I want to be Tory leader, admits Boris
BORIS Johnson admitted last night he hopes to be considered to lead the Conservative Party after David Cameron.
The London Mayor, pressed on his leadership ambitions by Sky News anchor Kay Burley, insisted the position would not become vacant for five years.
But in his most candid remarks to date, he finally conceded: ‘It would be a wonderful thing to be thought to be in a position to be considered for such an honour.’ However he insisted he thinks it is ‘highly unlikely’.
Mr Johnson, running to become MP in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, has long been tipped as a future leader of the party, most recently by Mr Cameron. He said last month he would serve a ‘full second term’ until 0 0, but not a third and named as potential successors Mr Johnson, Home Secretary Theresa May and Chancellor George Osborne.
Yesterday, Mr Johnson said: ‘It is at least five years away which is an aeon in British politics, by which time whatever my personal ambitions may be there will be thrusting young men and women who will be overtaking me and who knows, it will all be different.’
Mr Cameron has admitted that what he called his own ‘calm smoothness’ could give people the wrong impression about how urgently he wants to win the General Election.
He told The Spectator he had ‘no end’ of passion but was a Conservative, a tribe of people who ‘don’t always wear their beliefs on their sleeve’.
Asked why many people believe he must do more to demonstrate that he really wants to win, he said: ‘I don’t know. There is something about me – I always manage to portray a calm smoothness or something.’
TOP pun of the campaign came from Boris Johnson, who popped up in south London alongside David Cameron. They were at a nursery school and everyone dipped their palms in a splodgy tray of blue paint. Ancient Brits used to smear their faces in such stuff before taking on the hairy Picts. It was called woad.
London Mayor Boris cried: ‘It’s the Woad to Recovery.’ Tommy Cooper himself would have been proud of that one.
Messrs Johnson and Cameron did a joint turn for the TV cameras (if not for the sketchwriters) because it had become received wisdom among the political elite that Boris had been somehow boycotting the election campaign. This theory was cobblers. Two weeks ago I wrote a sketch about Boris wowing the locals in New Malden and Sutton. But received unwisdom sometimes has to be corrected. And so Boris and Dave did their turn and Boris was later pushed by Sky News’s mistress of the thumbscrews, Kay Hurley-Burley, to admit that he might one day fancy being Tory leader.
Good for him. The party of aspiration will not shrivel from a man for being ambitious.
At the nursery school the PM and Mayor sat at one of those toddlers’ tables – the sort with tiny chairs, dangerous for a man with Boris’s bottom as you might get stuck. They did a jigsaw puzzle with Joshua, 3, Hamish, 4, Stephanie, 3 and Leo, 4. Boris tried to tell the youngsters about Mr Cameron’s long-term economic plan. Polite but blank looks. Tory spin doctor Craig Oliver started to fret that his politicians were taking too long to complete the toddlers’ jigsaw puzzle. Mr Oliver started to flap, as spin doctors do. Boris cried that they had a ‘jigsaw crisis’. Collapse of one spin doctor.
ONdoorsteps in Nottinghamshire, where I later visited Broxtowe, there was what you could call a woadish worry about Picts or their modern counterparts – the Scots Nats. I was with Tory candidate Anna Soubry, a fiery old bird who in 2010 took this seat from a ghastly Labour droner called Palmer. He is standing again, even though he pocketed a vast pay-off from the Commons five years ago.
Nearly all the voters I met mentioned SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon. They were worried about her. ‘Seeing Sturgeon cuddling up to Miliband is a worst-case scenario for me,’ said an ex-Royal Navy man in Stapleford’s Brunswick Drive. Stapleford is a DH Lawrence sort of place, working class, plain-talking, solid England. Great place.
The ex-Navy man had been thinking about voting Ukip because of a pensions problem and immigration. Miss Sturgeon had changed his mind. ‘A government of her and Miliband don’t bear thinking about,’ he said. He was now leaning to the Tories. Defence Minister Soubry, 58, is the ripsnorter (she looks a little like Mrs T but is more liberal) who took a swipe at Alex Salmond on TV a couple of weeks ago.
After the programme, Mr Salmond – himself pugnacious – refused to speak to her, whimpering that she was ‘far too aggressive’. Miss Soubry recalled that with an almost Sid James laugh. Her campaigning yesterday was local – doorstep chats about health clinics, Nottingham school and most of all, the trams in Beeston.
The town, once solid Labour, has been logjammed for two years by the Labour council’s bungled tram project. Lifelong Labour supporters have vowed never to support the party again, but the area has a lot of Guardian-reading university lectur- ers and public-sector workers. It was not all going Miss Soubry’s way. A man in a deli said he hoped she would lose. The owner of an Audi convertible in Brampton Drive would not vote Tory because they did not help ‘poor people’ like her.
A man washing his car and smoking a cig’ at the same time (harder than it sounds) had switched from the Lib Dems to Ukip. He didn’t like blacks. But shopkeepers Cheryl Sims of Beeston Sewing and ex-plasterer Nicholas Martin of the Cameron House gift shop were voting Tory because of the trams and the economy.
And a miner’s daughter who had been brought up Labour and voted Lib Dem last time was switching to the Tories. Why? ‘I don’t want Sturgeon in.’