By | May 8, 2008
Boris Johnson, the new conservative mayor of London, owes me a drink. When he first entered politics nearly a decade ago, I wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph (for which we both then worked) in which I predicted that he might well be a future prime minister. Everybody mocked the very idea that a man who had cultivated a Bertie Wooster image and regularly appeared on TV comedy shows could ever be more than a political maverick.
Now, as Irwin Stelzer has pointed out, Boris — as he is universally known — is “the most visible elected official in the land, especially now that Britain does not have a prime minister directly chosen by the voters.” (Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair without a general election — a big mistake for which he is now paying dearly.)
Having ousted Ken Livingstone, a Leftist demagogue who had held power for eight years, the voters can now look forward to a future without fraternal visits from the likes of Hugo Chavez or Sheikh Qaradawi. The problem, as they knew when they elected him, is that Boris has never run anything before.
Fortunately help is at hand: even as you read this, Mayor Bloomberg is flying in to give Boris the benefit of his omniscience. The contrast is piquant: the billionaire boss of one of the world’s biggest communications conglomerates confronts the quintessential British amateur.
Mr. Bloomberg has much to teach Mayor Johnson about how to clean up London’s diabolical transportation system, its incompetent policing and other public services, while fighting the capital’s corner against a tax-greedy government that would cheerfully kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
But Boris must pick his enemies carefully and the lessons of municipal politics in one country do not always apply in another. Ed Koch broke a bus and subway strike by standing up to the unions and winning over the commuters. Boris may have to do the same, but he will find that Londoners need some persuasion first.
First, he needs to isolate the most extreme union, the Rail, Maritime and Transport, from the rest. Then he needs to explain to the public just how his predecessor poured their money into subsidies that have done nothing to improve services.
In order to create safer streets by getting more officers out on patrol, he needs to isolate and eventually replace the discredited and unpopular Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, while winning over a public that still is inclined to give the police the benefit of the doubt.
None of this will be easy. Unlike Mayor Bloomberg, Mayor Johnson has no power to fire the metropolitan police commissioner, who is appointed by the government. But he can use his powers to make Sir Blair’s seat too hot for comfort. It also would be good to know that the mayor is making serious preparations for a major terrorist attack, on the lines of the recent Senate hearings at which Joe Lieberman warned of a possible nuclear attack on Washington D.C.
Even such drastic scenarios can be shared with the public when a leader has been entrusted with a strong new mandate. The victory of Boris Johnson in London completed the Labor Party’s worst nationwide defeat at local level since 1968. Prime Minister Brown’s standing in opinion polls has now fallen faster and further than any prime minister since Neville Chamberlain in 1940.
In fact, Mr. Brown has done much worse than Chamberlain, whose popularity survived being double-crossed by Hitler at Munich and only evaporated after the war began to go wrong when the Nazis invaded Norway, taking the British by surprise.
Mr. Brown’s offence is less heinous. He has yet to lose the war on terror, though he did little to help the Iraqis win their battle last month to recover control of Basra from the Shiite militias after British forces abandoned it. But he is more contemptible than Chamberlain, who was a good peacetime leader but unequal to the task of dealing with Hitler. It required the genius of a Churchill to do that.
Mr. Brown has not been confronted by a Hitler, nor even a little Hitler, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. All that Mr. Brown had to do was to follow in the footsteps of Tony Blair. First, though, he should have gone to the country and asked the voters’ permission to govern. That is what Mr. Blair did, three times; three times he received that permission. Mr. Brown, who has none of his predecessor’s respect for the electorate, thought democracy was a minor detail of the political system. He has learnt the hard way that democracy is its very essence.
Boris Johnson, by overturning the corrupt, venal, and divisive Labor regime in London, has reminded the British political class that the ultimate power rests with the people.
Mr. Johnson is the editor of Standpoint.
