Crosby would work hard to keep it until polling day in May. The much-publicised killings of teenagers on the capital’s streets were dominating the news – on what Ken contemptuously calls the grounds of ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ It was no accident that this subject had been chosen for Boris’s first policy manifesto or that while launching it, he was flanked by David Davis, the shadow home secretary, whose presence was also intended to dispel growing and persistent reports that the Leadership did not really want Boris to win. Boris’s, or rather Crosby’s, choice of battleground was now clear: crime, and particularly youth killings. Some working on the team felt concerned that the crime emphasis risked making it a ‘nasty’ campaign but Crosby clearly had no such qualms.

By the end of the month, the polls were mixed. A YouGov poll now
showed Boris with a five-point lead over Ken and another, a private poll for the Labour party, put Ken ahead by nine points. These conflicting messages from different pollsters continued throughout the campaign, but it was clear that Boris was very much in the race. But so – notwithstanding all the allegations – was Ken.

On 27 February, Boris came up with a statistic that would turn out to be false and a gift to his opponent. In an interview on BBC London radio, he said that the cost of employing conductors to work on his proposed new fleet of Routemasters would be just £8 million a year. It soon became clear this figure was erroneous because more new Routemasters would be needed than the number of bendy buses they replaced. Unaccountably, Boris stuck with it.

On firmer ground, he returned to his old opportunistic self with news that the Met was investigating him for purloining the cigar case of Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. The incident had taken place a full five years earlier and he had even written about it in the
Telegraph
at the time. Yet, bizarrely, now Scotland Yard was pursuing the case – and during an election campaign increasingly dominated by stories of teenagers dying on London’s streets. It was another electoral gift. Boris allowed himself to be described as ‘fuming.’ ‘There were over 18,000 crimes in London last month and yet the police write to me about this!’ he exclaimed. As so often in his life, his salvation yet again came by way of his opponents.

Ken played his part, too. Tuesday, 4 March was a turning point in the election and it was another Andrew Gilligan story that made it so. The
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splashed with the revelation that £100,000 of public money had gone to projects run by Karen Chouhan, to whom the controversial Lee Jasper had written a number of sexually charged emails. One from Jasper’s City Hall email address ran: ‘Happy Birthday my gorgeous, wonderful, sexy Kazzi. I want to wisk (sic) you away to a deserted island beach, honey-glase (sic) you, let you cook slowly before a torrid and passionate embrace.’ Jasper had not declared any relationship with Chouhan, and she in turn denied any sexual liaison between them. But Jasper now had to go, although not before blaming, ‘the racist nature of a relentless media campaign.’

Incredibly, Ken continued to back him, saying: ‘I would bet my own
life that [the police] will clear Lee Jasper and I will reappoint him when they do.’ It was surely a blind spot not to see the damage being done to his campaign. Indeed, some of his most loyal advisers such as John Ross, his economics guru, appeared to break ranks at this point to criticise Jasper. It did not help that a couple of arrests of Jasper ‘associates’ soon followed and more came later.

Boris’s Aussie-powered campaign machine seized its chance. Boris exploited the Mayor’s troubles by announcing plans the very next day to make City Hall more transparent and accountable. If elected, Boris said he would publish on the City Hall website the biographies, responsibilities, register of interests and contact details of all mayoral advisers for the public to inspect, along with a code of conduct. Once dubbed the evil racist, Boris was now occupying the moral high ground and it was a good place to be. He then attacked Ken for making London an even more expensive place to live through increases in tube fares and the GLA council tax precept (effectively the Mayor’s levy), plus what he described as his ‘vainglorious foreign policy ventures’ (the so-called ‘Kenbassies’ set up abroad in countries like China to attract inward investment) and lastly the
Londoner
, which he branded ‘the Mayor’s ludicrous Pyongyang-style newspaper.’

Then came the news in a report leaked to
The Times
that Ken was ‘secretly planning’ a large-scale expansion of his congestion charging zone. A delighted Crosby, now working a regular 18-hour day, immediately put out attack leaflets to all nine areas the newspaper said were under consideration. Ken, whom Boris began to dub ‘Ken Leaving-soon’, was feeling Crosby’s heat. In a reference to his opponent’s Australian nationality, he was overheard saying: ‘For the first time in my life, I can actually see the benefits of a rigorous deportation policy.’

Ken’s celebrity friends – including Kevin Spacey, director of the Old Vic theatre – continued to support him but others in the normally reliably Labour-supporting arts world, such as Tracy Emin and Dinos Chapman, distanced themselves. They were both signatories to an open letter attacking Ken’s love of tall buildings in the East End, which they said were ‘destroying what makes London special.’ But much worse was to come the next day from another so-called friend – the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling – who was delivering his first budget on 12 March. There was little good news – increased borrowings, lower than expected growth rates, higher taxes on alcohol and family cars. Worst of all was that he confirmed that the hugely unpopular planned abolition of the 10p starting tax rate would go ahead – leaving some five million low-paid taxpayers worse off (not a few of them living in London). The electoral ripples were immediate and disastrous for Labour – whose support fell to a 25-year low – and especially for Ken. In London, Labour was now trailing the Conservatives by a massive 24 points compared to 16 points nationally. Labour was hugely unpopular but incredibly Ken (who had for so long outperformed his party) was more unpopular still.

It was at this point that Ken first scented defeat. Seemingly the worst he could pin on Boris was that he had under-costed his Routemaster bus policy by £100 million. It was a subject that Andrew Neil also pursued when he interviewed his former employee on the BBC
Daily Politics
show. Under persistent questioning from the Scot, Boris finally admitted that he did not know the exact cost after all. But although it was embarrassing, set against a collapsing Labour vote and the still-rumbling Jasper saga, ‘bus-gate’ was a sparrow among hawks. On 27 March,
The Times
reported that Gordon Brown had ‘all but written off’ Ken’s chances of winning and was seeking consolation in the fact that a Boris victory would be a ‘disaster’ for David Cameron. Downing Street rejected the story as ‘utter garbage’ but it was clear that Labour was now rattled.

Although just named Britain’s fourteenth-worst dressed man by his old employers at
GQ
, Boris looked very smart for his official campaign launch at a community hall in Edmonton (a location chosen by Crosby because three teenagers had been murdered in the area in recent weeks). Both Ray Lewis – the black youth leader now regularly seen with Boris – and David Cameron joined him. Cameron made the introductions, dubbing his fellow Etonian ‘twice as charismatic’ and ‘twice as energetic’ as Ken. ‘I don’t always agree with him,’ he conceded, ‘but I respect the fact that he’s absolutely his own man.’ (Soon afterwards, Cameron would give an even clearer sanction to Boris’s departures from the national line with: ‘It’s very important
that it’s his manifesto, his proposals and his mayoralty.’) Meanwhile, Boris offered a choice between his own ‘fresh approach’ and what he colourfully called his opposition – ‘a superannuated Marxist cabal.’ On 17 March, A
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YouGov poll – which had been first to put Boris in the lead on 26 February – found him in first position once again, with a 10-point advantage over Ken.

That night the three contenders clashed in another
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debate. With Paddick looking increasingly irrelevant, Ken and Boris were now settling into a nicely matched routine of point-scoring repartee in what felt more and more like a mayoral edition of
The X Factor
. Ken had brazenly adopted one of Boris’s policies – on obliging miscreant youths to earn back their right to free travel – but when its original owner pointed this out, retorted: ‘What sort of idiot, when they hear a good idea, wouldn’t take it on board?’ He then invited Boris to make a return raid on one of his own policies – a curious deal swapping cheap Venezuelan oil for London’s buses for advice on transport, waste and tourism – offering: ‘Would you like to meet President Chavez?’ When they disagreed on whether London had become safer under Ken, Boris pointed out that the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had recently declared that she was frightened to go out for a kebab in her neighbourhood of Peckham. ‘That’s because she doesn’t know what is in it,’ quipped Ken. ‘I want a London where the most dangerous thing in Peckham is the kebab,’ Boris shot right back.

With a month to go until the election, April Fools’ Day was a difficult one for both main candidates. First, Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman inflicted further damage on Ken’s claims to have made the capital safer when she was filmed walking round her south London constituency in broad daylight in a stab-proof vest. Then the far-right BNP endorsed Boris on its website on the grounds that ‘the Tory clown Johnson is a lesser evil than the Marxist crank Livingstone.’ The posting coincided with the re-release of yet more apparently racist articles in the
Spectator
while Boris was editor. Boris apologised again ‘for what was previously written, as it does not reflect what is in my heart’ and attacked Ken for peddling personal slurs.

Yet even within City Hall itself, word was being put about that a
Boris Mayorship would make life difficult for black staffers. Such was the fear generated by the rumour mongering about Boris’s views on race that several organised themselves into a ‘Don’t Let Boris In’ caucus. ‘They were led to believe that Boris was some sort of Right-wing Neanderthal and several black City Hall workers came to us to see how we could help them,’ recalls Steve Pope of the black newspaper, the
Voice
. ‘What was interesting was that they were genuinely afraid of what would happen to them.’

Outside the febrile atmosphere of Ken’s lair at City Hall, though, Crosby’s view was most voters were not interested in what he said, or allowed to be said, in years gone by. The point was Boris was no longer saying anything even potentially offensive now – and indeed was going out of his way to win over minority groups. And Ken’s determination to push this issue was also beginning to backfire in some quarters as people struggled to equate the monster his team said would want to ban the Koran with the
HIGNFY
figure now going round London spreading bonhomie in a smart-ish suit.