The £93m bung to stop Boris making mischief
. . . and the extraordinary move to make a LABOUR supporter mayor to thwart his old Eton rival
GEORGE OSBORNE and David Cameron knew they were heading for trouble in the autumn of 2011. Weeks earlier, there had been riots in the streets, with youths looting shops and setting fire to buildings. And people were getting fed up with all the talk about tightening belts to lower the deficit.
What they needed, the PM and his Chancellor decided, was a good Tory conference — or as their advisers put it, a chance to ‘detoxify the brand’. both started working on their speeches. To add to the tension, there was another anxiety: the prospect of boris Johnson making mischief.
Two years before, the Mayor lobbed a grenade into the Tory party conference by demanding a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty. Osborne had particular reason to be concerned: his keynote speech was scheduled for the same day boris’s regular Daily Telegraph column appeared.
Fearing it would be overshadowed by whatever boris chose to write, Osborne rang him three days before the conference to appeal to him to behave. ‘We just want a quiet conference. nothing unexpected,’ Osborne told him.
‘Hmm, funny you should say that,’ boris replied. ‘I’m just about to write my column for the Telegraph and I’m staring at a blank page.’ ‘Very funny,’ retorted the Chancellor. ‘no, seriously,’ boris countered, sensing an opportunity, ‘What price no mischief?’
‘What do you want?’ the Chancellor asked, scarcely able to believe the position the Mayor was putting him in.
Without hesitation, Johnson said: ‘£90 million extra for policing in London.’ before he put the phone down, the Chancellor had agreed to a package worth £93 million, allowing Johnson to make lavish pledges on policing when he ran for re-election to the London Mayoralty in 2012. ‘ That was the best-paid column ever,’ a delighted boris joked to aides.
In fact, Cameron had been loath to make boris Mayor at all. Years earlier, as leader of the Opposition, his first big test was to find the right candidate for the upcoming London Mayoral election in May 2008. Labour was generally at least ten points ahead of the Tories in the capital. Overturning such a lead would be a huge deal, signalling loud and clear that Cameron’s Tories were on the warpath.
To pull this off, he needed a big hitter to take on the controversial but popular incumbent, Ken Livingstone. but who?
At one point, he approached the ex bbC director- general Greg Dyke, a former Labour supporter. Dyke recalls: ‘I was first contacted by [Cameron’s strategy director] steve Hilton, who I liked a lot because he was not like a traditional Tory. I had just left the bbC and they obviously thought this would be clever.
‘I said to them: “I am not a Tory.” To which they basically said: “It doesn’t matter.” ’ After meeting Cameron for further talks, Dyke concluded he could not run on a Conservative ticket.
‘I said I thought the jump was too far. I said I quite fancied the job, but I can’t do it,’ he recalls.
Dyke then had another idea: he’d be happy to run on a joint ticket with the Lib Dems.
Cameron approved the plan — the only proviso being that Dyke should publicly endorse him at the General Election, a condition the former DG was happy to meet. However, the scheme leaked and the Lib Dems, who’d been making the right noises until then, took fright and bolted.
Day by day, Cameron found himself striking names off the list of possible Tory contenders. It was getting desperate. He needed someone who could inject fireworks into the race — and fast.
Right up until the last moment, he refused to consider the one man who seemed to many observers the obvious choice: boris Johnson.
A Tory MP recalls discussing the problem with Cameron at a dinner. The Tory leader, he says, was bandying around various ‘random’ names such as Richard branson — people who ‘weren’t even Tories’.
‘The ideal candidate is right in front of you,’ the MP told Cameron, speaking metaphorically. ‘Who?’ Cameron asked. ‘boris,’ was the reply. Cameron puffed out his chest. ‘Totally the wrong profile,’ he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.
When boris heard about this exchange, he took it in good part. ‘Did he really say that? The f***er!’ he exclaimed cheerfully. The Mayor concedes he was bottom of Cameron’s list. ‘He didn’t want me to run,’ he admits now.
Cameron’s reticence was understandable: as a shadow minister under Michael Howard, boris had proved to be something of a loose cannon. In October 2004, he was forced to go on an ‘apology tour’ to Liverpool after accusing the city of wallowing in ‘victim status’ following the beheading of Liverpudlian engineer Ken bigley in Iraq.
A month later, he was sacked from the front bench after lying to Michael Howard about his notoriously complicated private life.
Cameron may also have seen his fellow Old Etonian as a threat. Though the tension between them has been overstated, their relationship has always been tinged with rivalry. boris — who is two years older — regarded Cameron as his junior, in more ways than one.
‘boris does think he’s cleverer than Cameron, and certainly a lot more thoughtful,’ says one of boris’s former advisers. ‘ He genuinely thinks he has the bigger brain. He likes people who are thoughtful and have a depth and intensity and profundity of understanding, whereas to him Cameron is a technocrat.’ When they both entered Parliament in 2001, boris was the star. not only was he the editor of The spectator, but he was also a popular columnist and a star turn on the TV show Have I Got news For You. In comparison, Cameron was a nobody.
Unlike boris, he hadn’t been among the elite group of Etonians known as King’s scholars, whose academic prowess earns them exclusive accommodation in a section of the school known as College.
AT OxFORD, Cameron played no part in student politics. boris meanwhile was President of the Union in 1986. Their Oxford contemporary James Delingpole says: ‘ Everyone knew who boris was. boris had, in that Churchillian way, made up his mind who he was going to be, while most of us were still experimenting with our personalities. boris was already fully formed.’
The tables turned in 2005 when Cameron became Tory leader. In a provocative move, he denied boris a place in the shadow Cabinet, despite the blond one being among his earliest backers.
boris was instead offered the position of shadow spokesman for higher education, which he grudgingly accepted. Two years later, when Cameron had a reshuffle, boris was passed over again.
so it was with some satisfaction that, in early summer 2007, he made Cameron sweat it out for a while before eventually agreeing to run for mayor.
The result, on May 1, 2008, was a personal triumph for both men. For now, the schoolboy rivalry would have to be put on ice.