This last week has highlighted how Boris Johnson is more preoccupied with grabbing headlines – for example, by abusing the deputy prime minister (whom he called a condom) – than acknowledging he has made the most extensive cuts to London’s fire service in the brigade’s history. While some might find his comment on Nick Clegg amusing, there is nothing funny about Johnson’s approach as a politician. He is vain and frankly opportunistic; he constantly changes his mind on policies again and again.
He is, of course, very ambitious and is no longer content simply competing with David Cameron. He is also competing with Nigel Farage to try and woo the Tory right. He is playing to the gallery – calling for restrictions on benefits to European Union immigrants and, controversially, calling for water cannon to be bought for London. Just like Farage and the United Kingdom Independence party Johnson is happy to make contradictory statements and be seen as a maverick or ‘apolitical’. However, both are playing for high stakes with their eyes on Westminster, and their policies require proper scrutiny.
Johnson has a poor record as time as mayor and has avoided widespread criticism of his many failures and flaws. On housing, on his double-counting of jobs and spinning statistics to hide the truth about growing homelessness, or his recent confusion about how much money George Osborne would stump up for Transport for London impacting on fares appear second to none. This is not just luck: like TS Eliot’s cat, Macavity, when there is trouble Johnson isn’t there. So on Thursday, the day we saw emotional scenes of firefighters crying as they left their closing stations for the last time, it was the chair of the fire authority not the mayor who responded in the media.
Johnson doesn’t like losing and, arguably, Thursday’s cuts to 10 stations, 14 appliances and 552 firefighter posts are a victory for the mayor. Johnson was so determined to push through the cuts that he didn’t listen to Londoners, the assembly, the fire authority or even the Tory councillors who asked him to reconsider the cuts to fire stations across London.
However, some victories are shallow and when Alex Badcock, the longest serving firefighter at Clerkenwell, the oldest fire station in the UK, said in a powerfully raw interview that Johnson would regret closing the stations, you had to wonder whether for once it would be possible for the mayor to have made a serious PR mistake. Front pages carried pictures of emotional scenes as Clerkenwell was finally closed after a long community campaign. Johnson has won the battle but lost the PR war. He has tried throughout to absolve himself of responsibility for the cuts to police, fire and refused to engage with community campaigns on hospital closures. He has consistently put the responsibility for politically driven financial cuts on officers, on his £1.6m a year range of advisers and deputies, on the previous Labour mayor, on anyone but Johnson. Yet, at the point at which the cuts were made, the spectre of Johnson was present in the media – conjured up in the words of those affected by the cuts.
Johnson doesn’t deal well with opposition. Anyone seeing him rail at people who challenge him will have witnessed the insults, jibes and jokes – not just directed at other politicians, but at the public – for example, heckling the audience of his People’s Question Time in Lewisham when he was challenged on his failure to stand up for the community on the proposed A&E closure.
Johnson doesn’t have his next career move in the bag. He is not guaranteed to return to parliament as, like any politician his fate will be linked to events, so he may end up deciding his best option is to stick with city hall because, even though he is bored with his current job, it affords him considerable media exposure. And, as Sonia Purnell recently suggested, he could win. We can’t take a Labour victory next time for granted. I am optimistic though that Labour can highlight the mayor’s poor record in office and get our message across to voters. If we have learned anything from the last year campaigning on cuts to the emergency services, it is that we can scratch the Teflon – we can get some things to stick. We can – and must – chip away through consistent and persistent campaigning at his cuts, cheap politics and laziness. He is not delivering, he is positioning himself to the right of the Tory party, and he is dangerously populist, with much of the media uncritical of his many flaws. It is up to us to highlight his record and policy choices as this is what impacts on people’s lives.
We can’t be dismissive of politicians like Johnson – or Farage for that matter. We must keep the pressure up – when exposed to scrutiny populist politicians are not always able to handle it. Johnson and Farage are however both accomplished politicians attracting those alienated and disenchanted by politics and distrustful of politicians. We do need to make sure a Labour candidate for mayor can also connect with Londoners and appeal to people from across the political divide. From the perspective of city hall, we cannot rely on Johnson to float off up the river from London Bridge to Westminster. We need to identify someone who he would hesitate to stand against. We don’t need someone who will out-clown him. Labour won’t succeed in finding someone who can get good press out of hanging stuck on a zipwire and we shouldn’t try. Instead we will need a candidate who can calmly demolish his polished ineptitude with competence and charm.
Labour in London owes it to the rest of the country to try to contain the genie of Boris Johnson in a bottle. Because, if his luck holds out within and he does end up in high office, the slash-and-burn approach he has demonstrated towards emergency services would be translated to the national stage. His failure to deliver on anything but iconic white elephants with his name on them would leave an even more damaging legacy to the people of this country than his reckless fire cuts will to London.
———————————————————
Fiona Twycross AM is a Labour Londonwide assembly member. She tweets @FionaTwycross
———————————————————