From mayor to where? Why Boris Johnson’s London tenure does not bode well for the PM job

It says a lot about Boris Johnson’s campaign to be prime minister that his main strategy has been to hide behind the curtains. He used to specialise in jumping out from behind them. But since the Conservative leadership contest began – indeed, since he accidentally-on-purpose helped the nation towards Brexit – he has shrunk from scrutiny. “I don’t know what he believes, he won’t talk to me, he won’t talk to you, he won’t talk to the public,” as Rory Stewart noted to Andrew Marr.

Is he now a Bannonite no-deal neo-imperialist – our Trump? Or a One Nation cosmopolitan type, because, look, he’s had a haircut! If his handlers don’t lift the shroud, he can be all of these things. And so his campaign is confined to the haunted antechambers of the Conservative subconscious, where fantasy Boris can roister around on a runaway pig, high-fiving Churchill, yah-booing Corbyn, making Islamophobia and hardcore deregulation seem like a tremendous jape, before advancing on Brussels to help himself to an infinite supply of cake.

It’s a clever strategy because in the factual realm his achievements are non-existent. He has no ministerial record to speak of, as no one who actually knows Johnson trusts him. David Cameron didn’t. Theresa May made him foreign secretary, true, but more on a keep-your-enemies-closer principle. He proved exactly as distractible and reckless as you might have expected.

But there is one record that Johnson’s apologists do like to trumpet. He was after all mayor of London, 2008-16 – and if you want the proof of the Boris pudding, “you look at what we did in City Hall”, he says. And the capital is still there, isn’t it? Aren’t the 2012 Olympics, some cycle superhighways and three or four new houses in Penge evidence of transferable skills? Even if running London is almost nothing like running the country – let alone the Conservative Party?

But whether or not his crime and housing stats hold up (they don’t), the London years speak to two perceived Johnson strengths. The first is his ability to pull together a team: sure, he’s not a details person, but he’s capable of appointing others to do details for him. The second is his ability to refresh places others Tories can’t reach. London is emphatically a Labour city these days, but the City Hall experience suggests that Johnson might amuse and delight metropolitan types, at least the ones who don’t wear burqas. Or at least bring them along for his Brexit ride.

But how London is Boris? It’s worth remembering that running for mayor wasn’t never Johnson’s idea: he was cajoled into it by the then-Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley, whom he subsequently appointed to run the London Arts Council. Prior to that, Johnson had no London experience – he came from the most Home Counties of seats, Henley – and his strategy for winning rested on his “doughnut” strategy of appealing to the suburbs. His last-minute decision to support Brexit was taken by many Londoners as a “f*** you very much” from a departing mayor (London voted in 59.9 per cent to remain) while his meetings with Steve Bannon and doubled-down racism against Muslim women are unforgivable for many Londoners. Sadiq Khan is truer representative of where London 2019 is at.

While in City Hall, Johnson could rely on a number of advantages. London’s monopoly newspaper awarded him uncritical coverage; London was in its pomp as a global city, thanks in no small part to the immigration Johnson now implicitly condemns; and he also benefited from his predecessor’s industriousness in office. The scheme most closely associated with Johnson, the “Boris bikes”, was Ken Livingstone’s idea. Johnson just saw to it that they lost money.

It’s true that Johnson was not, as some claim, a catastrophic mayor. But he was a pretty rubbish one at a time when a trained chinchilla could have made a decent fist of the job. Livingstone genuinely transformed London. He managed to talk lots of money out of central government and put it to use by introducing the congestion charge, Oyster cards, a vastly improved transport network (especially the buses), investment in Crossrail and the Overground, plus lots and lots of skyscrapers with silly names. Johnson scaled back the best of these projects – he saw that the congestion charge would not reach posh west London – and ramped up the worst. Some 400 towers were approved under Johnson, who repeatedly intervened on behalf of developers to overrule local boroughs, overlooking conservation orders and planning regulations. The London skyline will be forever blighted as a result.

Nor did Johnson’s fun-loving persona ever translate into policy. One of the first actions he took was to ban alcohol on buses and trains; his great intervention after the 2011 riots was to invest in two expensive water cannons that he was never allowed to use.

Otherwise, it is hard to point to any significant achievement, especially with regard to housing or crime. Eventually, he put a few experienced municipal administrators in place and City Hall ticked along. As for his personal touch, his tenure was dominated by eye-catching, expensive flops. The Garden Bridge has cost more than £60m without anything happening at all. The Emirates cable car and the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower have both lost money, despite their prominent and ugly sponsorship.

Johnson’s record as mayor is another fantasy – a bunch of ideas that never really came to anything but had the strange by-product of making a few developers rich and London a far more triumphantly left-leaning, proudly cosmopolitan place than it ever was before.

It also marks the limitations of personality politics. Despite Boris Johnson’s vaunted personality, the main difference between the built environment of London 2008 and London 2016 is how much less characterful it became, how much more like Qatar or Dubai or Houston or anywhere, really, but itself. But it does at least highlight Johnson’s saving grace: his incompetence. Remember his grand plan to build an airport in the Thames estuary? It never amounted to anything at all.