Nobody’s coming into my kitchen — no bloody way!
By Jane Fryer
‘The fight-back starts here. Watch out, ha ha!’ ‘Smartening up my image would be a debacle’
CANVASSING with Boris Johnson is like handing out leaflets with a badly dressed George Clooney. Traffic stops, shopkeepers rush into the street, cashiers from the Nationwide Building Society chase him down the street screaming: ‘Selfie. Selfie. Selfie!’
Within seconds of emerging from Turnham Green Tube station in South-West London, he is the giant blond nucleus of a fragrant crowd of mums, grannies, men, children, camera crews — all pushing and shoving and jostling for attention. One woman falls off the pavement in the scrum and loses a kitten-heeled shoe. Horns are beeping. Everyone is yelling.
‘Boris!’ BORIS! Let’s have a little selfie, shall we Bozza. You don’t mind if I call you Bozza, do you Bozza?’ ‘Of course not! How lovely.’ The Mayor of London and Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip moves at a rate of ten selfies a minutes — telling and retelling his favourite new joke. ‘Turnham Green? Turnham blue! I say!’ He is a crumpled mess of M&S shirt tails, odd socks and terrible suit: ‘I’m running very low on suits — this is my Olympic suit, made in the pearl market in Beijing’.
He constantly re-messes up his hair, pumps hands and rubs his clenched fist against his heart as he looks people deep in the eye and pleads: ‘ Can we count on your vote in the election? Wonderful. For goodness sake, don’t give the keys of the car back to the person who crashed it into the wall last time.’
Britain’s most popular politician has been conspicuous by his absence in the election campaign. For 25 days, he was not seen once with David Cameron, despite endless clamouring by the party faithful to: ‘Get Boris involved before we lose it!’
He wasn’t even at the launch of the Tory Party manifesto last week: many suspected he was banned in case his celebrity overshadowed Cameron and eclipsed his rival George Osborne. ‘I didn’t know when it was. Really! And I already had to be in London to welcome Princess Anne to something,’ he says over a coffee in a Battle of Britain mug.
But yesterday, finally, he and Cameron popped out of the same car and into the Advantage Day Nursery in Surbiton (in the key marginal seat of Kingston upon Thames) and emerged an hour later all smiles, with Boris’s huge hands blue from finger painting with the children.
Conservatives around the country breathed a sigh of relief. The Tories’ most powerful election weapon had finally been detonated. But why, oh why, did it take so long? ‘Look, I’ve been very busy — I’ve been on missions all around the country. I’ve been supporting my friends. And don’t forget unlike all the other MPs, I do actually have a job — I have to keep running London.’
When we do finally sit down for a chat, it is not in the kitchen of the North London house he shares with his wife Marina and four children.
‘Nobody’s coming into my kitchen. No bloody way!’ he says, referring to the unhappy fallout from recent ‘at-home’ PR stunts by David Cameron and Ed Miliband. ‘I’d have to seek higher authority anyway,’ by which, of course, he means his wife. ‘I couldn’t possibly agree to that.’
So instead we’re in the ‘nerve centre of the Uxbridge Conservative Party’ — a teeny office behind an accountancy practice filled with pamphlets, dirty coffee cups and a loo but no loo-roll. We start with Nicola Sturgeon. ‘Obviously she seems like an attractive and compelling personality and politician from what I can gather, though I’m afraid I missed the TV debate last week,’ he says. ‘She would be the one wearing the trousers in any SNP/Labour administration. I don’t know what Ed Miliband would be wearing — I hesitate to say!
‘She wants to destroy Labour in Scotland and she wants to destroy the United Kingdom. But am I nervous? No! There’s no need for anybody to be nervous.’ Do men like Boris get nervous? ‘Um. Obviously, Yes. Um . . . Well, you know, I suppose it’s a very rare occasion when I’ve managed to get to set point in a tennis match with my sister [the columnist and writer Rachel Johnson] and I’ve got to serve for the match — now that would really get me going. No. I can’t think of anything else.’
So we move onto his Prime Ministerial ambitions. ‘Look its nonsense. Absolute nonsense! We’ve got a very close election coming up and the crucial thing is to get David Cameron in.’
He also refuses to be drawn on his preferred Cabinet position — ‘A year is a long time in politics [he is Mayor until 2016]. The kaleidoscope will have shifted, the prism of public opinion will have changed.’
Or who (if any) are his close friends at Westminster. ‘I know a lot of MPs and some of them quite well.’
Or even whether there’s any sibling rivalry among all those high-achieving Johnsons (he has two brothers, a sister, and a half-brother and halfsister) with massive brains: ‘We’re a nest of singing birds!’
He is, though, very happy to talk about the one exam he has failed — Grade One Piano — and the obsession with selfies wherever he goes. Even the local police want selfies with Boris, for goodness sake.
‘They’re a feature of modern political life. A good thing. A great thing. Though it’s true most of my political conversations with the public are not about housing or crime, but go: ‘Oh hang on, it’s not working. Is this the right button? You do it. No, wait. I’ll do it.’ But it all builds a relationship with the electorate.’ A day with Boris is gruelling stuff. We started at a construction site at the O2 — formerly the Dome — where he failed miserably to tighten a bolt with a ceremonial spanner (‘Whoops!’), admired a ‘lovely bit of steel’ and, on the 18th floor with no external walls, said to an LBC reporter scared of heights: ‘Come on, let’s go right to the edge!’ and marched him to the abyss.
His chat was peppered with things like: ‘Yah. Deffo,’ and ‘More airports everywhere, that’s what I say!’ Everyone loves him. ‘Is he running for Prime Minister?’ asks pretty blonde Courtney Stone, 17, who with her sister Charlie, 21, has come hoping to see Boris today. ‘He’d make a great Prime Minister. He’s not like a normal politician. He’s willing to take a selfie, he’s willing to get to know us. He’ll talk to anyone. He’s a legend.’
It must be strange living with the other, beside-the- scenes, rather less legendary Boris. The Boris who cheats and lies and philanders, but for whom, somehow, none of the mud sticks and he is still adored.
‘I don’t people think people focus on all that,’ he says breezily. ‘The issues they want addressed are housing, crime, transport, defence, immigration. These are a million times more important than me.’
Given the stress he must have put her through over recent years, I wonder how involved Marina is in his campaigning.
‘Where possible, I would not presume to comment on Marina’s role, except to say that she is showing a remarkable and unprecedented degree of enthusiasm at the moment.’
The Johnson genes are strong — his children are Boris clones. There was a rumour one son dyed his matching platinum hair black to distance himself from his embarrassing dad.
Is there anything he’d hope to teach them, any guiding principles, morals, to help them navigate their way through life?
‘Yes, yes! The paradigms of lu-o! Yes, I think the paradigms of lu-o is a good start. A very good start. And perhaps the verbs in-mi. And now I come to mention it, I think also, they need to know the irregular verbs, too.’
[For the benefit of the 99.9 per cent of the population who have not studied Classics at Oxford, Boris is talking about the conjugation of verbs in ancient Greek. I had to ask three clever friends before I had a clue what he was talking about.]
Great, so, er, anything more practical, I ask, like how to put up a shelf? How to navigate the London Underground? How to practise safe sex?
‘What do you mean?’ He looks appalled. ‘ The classics are the universal spanner that unlocks the secrets of life. If you have Latin and Greek you have everything. I learned nothing else for 20 years, virtually, and it’s given me everything I need to know. I’m proud to say I’m in charge of every bus in London. I run the police, the housing. A Latin degree is what you need!’
The odd thing is that, despite his poshness and pretentions, ask anyone why they like him, and the answer is the same.
‘Because he’s so normal. He’s one of us. You might see David Cameron in Central London in some smart street, but not down here. He’s too posh,’ says Courtney Stone. ‘Boris isn’t posh, he’s normal. He listens. He travels on the Tube like us. He’s not like a Conservative, he’s just Boris.’
‘I am pretty normal!’ Eton-educated Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson insists later. ‘Who is normal? What is normal? One thing I do believe in is the absolutely spiritual equality and identity of human beings.’ Maybe it’s his silly hair cut (‘I go to a Turkish barber, but I can’t tell you where for security reasons!’), or the rubbish suits or the shambolic appearance or his surprisingly endearing splay-footedness. Whatever, he undoubtedly has an uncanny ability to put people at ease, to fit in.
At the Al Falah Islamic Centre in West Drayton, he rammed a hat on his head and, clutched the torn sheet of A4 containing his speech and told the congregation about his greatgrandfather who, very conveniently, was a Muslim. ‘There you go, who’d have thought it?’
When he took off his scuffed shoes, we all spent good few minutes discussing the state of his one grey and one blue sock. ‘They’re not, it seems to me, a perfect match,’ he says. ‘But if you get up so early in the morning, before daybreak, and reach blindly into the sock drawer, surely you can be forgiven.’ And lo, he is.
When members of a sign-printing company misspelt their ‘We love you Borris!’ sign, he insisted, ‘No, no! I much prefer the spelling — real old English. So much nicer’. And then, to whoops of joy from the crowd, he spent five minutes chatting on a mobile phone to someone called Bernice about the state of her bins.
And when a rare dissenter started haranguing him, he rolled his eyes at me like a naughty boy, looked at his watch (which is usually set ten minutes fast) and announced: ‘Right. I’ve got to go back for a further grilling by members of the Muslim community.’
Our tour finished at Sipsmith’s Gin distillery in West London. He went into overdrive. ‘You’ve organised a p*** up in a distillery, ha ha!’
His energy is extraordinary. From the front, he looks like a giant blond guinea pig. From behind he’s the spit of the cartoon superhero, Mister Incredible — no neck, vast back and huge gorilla arms sticking out of his hunched shoulders as he bounds up stairs, two at a time.
‘Strong as an ox, I am. Strong as an ox and legs like steel springs. It’s general all-round sheer physical fitness — down to discipline. Training!’
It’s hard to think of Boris as a team player, unless as head of ‘Team Boris’. He is pompous, attentionseeking, unpredictable, funny (though a day with him is enough to know his jokes run on quite a tight loop), extremely keen on burning eye contact and surprisingly sensi-
‘A Latin degree is what you need to run London’
tive about his thinning hair: what I’ve got!’ he almost snaps.
He also has no truck with a George Osborne-style image overhaul in his pursuit for power.
‘I genuinely think any such exercise would be totally futile. From time to time, well-meaning people — in fact quite a lot of them over the years — have taken me on one side and said, “with just a little bit more effort”. . . “If your suits were a bit sharper”. . . “If you changed your image in some way or other and concentrated more on what you were saying. . . you might be more presentable.”
‘But the truth is, all such efforts lead to disaster. Your style gets totally cramped. It would be a debacle.’
Speaking of which, how does he see it all panning out for the Conservatives on May 7?
‘I am confident. Yes. Look, in the last ten days I think it will really start to come around.’
And in the meantime, what next? Will he be smashing his way into the driving seat of the Tory campaign bus? Doing a lot more finger painting with Dave at suburban nurseries? Spreading his extraordinary stardust everywhere he goes?
‘Look Jane. The fight back starts here! Watch out! Ha ha!’
‘It’s