As mayor of London Boris Johnson has been more Silvio Berlusconi than Julius Caesar, writes Sally Gimson

The gods are against Boris Johnson.

First, David Cameron led the Tories to an outright victory in the election in May. Then George Osborne made a grab for the centre-ground in the budget, and the crisis in the eurozone avoided apocalyptic resolution.

If any one of those things had not happened Johnson could have leapt into action. This is a man who likes a crisis.

Imagine Johnson riding to the rescue to save the Tory party after a crushing defeat by Labour; or Johnson championing a liberal One Nation Toryism, if Osborne had chosen more blatantly to grind the faces of the poor.

Johnson could even, if the Greeks had been forced out of the euro, have become the Eurosceptic outrider leading the charge to take Britain out of Europe.

Instead Johnson has been banished to the backbenches, mocked by Osborne in his budget speech and reduced to writing a rather Basil Fawlty-esque, anti-German article in the Telegraph on the Greek crisis.

Johnson is always the hero in his own classical drama. It is both his huge strength and his greatest weakness.

But he should not be underestimated. Despite it all he is hugely popular in the country and still vies with Osborne to be the bookies’ favourite for next leader of the Tory party.

I first met Johnson in 1992 in Brussels. I was working for the European, the then newspaper, and he was a friend of my new boyfriend. Johnson was at that point a rising star of the Telegraph and his office
was plastered with ‘hero-grams’ from the its editor Max Hastings.

The European project, was, as Johnson portrayed it, a fight between nation states played out on a classical stage presided over by a crazed Roman emperor in the person of the socialist president of the European commission, Jacques Delors. A boring document on milk quotas would become a battle the like of which had not been seen since Romulus and Remus founded Rome.

His coverage made Johnson the enemy of all other Brussels reporters because many of the stories he wrote were simply untrue. Conscientious correspondents would get rung up by angry news editors at about 11pm – after the first edition of the Telegraph had appeared – and asked why they had not got the story about the Berlaymont (the European commission’s headquarters) being blown up. It is standing to this day.

It is not that Johnson is a Little Englander. Far from it. On his father’s side he is of  Turkish descent. He was born in New York and spent several years in the European school in Brussels between Primrose Hill primary school and Eton. His companion that evening in 1992, when we went out to eat waterzooi in a restaurant in a beautiful arcade in the middle of Brussels, was Marina Wheeler, who had been a classmate in the European school and soon after became his wife.

Born in 1964, he is of a generation of members of parliament who, with a few honorable exceptions, have not really existed in the Labour party, because most of us – and I am exactly his age – were so horrified by the ructions and divisions the party went through in the 1980s that we went off to do other things.

For the Tories it was different. Johnson was 15 when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and his young adult life was dominated by her neoliberal worldview.

But like many of his generation Johnson is also instinctively a social liberal. More than that he manages to connect emotionally with the middle classes in a way no Labour politician since Tony Blair has done. And he seems like a real laugh.

Young and old like him. They see him as their personal friend and not part of the distant political class. And the more he misbehaves the more they are attracted to him.

Like them he believes in the living wage, though he would not want businesses to suffer. He is in favour of a bit of academic selection in schools, but not grammar schools. He claims to have a healthy scepticism of Europe, while not being a mean Little Englander.

Remember the crowd chanting his name as he opened the Olympics in Hyde Park. There is no Labour politician, let alone a Tory one, who inspires such adulation.

Of course, the reality of Johnson in power as mayor of London is slightly different. He is more Silvio Berlusconi than Julius Caesar.

He is friend – as he himself attests – to the hedge funds. His greatest achievement has been the rather uncomfortable double-decker Boris bus. And his path is littered with failed and expensive vanity projects, many named after him: the cable car across the Thames, the garden bridge and ‘Boris Island’, his airport in the estuary.

Ultimately Johnson is not wildly interested in policy, so nothing has been done about the difficult problems London has faced, from pollution to housing. It is the oligarchs who have gained from his reign and the young who have rioted.

For the moment, though, Johnson is in parliament and isolated. He is personally ambitious but not a team player. He is too unreliable, too untrustworthy and too shameless.

The Osborne machine is determined to crush him while it has the chance. His command bunker is, as the chancellor reminded us, in Uxbridge and not in Whitehall.

His chance, like Ed Miliband’s, may have come and gone on 8 May 2015.

But it would be a mistake to count Johnson out just yet. He still lurks like a shark in the shallows. He has his supporters: the disillusioned Eurosceptics and the clever, modern-day ‘glamour boys’ who Cameron and Osborne keep out in the cold. If there were a real crisis – over the European referendum, for instance – they could be activated. Some of them can organise rebellions rather well.

The danger for Labour is that, if the political class in the form of Cameron and Osborne is discredited, it is Johnson, not the Labour party, who benefits.

We are in a time where identity matters more than ideology. Labour lacks politicians who connect emotionally with both the working class and the middle class, and the party has no one that makes the nation laugh. Johnson does all that in spades – and that makes him dangerous.

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Sally Gimson is a journalist and a councillor in the London borough of Camden

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See the full pamphlet with all the potential leaders profiled here

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Photo: Garry Knight