Omigod it’s Boris, the schoolgirls all squealed
Watches London’s mayor energise the election trail
JUST when it seemed this election would never catch fire with voters – whoosh! – Boris Johnson came bouncing into view. The bombastic blond bomblet burned through three south London seats yesterday morning, two of them Lib Dem marginals.
The response? Schoolgirls squealed ‘Omigod!’ and jiggled round him for selfies. Shop assistants rushed out to plead with him for a snapshot in front of their establishments. A quintet of 20-something office workers leaned out of a chartered accountant’s window and coo- eed. Whites, blacks, all ages, all sorts goggled and gurgled.
Oldies in mobility scooters clutched tight to their handlebars for fear of being overturned by the scrum surrounding Boris and young James Berry, the local Tory candidate who looks to have a good chance of uprooting Lib Dem Cabinet minister Ed Davey in Kingston.
‘BORIIIIIIS!’ yelled the male driver of a white Ford Transit zooming past Pengilly’s Shoe Repairs in New Maldon. Boris was talking to Mr Pengilly himself about small business rate relief so he missed seeing white van man take both hands off the steering wheel and, with two tattooed arms, give a ‘phwoarr’ sign, right thumb raised.
WITHIN ten minutes Mayor Johnson had run out of leaflets about the candidacy of Mr Berry, 31, a bright- seeming barrister. No woman was safe from the mayor’s approaches. South Africanborn Lisa Oliver, mum of Joseph, one, Kai, five, and Tayla, eight, was given a long chatting-to. She said afterwards that she ‘ loved Boris for being down to earth’.
Psychologist Lucy Leonard, 36, holding son Alex, two, was concerned about the NHS. Her male companion smouldered with anti-Toryism but Mrs Leonard seemed prepared to give them fair consideration after being Boris- ed. Teaching assistant Heather Skipsey, 44, was ‘undecided’ but liked the mayor’s ‘energy’ (was that a Dick Emery growl as she said it?). She had dropped her shopping at his approach. A Lebanese woman, recently widowed, nearly started crying when she beheld Boris’s crumpling dimples.
Messrs Cameron, Clegg, Farage and Miliband may be hiding in their bubbles but this was proper, old- fashioned street campaigning. Dangerous? Yes. At Cafe Galia a middle-aged, middle-class lady, shaking with rage, screamed at him about the housing supply, saying: ‘I’m disgusted with you - I hope you never become Prime Minister.’ She stomped off saying she ‘hated’ the mayor. She said she was a swing voter.
In Suttle’s stationery shop, a customer started talking about Sappho, the ancient Greek poetess. ‘Ah!’ cried Eton classicist Johnson, who mumbled a Sappho fragment which transliterates as ‘ mit’emoi meli miti melissa’ (as you surely know this means ‘neither honey nor bee for me’). The customer, his grasp of the classics near exhaustion, replied ‘ amo, amas, amat!’ Despite that snatch of Sappho, bumble bee Boris kept buzzing towards the laydees: Retiree Valerie Griffiths in The Place coffee shop; a 1960s Miss Conservative Jean Disspain, 75; two uniformed lasses from the Thomson’s travel agency; and part-time worker Jane Stead, 57. She, once firm Lib Dem, was leaning to the Tories because Nick Clegg had broken his word on college fees and because she was worried about inheritance tax.
Schoolgirl Brittany Stewart, 16, was quite pink after her encounter with Boris. ‘He just gives really good vibes,’ she said, flicking back a lustrous mane.
The whole remarkable performance was repeated when Boris visited Sutton & Cheam, currently held by Lib Dem plodder Paul Burstow. Local Tory candidate Paul Scully had a squad of 20 students in blue T- shirts, handing out balloons to lunchtime shoppers.
Matthew Maxwell Scott, greatgrandson of Sir Walter Scott and Tory candidate in nearby Lib Dem Carshalton, rushed up pushing a buggy containing his toddlers. ‘It’s my turn to look after the kids,’ he puffed. In past years you would never have heard a Tory man say that sort of thing. They’re out-Lib Demming the Lib Dems.
All the Tories need is another 50 or so Boris Johnsons and they would romp home.