JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (55 page)

Following this, he headed off for the victory party then in full swing at the Tories’ head office in Millbank Tower, upriver at Westminster. By the time he got there, the Altitude bar on the 29th floor was packed with guests including Sir Tim Rice, Lord Marland, and his parents, Stanley and Charlotte. Champagne had been served since 6 p.m., there were unlimited oysters and caviar. An all-blonde girl band in black ball gowns struck up ‘Jerusalem’ when Boris finally made his entrance shortly before one. Cameron held up Boris’s hand in victory – making the new Mayor look distinctly uncomfortable – and both men acknowledged the other’s contribution to the win. Boris, sipping his first glass of champagne since Christmas, also took a call of congratulations from the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, but was mainly closeted away with advisers.

The following day, a Saturday, Boris allowed Ken and his staff time
to pack up their belongings and leave before laying claim to his new office on the eighth floor. He did, however, return to City Hall for the signing-in ceremony in London’s Living Room, the events space with commanding views of the capital from the ninth floor. Boris arrived looking uncharacteristically smart – tidy hair, smart indigo tie and the classic statesmanlike combination of white shirt, plain dark suit. With Marina in his wake, he was swept upstairs to be greeted by 400 vocal supporters football chanting, ‘Bor-iss! Bor-iss!’ ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’ he whispered to Anthony Mayer and was told, equally discreetly: ‘Don’t worry, I’m in charge of this one! Sit down next to me and you’ll get a nice pen to sign a book. Don’t do anything until I say, “Now I want to present the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.”’

Typically, Boris did not follow instructions and stood up when he was supposed to be sitting down, and then when he was required to stand up and follow Mayer to the podium, he promptly tripped. But this is the sort of challenge at which he excels, and he duly made a joke about the stage being ‘booby-trapped,’ recovered well and was officially sworn in. It was not all laughter, though. He reasserted his manifesto pledge to put crime at the top of his priorities – not least because a 15-year-old boy from Peckham had been stabbed to death in a stairwell in the early hours of Saturday just as the Tories were downing champagne at the victory party, a few miles away. Boris talked of ‘this problem of kids growing up without boundaries and getting lost in tragic and self-destructive choices [being] the number one issue we face in this city.’

No doubt in a reference to those staff in the building who had openly campaigned against him during the election, he served warning against anyone who did not co-operate with his new regime. ‘If there are any dogs in the manger, I will have those dogs humanely euthanased,’ he cautioned menacingly. Boris was not due to receive the Seals of Office until the following night, so he quipped that, ‘Until that time, I imagine there are shredding machines quietly puffing and panting away in various parts of the building, and quite right too. Heaven knows what we shall uncover in the course of the next few days!’

He was then whisked off to his first mayoral meeting with his four
executive chiefs – Ron Dobson (head of the Fire Brigade), Transport chief Peter Hendy (who had watched Boris win on Friday night in the same row of seats as Marina), Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair and Manny Lewis, head of the London Development Agency. Blair and Dobson turned up in their uniforms. Boris is reputed to have thought Blair ‘pompous’ and Dobson matter-of-fact – ‘I just put out fires,’ he explained. Hendy had worked out some material on transport policies in the manifesto – including revoking the western extension to the Congestion Charge – and Lewis had a flipchart presentation on the organisation of the LDA that quickly looked as if it was testing Boris’s patience. And indeed within days, Lewis was out of a job and within months, so too was Blair.

Meanwhile, Anthony Mayer busied himself with preparing Boris’s entry pass and helping to ready his office once Ken had cleared it of the accumulation of eight years in power. There is no Mayoral car, Chain of Office or official accommodation to hand over, merely a set of cheap-looking office furniture, Venetian blinds and a phone. At Boris’s request, he also gave orders for inner walls and doorways to be dismantled to make the offices open-plan – apart from the Mayor’s own eighth-floor inner-sanctum.

On the Sunday, Boris and Marina attended his first official engagement in Trafalgar Square: an event celebrating the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi. Marina wore a crimson-coloured
kameez
with matching
dupatta
(a long tunic and scarf) from her collection of traditional Indian dress – not something seen much in Henley – and looked more at home than Boris did when he donned a policeman’s hat. ‘The last few days have been very, very exciting and very, very exhausting, but this is the single most wonderful job in British politics,’ he declared. Amid a great deal of newspaper speculation about his possible early moves, he was about to find out whether this was true.

Monday saw him taking the time to be introduced to the 600 City Hall staff and to shake their hands. Most people were impressed by his easy sociability as he addressed each floor of the building in turn, including the ground-floor canteen. But what shocked many was that he had arrived without his own staff: Ken had come into City Hall with a group of five or six people whom he had known and worked
with for some 15 years. Intensely loyal, they were known as ‘Ken’s cadre’ and enforced his will throughout the building, working entirely in his name. Albeit on a much smaller scale, they operated much as the President’s minders do in the US, over and above the mostly relatively junior permanent staff members. Although Boris had said in his acceptance speech on Friday night that he had a new team ready and waiting to take over, this was not actually the case.

That Monday morning, Boris arrived virtually alone. Over the next few days, some would start their new posts but it would take six months for a final team to emerge. Not until Friday of that week did he unveil one of his earliest appointments: Guto Harri, a Welsh-speaking rugby fan, as his director of communications. The pair had been at Oxford together but suggestions that this was Boris bringing in a crony were wide of the mark. They had never been particular friends and had barely seen each other socially since university. Indeed, it is not clear why Boris chose Harri, who had no previous experience in political spinning; it may just have been pure opportunism.

Harri, who had just left journalism to join a London-based public relations agency a few weeks before, had called Boris on the Tuesday before the Thursday election because he had to write an assessment for clients on Boris’s electoral chances. The conversation was interrupted when Boris suddenly exclaimed: ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Come and work for me if I win!’ ‘It sounded like the idea had just popped into his head right then, rather than anything premeditated,’ recalls Harri. And it almost certainly had, but it may also have been an exercise in point scoring: Harri had been sounded out by Cameron in the summer of 2006 for a job, but it came to nothing because he had at that point only just moved to New York to report for the BBC and felt he could not uproot his young family again. Now Boris had the man that had once interested his great rival and warned of a ‘Stalingrad-like resistance’ to attempts from Tory high command to poach him or other members of his team.

No need – working for Boris is widely considered in Tory circles to be considerably better paid, less of a grinding, all-hours prospect and more fun than a job working for David Cameron, even since he has been in Number Ten. Five out of the six best-paid political advisers in
Britain work for Boris, including Harri on £127,784 (2010). As this book goes to press, Munira Mirza, the 33-year-old arts adviser, has just received a 55 per cent increase to take her pay from £82,200 to £127,874. Boris is also, at £143,911, paid more than the Prime Minister (£142,500 in 2010). The other point of interest is that despite the ill-disguised ambitions of a handful in City Hall, Cameron consistently failed to show interest in Boris’s staff, even after the General Election. This was despite the fact they were the only Tories around with recent experience of executive government. ‘We have not even thought of making an approach,’ sniffs a highly-placed Downing Street source.

Harri’s previous experience on the BBC’s Westminster staff followed by a stint in New York – where he observed how the Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, kept potentially hostile press at bay – has, in any case, obviously come in useful. It has proved an astute appointment, with both men enjoying ribald humour. They also share a rigid distrust of ‘unhelpful’ journalists who seek to scrutinise Boris more than they would like. James Landale, who replaced Harri at the BBC, understands his predecessor’s appeal: ‘He’s a player, a gossip, all that Welsh passion; he’s a schemer, lively, fun. He’s quite like Boris in many ways.’ Boris would also bring over Ann Sindall, his loyal secretary from the
Spectator
, as his executive assistant. Once again, Sindall has become indispensable to him, well beyond her nominal pay grade, and even the biggest hitters in City Hall understand her importance. ‘I wouldn’t fall out with Ann,’ shudders one very senior official.

There was, however, certainly no Ken-style ‘cadre’. Nick Boles, the early contender for mayor and seen as ultra-loyal to Cameron, was therefore sent in by Central Office as acting chief of staff. But the two men had never been close and the strain of the two months to come – with Boris resenting what he saw as interference from the Leadership – would certainly drive them further apart. Despite Boles’ best efforts, Boris’s ‘early doors’ as mayor would demonstrate all too publicly his woeful lack of preparation for the job – or understanding of it. It was as if he were playing in
Richard III
all over again, only this time he could not hope to paste up crib-sheets behind pillars when he did not know his lines. He was now presiding over a £12 billion
administration covering issues from race to the environment through the economy and transport. His seat-of-the-pants approach was in danger of ripping apart but the origins of Boris’s near-destruction as mayor during the summer of 2008 dated back to the campaign itself.

Boles had made good progress in overcoming Hodgkin’s disease the previous autumn and in January had talked to Cameron and Osborne about building up a mayoral implementation team. But there remained little enthusiasm while victory still seemed a distant dream. By March – as some polls began putting Boris ahead of Ken – there was a wider understanding that should the Conservatives win the Mayoralty but surrender the advantage through poor planning, then it could well derail their chances of winning the next General Election. And yet, incredibly, there was still next to no preparation until the very last. Perhaps the disbelief that Boris could win was too firmly entrenched. It was, of course, a difficult job in part because the Mayoralty is so different from Whitehall government and the Parliamentary system – there is no shadow mayor with a shadow cabinet ready and waiting. Indeed, there was very little precedent at all as Ken had been Mayor of London since its inception in 2000 and largely crafted the role in his own image. But if Boris won, there would also be no transition period between the two mayoralties – to brief, let alone
create
a team – beyond the 48 hours needed to complete the statutory formalities.

‘There were no obvious people you can slot into obvious jobs as you have with a shadow government,’ recalls Boles. ‘Boris is a curious guy. One of the things that he doesn’t have is a political clique – there are no Johnsonites. This created a source of tension during the campaign, as Lynton [Crosby], reasonably enough, was furious at the idea that any minute of the day should be devoted to thinking about after the election, rather than how to win it. He was also concerned that it would look incredibly bad if the public thought Boris was already counting his chickens. I was prepared to do the work, but I did need to speak to Boris about what he wanted.’

Eventually, there were several arguments – or a ‘tussle’ as Boles puts it – with Crosby’s team determined not to let Boris become distracted. But in the end Boles was allowed a brief meeting, although it did
nothing to solve the problem as Boris had yet to come up with names for his team, or indeed a vision as to how he wanted to run the Mayoralty, if he won it. ‘It was much too little, much too late,’ recalls Boles, ‘but we did what we could in the time available.’

In the increasingly frantic final lead-up to polling day, Lord Marland, one of the campaign chiefs, came up with the idea of making Boris a ‘chairman mayor’ backed up by ‘an absolutely top-flight chief operating officer.’ Boris, not known for his administrative abilities or even interest, would be the public face of the mayoralty – putting the ‘bubbles in the champagne’ was one phrase used – but there would be someone else who ‘would actually run the mayoralty and City Hall.’ Boris immediately seized hold of the plan.

‘Not unreasonably, Boris thought the idea was a great one,’ says Boles. ‘This was the way he had run the
Spectator
– with Boris providing leadership and Stuart Reid [his deputy] making the trains run on time.’ Indeed, so taken with the idea was Boris that he would exclaim with joy at the thought: ‘Yes, I need a Stuart Reid! I need a Stuart Reid!’ Some of the old hands were troubled by his reaction to the idea of offloading many of the Mayoral responsibilities, however. ‘It looked like Boris wasn’t running for mayor because he actually wanted to run the thing,’ adds one. ‘He seemed just to want to be mayor because it’s a big job and it was there for him.’

Feelers were swiftly put out to find a tough, energetic businessman with superb management skills to do the bits that Boris couldn’t – or wouldn’t – do. The leading name to come out of the hat was Richard Bowker of the train company GNER, who was well-known to some of Boris’s financial backers. There were numerous ‘back channel’ conversations and he ‘seemed to be in,’ says one campaign insider. ‘Everyone was very excited.’ But there were still other jobs with no names attached to them at all. In fact, pretty much all the situations were still vacant. Finally, Boles was permitted to have a proper meeting with Boris about his chosen advisers but incredibly not until the day of the actual poll itself, on 1 May. Another insider remembers feeling ‘shocked’ that such an important discussion had been left so late. For the first time that morning, in Boris’s sitting room in Furlong Road, the pair went through a list of policy areas and tried to ‘staple
together’ names to match. Many – such as Kit Malthouse as deputy mayor for Policing – were former colleagues of Boles’ from Westminster Council. Some, such as Munira Mirza on Arts (an appointment seen as bolstering Boris’s non-racist credentials), Boles knew from his days at Policy Exchange. He persuaded Boris to take Dan Ritterband from the campaign team as marketing manager and Kulveer Ranger, whom he also knew, on Transport. ‘Boris’s ideas by then were Ray Lewis on Youth – whom I wholly endorsed – and Ian Clement as deputy mayor for Government Relations. Boris insisted on making a place for Clement: he had been a loyal campaigner and the first London council leader to row in behind Boris as a candidate. A former postman who had become Leader of Bexley Council, he also had a lot of charm. Boris saw him as someone with his feet on the ground and found him very appealing as a result. But by far and away his best idea was Guto Harri on Media.