JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (66 page)

On the surface most senior Tories have been glowing about Boris’s track record as mayor. After all, the return of Ken is a far worse prospect for them than Boris’s re-election. ‘Boris has shown himself a serious political leader and executive – we’re impressed,’ says the Downing Street source on cue. ‘He’s filled the shoes of Livingstone, and that was always going to be difficult. Before the election, people were saying Boris was a bit of a joke, but not any more.’

Pushed on the detail of real achievements, however and the tone is immediately more hesitant. As usual, the ‘sacking’ of Ian Blair is wheeled out as the significant victory (although that ‘victory’ has begun to look distinctly hollow after Boris’s chosen replacement at the top of the Met resigned after just three years in his post, leaving behind him a force facing its biggest crisis for four decades). ‘Otherwise, he’s doing loads of stuff under the radar,’ observes the Downing Street man. ‘But we would concede that there’s no big-ticket achievement and we’re surprised that after three years in power, there are
still
calls for him to take an axe to City Hall.’

A leading backbench Tory MP (and one of the first to come out in support of Boris as mayoral candidate) is more direct: ‘He has been showman rather than politician – he’s a disappointment.’ Leaders of the outer boroughs have also started to privately grumble that Boris has reneged on his promise to look after the suburban ‘doughnut’. Most schemes emanating from City Hall benefit Zone One areas, such as the smart part of Islington where he lives. His appointment in February 2011 of Teresa O’Neill, Tory leader of Bexley, as his new Outer London Adviser – and borrowing £40 million towards an outer London fund – were attempts to bring his natural allies back on side. Even so, the ‘doughnut’ Tories complain this amounts to too little, too late.

Some activists also report feeling disappointed. ‘I campaigned for him as President of the Union at Oxford and I campaigned for him in 2008,’ says one former supporter. ‘I know lots of Tories who said in the first mayoral election that they wouldn’t vote for “that clown.” And now they think he’s not been so bad as they expected. But those of us who expected more, feel let down – he’s done nothing for the doughnut areas and I think he almost deserves to lose next time.’

The hope is that ‘noticeable’ additions to London life in the pipeline will dazzle the detractors and provide Boris with the bragging rights he needs for a second term and beyond. As he entered the fourth year of his mayoralty, City Hall staff noticed he was devoting a ‘huge’ proportion of his time in trying to extract funds from private donors, often bankers and, yes, sometimes his friends at News International, but also little-known overseas companies for a range of increasingly bizarre, even panicky ‘legacy’ projects. ‘Subjects such as crime and transport are now much further down the agenda,’ says one despairing aide.

Boris had kicked off with the laudable Mayor’s Fund – a much-trumpeted charity intended to help the disadvantaged youth of London – with donations from the City’s hugely advantaged bankers. It did not start well, with Bob Diamond – the £7 million-a-year man from Barclays – saying that he didn’t have the time after all and bailing out after just six weeks. And despite the Mayor’s commendable efforts to invite bankers to ‘palliate their guilt’ by siphoning off the small change from their bonuses, the sums since raised have proved a humiliating fraction of the many millions he had promised (and expected). A sheepish Boris admitted in March 2009 that ‘there’s not an awful lot there yet.’
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By 2010 the Fund was still spending less than £1.5 million a year across the whole of London. Even one of Boris’s chief supporters, Lord Marland, admits the Fund is ‘stuck in process and is sluggish. It has not had the significant impact that was hoped and needs a game change.’ In the event, Boris had discovered that extracting money from bankers is not so easy as it should be.

Of course the ‘Boris bikes’ are the largest, most expensive and popular project and he has brought in up to £25 million from Barclays for that. But only in return for colossal brand exposure – and as we know, the taxpayer is still expected to have to fork out another £100 million or so over the 2008–2012 mayoralty, too. Yet despite the enormous cost, beyond the bikes are at least four other grandiose schemes that the Mayor is enthusiastically pursuing.

‘Money is no object when it comes to making these prestige projects happen,’ observes one senior City Hall official. Despite the
excitable puffs from City Hall, these are not free gifts to the metropolis as many assume. In fact, the total bill for all the Mayor’s ‘vanity projects’ (as they are nicknamed privately, even by his staff) could run into hundreds of millions of pounds. With Boris tightly constrained on how he can raise revenues, the ever-rising costs could well push up transport fares, which have already risen by up to 44 per cent under his reign, even further.

The first is the officially titled ArcelorMittal Orbit after its sponsor – a global steel company – which Boris hopes will be London’s answer to the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower. A £24 million (initially, £19 million) 115-metre red-metal tower next to the Olympic park in east London, it resembles either a hookah pipe or a demented treble clef, but is, apparently, ‘an electron cloud moving’ to City Hall. Nicknamed the ‘Olympic Erection’ or ‘Piffle Tower’, it was branded by the
Observer
’s architecture critic Rowan Moore ‘the most extravagant example of the idea that a huge, strange object can affect tens of thousands’. But describing it as ‘ponderous and confused’, he concluded: ‘This could be the point at which the idea stops working.’
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Taxpayers will nevertheless be paying at least £3 million towards it, and more to visit. Furthermore, it is not widely known that profits from visitors will not go back to the public purse but instead to ArcelorMittal: the company has donated £10 million in cash towards the project and lent the money for most of the rest, but in return will benefit from enormous publicity and naming rights in perpetuity, as well as the visitor income stream.

Another much-touted wheeze is the new Routemaster bus – an emotionally resonant but, according to its detractors, financially nonsensical investment of £8 million for a first batch of just five buses (or £1.6 million each) loosely based on the old hop-on, hop-off double-deckers. The first few were scheduled to appear on London’s streets by the end of 2011 and should cut quite a dash, with their rounded behinds and glazed-over staircases. Later models are expected to be cheaper as development costs are absorbed but eventually the cost of extra conductors alone is expected to top £20 million a year.

Next, Boris wants to build a ski-lift style cable car from the O2 Arena on the Greenwich Peninsula south across the river to the Royal
Docks and the ExCeL London exhibition centre. Elegant, certainly, its route has nevertheless puzzled locals, who are unlikely to make that particular journey often after the Olympics are over, and links with other public transport routes are questionable. Boris promised the original £25 million cost – now slated at up to £57 million – would be paid for by the private sector but by June 2011 he was furiously back-pedalling and said he could no longer ‘guarantee’ the taxpayer would not have to foot the bill.
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Meanwhile, he has been making his usual round of calls to drum up cash from advertisers or sponsors, persistently pressing James Murdoch of News International for one to cough up. (There were suggestions that the defunct
News of the World
might be a sponsor.) The quest for backers has been made more difficult by the financial uncertainty, however, as well as concerns over safety issues surrounding the 300ft support towers. Together they mean that the cable car may well not be ready in time for the Games – its principal raison d’être. No matter, work has begun, so the taxpayer is already committed.

Finally, Boris was able to claim in the spring of 2011 that he had secured up to £60 million for a futuristic kilometre-long floating pontoon along the Thames shoreline from Blackfriars to the Tower of London, yet another planned attraction for the Olympics, as well as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. According to City Hall, the principal backers for this addition to a World Heritage Site were to be the Singapore-based Venus Group. In fact, the company’s real name is Venus Asset Management, a little-known outfit whose website has neither a postal address nor telephone number, and which comprises a lot of subsidiaries called Guru. A director of one of these companies, Guru Fund Management, is the signatory to the agreement with Boris. There are even fewer details about Guru Fund Management except that its UK registered office is located in a brick-built block of modest flats in Stratford, east London, and its director, Sri Nadarajah, lives in the same block, where homes typically sell for an average of around £150,000. (Attemps to contact Nadarajah at this address have met with scant success, repeated phone calls going unanswered before defaulting to a fax machine.)

To date, the origins of the promised £60 million have not been
disclosed and the deal has provoked questions at City Hall. Boris’s incoming chief of staff, Sir Eddie Lister, handwrote along the bottom of official documents that he would not agree to the deal without due diligence conducted on Guru and a guarantee no public funds would be committed. City Hall claims due diligence has since been done but has declined to provide further details on Venus Group, or the money, on grounds of commercial confidentiality. Privately, officials remain ‘concerned.’ ‘We have no real idea who these people are or where their money is coming from,’ says one. ‘It is not the sort of agreement that the Mayor of London should be entering, but Boris would not be dissuaded.’

Meanwhile, many of Boris’s aides have tried to re-focus his attention on the all-important, if comparatively dreary issues of transport and crime. It appears that he is often too taken with his bold schemes to be dragged down to earth, though: it’s as if he fears nothing more than having his mayoralty described as dull. As one observer put it: why is it that politicians prefer to leave a legacy in the shape of a towering folly rather than an efficiently-running transport system? It’s not as if Boris is short of media attention – he still has an instinctive feel for a photo opportunity. When he and a camera crew accompanied police on a drugs raid in the summer of 2011, when he saw the Mayor, the astonished suspect exclaimed: ‘What the fuck are
you
doing here?’ Fame indeed.

Boris is an assiduous caller of newspaper editors – and enjoys almost unparalleled access, helped by the fact that he has worked for them (such as Tony Gallagher, editor at the
Telegraph
), gone to university with them (Ian Katz, deputy editor at the
Guardian
), lived nearby (Katz again), attended the same school (fellow Old Etonian Geordie Greig at the
Standard
) or worked opposite them (Lionel Barber at the
Financial Times
, who was in Brussels at the same time). He is also in regular contact with James Murdoch of News International, and before she resigned, Rebekah Brooks, and is given top billing when he writes for the
Sun
. He has even attended a News International board meeting, and been wined and dined by the company at least six times.
The Times
has been vociferous in support of his ‘Boris Island’ airport in the
Thames estuary idea, when most other news organisations (like the airlines) have discounted it. Jeremy Paxman on
Newsnight
is a family friend, David Dimbleby on
Question Time
is a fellow ex-Bullingdonian – so many BBC interviewers are part of the greater Johnson diaspora. Curiously, the BBC decided not to run with the Helen Macintyre story – ensuring a débâcle that might have been a difficult issue for the Mayor fizzled out within days. ‘There was a feeling that it wasn’t a story, it was just Boris,’ explains a BBC executive. (It is also interesting that it was not his tormentor of old, the
News of the World
, but the
Daily Mirror
that broke the story.) It’s a cosy world – and Boris, Rachel and Stanley occupy some of its sunniest spots.

Seriously critical coverage – bar the occasional outburst in the
Guardian
or
Daily Mail
– is rare. Boris charms and he cajoles and is often treated indulgently in return. He has a reputation for not behaving like a normal politician and so he is not judged like one; to date, at least, he has been forgiven where others are simply forgotten. Although, of course, if in the future he does go for Downing Street, he might well find that his indiscretions with women suddenly become a political issue, where for so long – since his sacking over Petronella Wyatt – they have been overlooked. Almost certainly, it would be calamitous should Marina ever leave or denounce him.

Older Tories – and even some of his one-time staunchest supporters, such as Sir Max Hastings – shake their heads with dismay whenever Boris is cited as a plausible candidate for Number Ten. ‘Cameron is taking a huge political risk in the national interest,’ writes Hastings in the
Daily Mail
, ‘while London’s Mayor seeks to advance, or at least protect, his own career. I know which of the two I want to run Britain, and it is not Boris.’ Despite this (and as even his critics concede) as a celebrity toff, Boris embodies two of the great trends of our age. ‘Servility to celebrity has partially replaced class deference,’ notes George Walden, the former Tory MP, ‘and the adoring polls suggest that Johnson benefits from both.’
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Indeed, who would have thought a mere decade ago, that politics in the twenty-first century would be dominated by two Old Etonian ex-members of the Bullingdon Club? For most of the latter half of the twentieth century it was the meritocratic grammar schools that
held sway. Their products occupied Number Ten for 33 years from when Harold Wilson ousted the aristocratic Alec Douglas-Home in 1964 through the Heath and Thatcher years to John Major’s departure in 1997. And yet in the new millennium, Cameron and Boris preside over a political elite once again drawn from a tiny, privileged social caste. It is as if in some ways, Margaret Thatcher – daughter of a Grantham grocer – never existed. True, if Ed Miliband makes it into Number Ten he will be the first premier to emerge from an English comprehensive but the last electorally successful Labour leader – Tony Blair – who brought the grammar school run to an end in 1997, was schooled at Fettes, Scotland’s answer to Eton.