JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (53 page)

Two days later, Gilligan – who had by now become a key figure in the election – made what some thought to be his first mistake in an otherwise meticulous coverage of Ken. Straying away from hard facts on the news pages, he wrote a savage opinion piece on the Mayor in the
Standard
under the headline, ‘NOW WE’RE ALL COUNTING THE REAL COST OF KEN’. Soon afterwards, he won the prestigious Journalist of the Year award at the British Press Awards for what the judges described as ‘relentless investigative journalism at its best.’ But even some of his colleagues on the
Standard
felt that Gilligan would have been better advised not to display his personal views in this way – and that the newspaper was straying dangerously close to becoming the
Evening Boris
. Even a key member of the Boris campaign team fretted the
Standard
’s unrelenting championship of their man might prove counter-productive. ‘Support from a newspaper is obviously always very helpful,’ he concurs, ‘but it would probably have been even more powerful if they had said something more along the lines of, “on the one hand this and the other that” and then allowed readers to choose.’

Ken also had other concerns. BBC London now revealed that he had five children by three women, rather than the two previously known about with his current partner. He said the matter had not been ‘secret’, merely ‘private’ and that all the children and their mothers were known to each other and that he was an ‘involved’ father with them all. ‘I don’t think anybody in this city is shocked about what consenting adults do,’ he said, after what was widely thought to be a planned leak. The disclosure came just ahead of Andrew Hosken’s forthcoming biography, which would have revealed the children for the first time in a
Daily Mail
serialisation (at least this way, Ken got his comments in first).

The usual pundits tried to make much of his complex family arrangements, but in truth as Ken said, it was not a big deal in a city as liberal as London. What is likely, though, is that his private life would have made it more difficult for him to make much of Boris’s sexual history. And indeed – although Crosby was ready to deal with any trouble on that front – the spectre of ‘bonking Boris’ barely featured in the entire campaign. Boris himself knew better than to make trouble for Ken on this issue: both men wanted cloaks drawn over their history of begetting.

And in any case, Boris was simultaneously dealing with the fall-out from a
Marie Claire
interview with Janet Street-Porter in which he had admitted to smoking dope before going to university and an admission that he
might
have taken cocaine while at Oxford. There followed an outburst of synthetic outrage from predictable quarters – but it was brief.

By mid-April, word was coming out that the Conservatives believed they were now in with a real chance of winning – and that coming close was no longer ‘good enough.’ It was a seismic shift of thought and expectation, not least for Boris himself. Until then, senior figures had only dared hope for a narrow, but glorious defeat. Yet with the polls turning against them, Labour’s sole solution seemed to be London minister Tessa Jowell threatening to fine ministers £5 for referring to Boris from now on as anything but ‘Boris Johnson’ or the ‘Conservative candidate’. The public reason given was that first names reduced a very important contest to the status of a ‘joke.’ Privately,
officials were admitting a flash of panic brought on by the belated realisation that the fact that their opponent was known as ‘just Boris’ reflected just how fond people were of him. (Incidentally, it seems that Boris may have received a similar briefing as he also stopped calling his opponent ‘Ken’ around this time, starting to refer to him in formal tones as the ‘Labour Mayor’.)

Not all Conservatives looked forward to a Boris triumph, however. George Walden, the former Tory MP once attacked by Boris for being a member of the ‘liberal elite’, chose the morning of 9 April and the pages of
The Times
to urge Londoners not to vote for any of the candidates, whom he spit-roasted in turn for their failings. But he saved the real heat for Boris, or as he called him, ‘Johnson’: ‘The gaiety of nations I understand, but the most entertaining thing about Johnson is when he puts on his serious, solicitous look. Like David Cameron, he is coming to believe in his own sincerity. Servility to celebrity has partially replaced class deference and the adoring polls suggest that Johnson benefits from both. A Greek grocer I knew put his finger on it. Musing about how Alan Clark imagined relieving himself on the public from his ministerial balcony, he concluded: “The English don’t mind being pissed on, so long as it’s from a great height.” It is not Johnson one should feel embarrassed for, as he clowns around, it is the country.’

That night, the candidates met again, this time under the chairmanship of Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s
Newsnight
. The highlight was a tug of wills between a Paxman and Boris over the recurring issue of the cost of his Routemaster policy. Boris now appeared to be backtracking from the £8 million figure, but did not seem to have another more realistic one in its place. Or if he did, he did not want to reveal what it was. Sensing blood, Paxman kept returning to the point, asking no fewer than 13 times for a costing: ‘Give us a figure, come on!’ Throughout, Boris kept flannelling and in the end, Paxman theatrically declared: ‘A figure! A figure! I despair!’ Boris had scored a spectacular own goal. At one point he even appealed to Ken for help by asking him for a figure on what he intended to spend on 500 new bendy-buses.

Crosby thought the debate to be the low point of the campaign – Boris
had stopped clowning around but still couldn’t be trusted with figures (although Boris’s minders believe this was his only lapse in self-discipline in what was otherwise a focused and commendable effort). But even now many viewers thought that Boris’s desperation in the line of fire had somehow made him still more ‘endearing.’ There was something of the naughty but charismatic schoolboy being slapped down and shown up by a heartless and insistent master – although Paxman noticeably did not press Boris with the cold determination he has inflicted on other politicians. It proved just how effective Boris’s politics of personality could be – even Ken was seen laughing at his jokes and straightening his collar in a fatherly gesture. (Boris was later caught on a Labour supporter’s mobile phone admitting the new Routemasters would indeed cost £100 million. Undoubtedly the fiasco over bus figures was his weakest point in the campaign, however forgiving some of the public might be.)

That same evening at yet another hustings, the London Citizens’ Convention in Westminster’s Methodist Central Hall, Boris’s performance was much more politically assured. He showed just how far he was prepared to stray into liberal territory and take advantage of Cameron’s licence to differ. The audience was composed of church members, trade unionists and school children. It was perhaps not a naturally sympathetic collection of people for an Etonian member of the Bullingdon Club (especially compared to many other hustings, where Paddick says he repeatedly spotted a ‘very vocal Boris supporting group ready to shout everyone else down and led by a thick-set Mediterranean-looking guy in his 50s in a Boris T-shirt’). All the candidates were asked the same politically tricky question on whether they agreed with an earned amnesty for illegal immigrants. Having now been Crosby-ed for several months, Boris knew his audience, both within and outside the hall. So (incorrectly) describing himself as the grandson of a Muslim immigrant from Turkey, he theatrically (and in direct contravention of his own party’s policy) declared his support. He even went on to emphasise the point by imagining the pride that he believed his grandfather would have had in him for adopting such a platform – he knew he needed one ‘brave’ policy, some eye-catching initiative to set him apart from his party and
avoid the dangers of ‘boring.’ It also served as a brilliant antidote to all the ‘racist’ chatter about him.

This was not the performance of an out-of-touch heartless toff, but a politician who had read his electorate accurately and responded to them. It will never be possible to apportion the credit between Boris and Crosby, but what was clear by now was that they made a formidable team. And while they were reaching out to the Left, the
Sun
was meanwhile also preparing to come out in support.

Indeed, such was the interest in every aspect of Boris’s life by now that the media had started to focus on his family. Marina has always sought to provide them with as normal a childhood as possible, though, and decided to use the provisions of privacy law she knew so well to protect the children. With Boris, she lodged a successful complaint to the Press Complaints Commission against a newspaper that had published photographs of his children on holiday in Turkey. ‘The London Mayor considers those photos an unwarranted intrusion into the private lives of his children,’ his spokesman said. ‘It is clear from one photo that this intrusion has caused some distress to one of his daughters. Another seems to mock his youngest son by inviting comparisons with his father.’ The move paid off and the Johnson kids have been allowed to grow up out of the public spotlight, with at least one newspaper since then deciding against naming them in a potentially embarrassing story.

Back on the campaign, Ken was catching up in the polls. Meanwhile, Boris was coming under mounting pressure to name his chief players in London if he were elected. He seemed strangely reluctant to do so – claiming that he did not want to prejudice the outcome of the election or his proposed staff and advisers by naming them. He had just one name to give out – but it was a big one. Bob Diamond, the American-born president of Barclays, was to help set up the Mayor’s Fund.

Race was to prove an issue one more time for Boris when he appeared on a live on-air hustings on BBC Asian Network. Ken was late – pleading he had stayed behind to see his children because they ‘don’t understand why Daddy spends more time with Boris than with them.’ Maybe this unsettled Boris, but he started to sound
uncomfortable when asked by the presenter Nihal Arthanayake whether he had met his Turkish relatives or kept up any part of his Turkish heritage. Boris evaded the question by announcing that he had Turkish cousins living in London and denied that he had only recently uncovered them to help him win the ethnic vote. ‘Lots of Turkish relations have been coming and going in our family for a long time,’ he countered. But when Arthanayake asked him: ‘Are you down with the ethnics?’ Boris replied: ‘I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me, Nihal,’ before later adding, ‘My children are a quarter Indian, so put that in your pipe and smoke it!’ Arthanayake ended the exchange by saying: ‘OK, let’s not try to out-brown each other.’

Of course, there was one other minority group that Boris had also annoyed in the past with his support for Section 28 and for having once compared civil partnerships to ‘three men and a dog’ getting married. For him, this was yet another vulnerable territory as Ken had traditionally been very strong on gay issues (although more recently he had lost support over his links with a Muslim cleric who had called for homosexuals to be killed). Nevertheless, on 19 April at one of the last hustings before the poll – this time organised by the gay rights group, Stonewall – Boris knew he had work to do. He wasted no opportunity to make up lost ground in declaring ‘half’ his campaign group was gay. But then there were loud theatrical ‘oooohs!’ from the audience when he thumped the table in angry response to a hostile question on his one-time support for Section 28. He hastily pointed out that he had more recently been supportive of its repeal against the Tory party line at the time. The flash of temper passed and he regained his composure when Andrew Pierce of the
Telegraph
asked a helpful question. Recalling the ‘out-ethnicking the ethnics’ comments, Pierce invited him to ‘out-gay the gays and reveal whether, perhaps while at Eton, he had had a gay sexual experience.’ ‘The answer is …’ Boris replied, and then after a dramatic pause, ‘not so far!’ The exchange demonstrated just how far he had travelled, while Ken remained the same old Ken.

By this time, though, the pressure of the relentless hustings, press conferences and interviews was telling. In yet another meeting with
his two opponents the next day on BBC One’s
Politics Show
, it was Paddick who demonstrated the quickest wit. Asked to describe each other in one word, both Ken and Boris broke the rules with long and pedestrian responses. When it came to the Liberal Democrat’s turn, he came up with the simple, but devastating: ‘Tragedy; comedy.’

With a week to go, some thought the result too close to call. But the Tory Leadership was waking up to the realities of quite possibly being only a week away from a Boris Mayorship. It had taken them a long time to realise the very qualities that would be deadly to ‘normal’ politicians were still working very well for Boris. A well-sourced piece in the
Telegraph
on 24 April reported Cameron’s team had spent a ‘significant amount of time’ discussing what kind of relationship it would have with Boris, should he become mayor. According to the piece, the top priority was, ‘to find ways of insulating’ the leadership ‘from the fallout if Boris hits trouble of any sort once in office. A degree of distance will be required between the Westminster front bench and Boris.’ So, although it was widely believed among top Tories that Boris could now win, there were deep fears about the consequences for the Party at large and its hopes for the General Election if it proved to be the case. The fear that there would be another Boris scandal after he was elected now became intense. It was not exactly a ringing endorsement from his own side as he entered the final days of the fray.

That same day, on the
Standard
’s front page, Ken publicly contemplated defeat for the first time. Under the headline, ‘MAYOR ADMITS THAT JOHNSON COULD WIN’, he even advised Boris to oversee a ‘graduated transition’ if he were to be elected to City Hall in a week’s time. Playing on the heart-strings – and once again mentioning his children – he said, ‘If I don’t win, come 6 May, I will be taking the kids to school and starting a book on my last eight years as Mayor.’ In the evening, there was yet another television debate, this time on a special edition of the BBC’s
Question Time
chaired by David Dimbleby. Perhaps mindful of what the Shadow Cabinet had been discussing, Boris emphasised his independence with the declaration: ‘I would gladly embarrass any Government that is in power, if it was in the interests of Londoners.’