JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (60 page)

While Boris had emerged unscathed, his adversaries were not quite so lucky. Quick was the first casualty. A week before the select committee report left Boris in the clear, the policeman had already been skewered; a fate hastened though not orchestrated by the Mayor. On 8 April, Quick – who was Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism chief and widely seen in Tory circles as an ally of Sir Ian Blair’s – was photographed outside Number Ten holding secret briefing notes on an imminent undercover operation. The security breach meant that raids in the North of England had to be brought forward by several hours and were, according to senior sources at the time, ‘compromised’. Quick made it clear to the new Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, that he was considering resigning. Not until the next day at 7.30 a.m. was Boris informed that Quick was expected to quit but just 40 minutes later (while the raids were still in progress), Boris phoned BBC Radio 4’s
Today
programme to announce Quick’s departure. ‘In the end,’ he told listeners, ‘Bob Quick decided it was the best thing to do. It’s a matter of sadness as he had a very, very distinguished career in counter-terrorism.’

In doing so Boris not only pre-empted a public statement from Scotland Yard but once again stole the thunder from the hapless Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. In a pre-emptive swoop that left senior Met figures gasping with fury he even announced Quick’s replacement, John Yates. However, Quick was perhaps most astonished of all, not least because he had not yet actually tendered his resignation.
‘I had told an MPA representative that I intended to resign but I had not yet done so,’ he recalls. ‘I hadn’t even spoken to Boris.’

Of course, Quick was now left with no choice. In any case, he viewed resignation in large part as a protest at what he considered an invidious politicisation of the Met: ‘It was actually more about the Green affair than the bit of paper in Downing Street. I could have withstood that on the day, admitting to a split-second mistake and turning the spotlight on the photographer who had appeared mercenary and unpatriotic, but I felt that the tide was against me because of Green and the political levers now being used on the Met. I had spoken out in December [2008] about the corruption I was witnessing around me [but] I was simply attacked by the Tories, the tabloids and one or two colleagues I felt were trying to derail the investigation. And so it was hopeless.’ Quick’s convictions commanded some outside support. Martin Kettle, for instance, wrote in the
Guardian
: ‘Quick lost his job for 100 per cent political reasons.’ And five months later, the smouldering row over political interference reignited in public when Kit Malthouse declared that he and Boris had their ‘hands on the tiller’ at the Met and had ‘seized control’ of its senior officers, prompting an explosion of outrage from Stephenson and the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers Sir Hugh Orde, not to mention a growing sense of unease in the ranks over at Scotland Yard.

Boris would have to wait to exact his revenge on Keith Vaz but in an article entitled ‘Limo-Loving Politicians’ in the
Daily Telegraph
the following May, he lambasted Vaz’s ‘rear end’ as the ‘symbol of every-thing wrong with British politics.’ It was, he said, ‘cupped, cosseted, cocooned on the velour upholstery of a government car’ and, as the vehicle passed Boris on a Whitehall street, ‘Vaz hauled down the window to hail me. Actually, I can’t be sure that it was Vaz who pressed the button. It might have been him, or the driver, or the bodyguard.’ Vaz then offered him a lift, he continued, ‘in the kindly tones of Louis XIV leaning from his carriage to comfort a poor peasant woman struggling along in the mud.’ Boris wrote that he refused this offer – “‘No, it’s OK, thanks, Keith,” I said, slapping the battered old handlebars of my machine. “I’ve got my bike.”’ – and then decried
the cost to the taxpayer of Vaz’s grandiose entourage, complaining, ‘He didn’t face the slightest threat to his security, except possibly from people like me, and here he was cruising around London as though he was Charles blooming de Gaulle.’

Vaz wearily points out that (as Boris would know) a mere select committee chairman does not have a government car, still less a chauffeur or bodyguard. It was, he says, his assistant at the wheel of his own family Prius and that it was ‘all a nonsense.’ But Vaz knows as well as anyone that there is no point in trying to hold Houdini to account.

*

Back in April 2009, though, events at the Met looked set to engulf Boris yet again. A bystander had died after being struck and pushed over by a policeman on the fringes of the demonstrations against the G20 gathering of world leaders. Pictures of the incident handed to the
Guardian
a week later show Ian Tomlinson, a homeless newspaper seller, was walking away with his hands in his pockets when the officer assaulted him. His death consequently struck at the heart of police accountability and the rights of the individual – both themes that Boris had enthusiastically expounded, before and since becoming mayor. This time, though, he chose to keep surprisingly quiet beyond describing the pictures as ‘disturbing’ and saying that his deputy on the MPA would be meeting the police complaints body. He even complained about what he called ‘a very unbalanced orgy of cop bashing.’

In an interview with Jon Gaunt on SunTalk radio, Boris said: ‘It is wildly overdone – everybody understands that there are serious questions to answer about what happened to some of the protesters at the G20, and particularly Ian Tomlinson, and thoughts are with his family, but you have to get it into proportion.’ Boris’s ideas on proportion are instructive: his comments on police conduct at the G20 – which led to a newspaper seller’s death and a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ followed by a charge of manslaughter against the policeman in question – compare interestingly with his outrage over the raid on a frontbench Tory MP suspected of receiving leaked information potentially damaging to national security.

Questions over policing in London continued to dominate Boris’s
mayorship, but after previous dramas he was muted in his criticism of the force. And yet his mayorship has seen some of the Met’s most turbulent years with controversies raging over its crowd-control techniques and the catalogue of errors in the case of multiple rapist John Worboys that allowed him to continue to attack women for years after he might have been caught. Arguments over whether he has raised or reduced the overall numbers of officers have also swirled over a jumble of confusing figures – leading to Boris being dubbed a ‘liar’ on the subject by at least one Labour member of the London Assembly. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that in due course he recognised that continuing as chairman of the MPA was adding more to the debit than the credit side of his mayoral balance sheet. On 26 January 2010, he resigned and no doubt with some relief handed over the reins to Kit Malthouse. It was another electoral promise broken – a key plank of his manifesto had been that he would chair the MPA to hold the Police to account. But if he thought that in doing so he would be able to file away the Met as someone else’s problem, he would be proven much mistaken.

Boris’s decision to step down from the MPA coincided with an escalation of the row over the Met’s failure to investigate phone-hacking allegations against the
News of the World
, the paper that had revealed two of his own affairs. On this subject Boris appeared to be almost unquestioningly on the side of the Police and indeed, the newspaper itself, denouncing the allegations of illegal hacking as ‘codswallop’ and a ‘politically motivated put-up job by the Labour party.’
¹⁰
It was a surprising stance because the Police had warned him that his own phone had been targetted around the time that news of his liaison with Anna Fazackerley broke in the paper. Later he changed his line to suggesting the paper should not be singled out as the practice of phone-hacking was widespread in journalism and celebrities actively liked being hacked.
¹¹

Like other senior Tories, Boris seemed unwilling to confront the
News of the World
or more particularly its bosses at News International (with its stable of electorally influential papers such as the
Sun
and
The Times
) despite mounting evidence against them.
Only when it emerged in July 2011 that the
News of the World
may have been hacking phones belonging to murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and the relatives of dead servicemen and terrorist victims, together with compelling evidence that the Police were either complicit or at best disinterested in the offences – leading to an outbreak of public revulsion and the dramatic closure of the
News of the World
– did Boris finally call for a ‘ruthless’ investigation. Yet he still praised Rupert Murdoch’s ‘very considerable’ contribution
¹²
to the British media, adding that he did not subscribe to the line that the media tycoon had in any way ‘corrupted or corroded our political debate.’

Although media attention focused on David Cameron’s relationship with News International, after becoming mayor Boris had also cultivated relationships with both James Murdoch, chairman of News International’s European parent company, and UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks, who resigned and was then arrested over the affair. Boris was at Eton with Brooks’ husband Charlie, and has lunched and dined with both Brooks and Murdoch (on one occasion with Marina) and has also been taken out to dinner by James’ father, Rupert Murdoch. The links do not end there – Sky sponsored Boris’s cycling events (Skyrides), News International was planning to sponsor a mayoral academy and has considered plans for investing in other Boris projects while backing many of his policies in print.

When the phone hacking scandal claimed the two most senior Police appointments made under his mayoralty – Sir Paul Stephenson who resigned as Commissioner in July 2011 followed swiftly by John Yates as head of Counter Terrorism – Boris reluctantly accepted their resignations. At a very rare press conference on 18 July, under intense questioning by journalists he now admitted he had ‘misunderstood the severity of the [phone hacking] allegations.’ Although he also claimed, that he had always said he would ‘look again’ at the affair if new evidence came to light. It was an extremely rare case of Boris submitting himself to some of journalism’s most dogged questioners, and he looked particularly flushed as some present began to ask if he had considered his own position. Downing Street also slapped him down after he seemed not fully to have backed
David Cameron over the scandal. Unusually, Boris looked neither confident not comfortable.

Back in April 2009, though, Boris was coming up to his anniversary in power and his first annual appraisal. The one from the voters was effusive – a poll in the
Standard
had him trouncing Ken on a massive 49 per cent of the vote. Despite the early chaos, resignations, rows with Commons committees and skirmishes with the Police, Boris’s mayorship was proving one of breezy survival: London had not collapsed into farce or been taken over by jack-booted racists. Although a Tory, he had moved to the Left in various ways – supporting the London living wage and an amnesty for illegal immigrants (although the
Guardian
compared this stance to ‘someone’s social conscience coming out of a coma’
¹³
) – just as Ken shifted rightwards with his enthusiastic adoption of the City (leading one independent commentator to brand him ‘a curious mix of Trotsky and Thatcher’).

Indeed, there were remarkably few changes considering Boris’s electoral mandate: his regime had not become the laboratory for Conservative policy wonkery many had expected. ‘Boris is a captive of City Hall,’ observes one former colleague. ‘The place is a monument to Ken Livingstone. The meetings are like some 1970s throwback to municipal socialism. It’s a nightmare for anyone instinctively Conservative.’ ‘It’s just the world’s biggest think-tank,’ complains another Tory. ‘The Police and Transport run themselves and it produces a lot of reports that are largely ignored.’ Even Boris admitted much of City Hall’s output has to be ‘filed vertically.’

Boris won acres of favourable coverage, however, by making speeches in Latin or cracking a good joke after falling in a river; he did what good entertainers do and cheered people up. Voters, it seemed, enjoyed having a mayor who might not know every detail of the Circle Line, but swore like a celebrity chef when cornered and claimed to identify with the Incredible Hulk, since ‘the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.’
¹⁴

So, Boris was saying all the right things – but was he actually doing them? ‘It may be that a bold personality and cautious policies is the right mix for a London mayor,’ suggested the
Economist
. Maybe so, but the lack of an answer to Ken’s ‘big picture’ achievements – the
Oyster Card or the Congestion Charge, both of which may be said to have improved London life – was worrying. Media outings were consequently meticulously orchestrated to project the ‘big personality’ and avoid questions about the lack of grand ideas. Such control meant journalists considered more probing or knowledgeable were regularly refused interviews. Nor would Boris be likely to bestride the airwaves whenever thornier issues such as Tube breakdowns, strikes or London’s streets being seized up with roadworks were high on the agenda. As one of his aides put it: ‘Boris does not do bad news.’

His good fortune was that although ostensibly a small-state Tory, he was reaping the political rewards from big-spending projects such as Crossrail, a new railway traversing London, and the 2012 Olympics. And yet in reality he could justifiably claim little credit for either – both had been won on Ken’s watch.

His own initiatives were on a smaller scale. They included the fact that, as promised, he was getting rid of the hated bendy buses – albeit slowly. He had also cut costs at City Hall and frozen the precept (the Mayor’s share of the council tax take, thus saving the average household a notional and not life-changing £8 in his first year). More divisive was his decision to abolish plans to impose a high-rate Congestion Charge on gas-guzzling 4x4s (just one of many measures that angered the Greens). And although the effects were not yet visible, he also seemed to have gone back on his word to stop seemingly randomly scattered skyscrapers from trashing the city’s skyline. ‘Erectile disorder seems the occupational disease of London mayors,’ railed the commentator Simon Jenkins about Boris’s new-found enthusiasm for towers.
¹⁵
As soon as Boris had taken occupancy of ‘the testicle’ (his nickname for elliptical City Hall), he ‘craved a phallus.’