In a year and half, Mr Johnson will be in the final days of his battle with Ken Livingstone to win re-election as Mayor of London. It would be catastrophic for Mr Johnson, and for the Tory cause in London, if he could be painted by Mr Livingstone as a mere Cameron stooge, meekly obeying the heartless diktats of Downing Street on housing benefit and on many other things too.
The chances are that in the spring of 2012, when the pain of the spending cuts will still be more apparent than the gain, the Conservatives will be deeply unpopular. The Cameron-Osborne strategy is designed to ensure victory at a general election in 2015, by which time several years of belt-tightening will have given way to the wonderful prospect of tax cuts.
Mr Johnson is naturally not going to sit idly by and let himself become an unlamented victim of this masterplan. He knows he can only win in 2012 by showing that he is a more redoubtable champion for London than Mr Livingstone would be.
This means annoying Mr Cameron: and with what mischievous relish the Mayor has set about the task. As Mr Johnson’s biographer, it soon became clear to me that although both men went to Eton, the assumption that they must therefore be the same kind of person is complete nonsense.
Unlike Mr Cameron, Mr Johnson was a scholar of Eton. He considers himself far cleverer than Mr Cameron, and it is certainly true that at school, at Oxford, and for many years afterwards, Mr Johnson was a thousand times more famous.
Mr Cameron is actually just as clever as Mr Johnson, but in a completely different way. While Mr Johnson cannot see an apple cart without feeling an urge to overturn it, Mr Cameron knows this would lead to an absurd and counter-productive loss of apples, and hastens to steady the cart.
The Prime Minister is an insider: a prudent, well-mannered, perfectly balanced representative of the Establishment, with a genius for getting on with people like Nick Clegg. Mr Johnson is an outsider: a maverick with a genius for playing to the public gallery, often by annoying people like Mr Clegg.
When Mr Cameron falters, as all Prime Ministers do in the end, Mr Johnson hopes to offer his services as the next leader of the Conservative Party. Here too it makes sense for the Mayor to show that far from being a pale imitation of Mr Cameron, he is a different kind of Tory altogether: a Merry England Conservative who wants everyone to enjoy themselves. Such an alternative might be quite popular after a long period of high-minded Coalition Government.
But is it not intolerable, during a discussion of the impact of the housing benefit reforms on London, to speak of “Kosovo-style social cleansing”? This is the question posed by serious-minded people, including Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg, the latter of whom said: “I disagree with what Boris Johnson said on the policy and very strongly disagree with the way he expressed his views.”
It is true that if Mr Johnson had expressed his concerns about the housing benefit reforms in as tasteful and temperate a tone as Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg wished, there would have been much less of a row, and many fewer people would know of the Mayor’s reservations about the policy.
But not everyone thinks that politics needs to be conducted in a relentlessly pious tone, and the Coalition’s ostentatious high-mindedness looks more than a little self-interested: a way of silencing or at least sidelining anyone who employs the kind of questionable analogy which a man in the pub might use.
Readers who recall Mr Johnson’s reports as this newspaper’s Brussels correspondent will know that he has a gift for dramatising stories which in other hands might have turned out deathly dull.
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