Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise

Boris Johnson loves playing games.

Using a warped wooden racquet, the London Mayor plays doubles with his siblings.

Oh, yes! Oh, yes.

One is an eco-businessman.

One is a Tory MP.

And the third is a mischievous journalist.

Boris Johnson is a formidable and unorthodox competitor.

Gotcha!

CHEERING

Yeah, I like it.

His love of life has helped make him the country's most popular politician.

Stand clear of the gates!

At Private Eye we call him "Beano Boris" because he's a character from an old-fashioned cartoon strip.

Everything's "cripes" and "blimey" and "chaps" and "phwoar".

But those who know him claim there are at least two different Boris Johnsons.

He's a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear.

Behind the clown mask is said to lurk a deadly serious political operator -

determined to get to the top, despite his colourful private life.

He said have you got any advice, and I said, "Yes, lock up your willy."

This film examines what really makes Boris tick,

whether he is a man to trust and whether he could replace his fellow Etonian at Number 10.

He knows that life is a competition and he always wants to be top.

And Boris Johnson speaks more candidly in this film about his

chances of grabbing the top job than he has ever done before.

This programme was such a bad idea.

This is Boris Johnson age five paddling his own canoe in the river

that runs through the family farm in Somerset.

There was no evidence then of the modern obsession with health and safety.

The Eton and Oxford-educated Mayor of London has routinely broken the conventional

rules of politics - and often found himself in deeply troubled waters.

But though he had a pedigree English education - Boris Johnson has an

exotic mongrel background.

My brothers and sisters and me, we're like the honey you used to get

that said "produce of more than one country", you know, we're all...

We're from all over the place, so we've got, er,

Turkish, German, French, Russian,

international Jewry, you know, you know, the lot.

The blond gene which is so strong in the prolific Johnson clan -

is thought to come from a flaxen-haired slave girl whom one his ancestors married.

Boris Johnson's great grandfather was a Turkish journalist and

politician assassinated by a nationalist mob.

His mother is a painter and his father an environmentalist who once worked for MI6.

The Johnsons were living in New York when Boris was born.

I wasn't actually present at the birth, though I'd been hanging

in there for a long time. I popped out to get a pizza,

as one does, and when I came back the baby had been born.

Boris was a champion when he was born, because not only was

he very big, looked as though he was ready for prep school,

but he had thick yellow hair, it was most extraordinary.

It was the time when the Beatles had just arrived in New York.

So he got called the blond Beatle and all the mothers

who were expecting babies, and to have them in that hospital, were brought in to see the blond Beatle.

Boris was the first of numerous Johnson children who grew up in a super-competitive household.

Boris Johnson says it was all sparked off by the birth of his sister Rachel.

I shall never forget the expression of Boris's face when he arrived at the hospital,

and saw me holding a new baby.

The expression on his face was indescribable,

but one of shock, disbelief, and fear.

My life was one of blameless panda-like passivity until my younger sister arrived 18 months later.

There I was, you know, everything, I had everything an 18-month-year-old

could possibly desire and suddenly

I found that I had this competition in the form of Rachel.

And it was necessary to exert myself

for food, for attention, for everything else.

I learned to read before he did and this gave him a huge kick up the pants, because my grandmother,

my paternal grandmother, used to... ask me to read out Times leaders

when I was four, and would then turn to him and say, "She reads much better than you".

So he's always been a competitor, right from the age of 14 months.

He knows that life is a competition and he wants, always wants to be top.

Boris seemed to have inherited his competitive gene and his blond hair from his father.

But he also has some of his mother's more artistic side -

he remains an accomplished painter.

This is a self-portrait Boris Johnson did when he was just twelve.

Whenever anyone asked him what he wanted to be, he would answer, world king. That is true.

And that's what he thought, he thought that was a job

that he could do and he would fulfil every criterion.

The early life of Boris and his three siblings was one that was constantly on the move.

As an environmental consultant, Stanley Johnson was regularly posted to new places in Europe and America,

and the Johnsons moved house 30 times in 15 years.

It made for what Rachel Johnson describes as a rackety childhood -

made worse when their mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was

away from her four children in hospital for eight months.

When I was in hospital, they became very close to each other because we

had a series of dotty nannies and housekeepers looking after them, and

they grew very close to each other and very protective of each other.

Boris was always very protective of the younger children.

Boris was sent to Eton on a scholarship aged 13.

SINGING

The school has produced a third of Britain's prime ministers, including

the current incumbent who was known at Eton as Cameron Minor.

I do remember Dave.

I'm fairly certain someone said to me once, "That's Cameron Mi",

and there was this tiny chap, I dimly remember.

Johnson's relationship with Cameron Minor would be a recurrent theme throughout his life.

But at Eton it was Johnson who became the school star.

Boris was clearly somebody out of the ordinary. I mean, he had, always had shaggy hair,

he always had a rather plummy voice, he was always very sort of physical,

a rugger player from an early stage,

he always had great humour and a tremendous drive and seriousness,

which sometimes is belied by the humour but was undoubtedly there.

Do you think that Eton increased your sense of competitiveness?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that was a good thing. And I'd encourage that.

Boris Johnson was such a tough competitor that he broke his nose

four times on the playing fields of Eton. And he learned on a different

school stage that he could break the conventional rules to his advantage.

It was at Eton he discovered he could make people laugh.

When he was in a French play, and he had to recite Moliere and

he hadn't bothered to learn his lines and he hid behind a pillar reading them out,

which was obviously much funnier than if he'd learned them

perfectly and had stood on the stage and declaimed them.

Do you think that you, you learned something for later life from acting

in plays at Eton, that you could actually get more laughs by looking

as if you don't know your lines than actually remembering them?

Well, I certainly think that as a general tactic in life,

if that's what you're driving at,

it is, it is often useful to give the slight impression that you

are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on,

because the reality may be that you don't know what is going on but

people won't be able to tell the difference.

This is why he's dementing for other politicians, because they're all to

an extent playing the part assigned to them by the party, you know,

you have to be loyal, you have to be a good Tory.

Boris has realised quite early on that he would go further if he broke all those rules,

and people would love him even more,

which is brilliant, genius piece of casting.

While he was at Eton, Boris Johnson learned that his mother and father were breaking up

and they were getting divorced.

I often thought that his being world king

was a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible,

somehow safe from the pains of life,

the pains of your mother disappearing for eight months,

the pains of your parents splitting up.

It was at Eton that the would-be world king learned to play by his own rules.

When he was 18, his house master wrote, "I think Boris honestly

"believes it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception -

"one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."

Johnson was elected a member of Eton's elite group which could wear its own fancy waistcoats

and he was made Captain of the school.

The fact that David Cameron didn't achieve either honour

is something he's often privately reminded of by Johnson.

I remember at the end of school you write message with photographs,

so-called leavers, you send them to your friends, and I can actually remember what I wrote to him.

He wasn't one of the great characters of Eton, he's one of the great characters of Eton history.

When the 18-year-old Boris left Eton he posted this picture of

himself in the leaving book and underneath it he wrote that his next

ambition was "to achieve more notches on my phallocratic phallus",

in other words his almighty male organ.

Johnson had won an Oxford scholarship to study Classics.

And he was determined to grab more of life's glittering prizes.

..There being 167 votes

in favour of the motion

and 85 against,

I declare the motion overwhelmingly carried

and I close the house at 12:18 am.

Johnson was elected President of the Oxford Union in his third year.

The university's famed debating society was known as the playground of power.

Many of its presidents would go on to become Prime Ministers.

But Johnson's path to the top had not been smooth -

he had developed what he called Tory tendencies.

And when he first stood for the presidency his political opponents

depicted him as a right wing Old Etonian toff who thought he was born to rule.

As the polls closed he went to find the result.

When I got there it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to win.

And... I tell you, it was like all harrowing and shattering defeats,

it was very good for me, it was, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Boris would later develop his skill at putting on a brave face into an art form.

He was visited in his college rooms by his mother, his two brothers

and his sister Rachel who was now also at Oxford.

He decided that the only way he could win the Union presidency was by broadening his political base.

And the party making all the running was the SDP, the newly formed Centre-Left party.

The SDP were in search of a candidate, and it would be,

it would be fair to say that whilst I never

identified myself as a supporter of the SDP,

when asked if I would accept SDP support I did not demur.

In other words - yeah, you know.

Boris was a political chameleon.

I think he was almost like a blank screen

in which people could project their own political views.

From his point of view he didn't need to be party political,

if he wanted to be elected President of the Union he did not want to alienate anybody,

so he allowed people to think whatever they wanted to think, that was pretty smart.

He was exactly as you see him now, you know,

charming, ruthless, er, single-minded, determined,

he wanted to be President of the Union and he got there.

Johnson had become President by appealing across party lines -

a skill that would later serve him well.

He'd also been elected to Oxford's most secretive elite group - the notorious Bullingdon Club.

The all-male dining society's members included David Cameron,

who has long wanted this photo to disappear.

Members of the Buller feel bound by strict vows of omerta and normally refuse to speak

publicly about the Club.

Ah, yes. I congratulate you on defying the censors and bringing this

appalling image once again before public view.

It is a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate, er, arrogance

and toffishness and twittishness,

I suppose, but you know, it was great fun at the time.

Er, or was it? Actually,

the awful truth about all that business was you kind of felt very, er, posh...

you felt it was wonderful to be going round swanking this up,

but actually I remember the dinners being incredibly, you know,

drunken and, you know...

Ending up with smashing up restaurants and things?

Well, yes, and the sort of abiding memory,

the abiding feeling was of, of deep, deep, deep self-loathing and you know, what, what...

I've talked to a number of people in the photograph and

they say that when they see you these days you go up to them and say "Buller, Buller, Buller!"

Right, do they?

Yes, they do.

It may be that I do, in a satirical way.

In his public role as President of the Union Johnson had become one of

the best known figures in the university.

I was editor of the Daily Telegraph

and I went as a guest to join a debate at the Oxford Union,

and there was Boris in all his glory as President of the Union,

his white tie and tails and all the rest of it.

The house will proceed to a division...

It was obvious all the girls were potty about him, nobody was looking at me for two minutes,

they were all looking at Boris.

..honourable members voting against the motion will sit on the benches on my left.

Watching President Boris most closely was his girlfriend Allegra Mostyn-Owen.

She was the student regarded as the great beauty of her day at Oxford.

Allegra had modelled,

she'd been on the cover of magazines, she always was immaculately turned out, and then

standing next to her was this very dishevelled figure of Boris Johnson.

The rumours were that he'd got her to wash and iron his shirts for him,

they didn't appear to have been washed and ironed by anyone.

The couple married soon after they both came down from Oxford.

Boris Johnson had got an upper second in classics, not the first class degree he'd coveted,

and he was disappointed to learn that David Cameron did get a first

in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Johnson had become a trainee reporter for the Times.

But after he concocted a quote for an article he wrote about

the Plantagenet King Edward II and his gay lover, The Times let him go.

It was awful, I remember, I remember...

I remember a deep, deep sense of shame and guilt and,

and just not, do you know,

just not knowing how to, to sort it out,

and it was, it was a bit of a bummer, frankly.

But not for the only time Johnson fell on his feet.

He managed to move down river to another job at the Daily Telegraph.

Its editor Max Hastings, whom Boris had cannily invited to speak

at the Oxford Union, made him the paper's man in Brussels.

We realised that Boris was very bright, we wanted somebody

punchy, aggressive, original in Brussels to really get onto

the whole EU issue, which was then really becoming

very big stuff in British politics,

and we just looked around for our brightest and available young man,

and Boris looked like it, and he did not disappoint our hopes.

The multi-lingual Johnson became a Eurosceptic reporter.

He ridiculed the Brussels Commission with his gift for a phrase

and his nose for a good story.

From Euro-manure to one size fits all condoms,

little escaped Johnson's eye.

A number of the EU correspondents I've talked to

said that you would take stories with a grain of truth

and then hype it up and hype it up almost beyond recognition.

Well, I mean, you know,

I think there's a bit of pots and kettles going on there.

Yes, there were one or two stories which perhaps in retrospect

either because you'd slightly miscued the story yourself

or because it got souped up in some way in its projection

and, you know, the thing was a little bit overegged or whatever.

I think I once said that the Berlaymont was going to be blown up,

which didn't turn out to be quite true.

The Berlaymont, the headquarters of the Brussels Commission,

is still standing. But Johnson's growing Euroscepticism

would help shape his own political future.

Yet just as his Brussels reports were making his name,

a story linked to his Oxford past came back to haunt him.

It involved a fellow Bullingdon Club member, Darius Guppy,

a long time friend of Johnson

from their days at Eton and Oxford together.

We did have a serious embarrassment with Boris

when he was in Brussels when one fine morning, er, on my desk

along with the post I find a tape and a note from a reader

who was saying, "What are you as editor in chief

"of the Daily Telegraph proposing to do

"about one of your correspondents, Boris Johnson,

"having this conversation with Darius Guppy, a convicted fraudster?"

The tape was a recording of Guppy telephoning to ask Johnson

to find the home address of an inquisitive journalist,

whom Guppy wanted to scare off.

20 years on, we filmed for the first time

Johnson listening to extracts from the tape.

'But I am telling you something, Boris,

'this guy has got my blood up, all right? And there is nothing

'which I won't do to get my revenge, it's as simple as that.'

'How badly are you going to hurt this guy?'

'Not badly at all.

'He will not have a broken limb or broken arm.

'He will not be put into intensive care or anything like that.

'He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a cracked rib.

'Nothing which you didn't suffer at rugby, OK?

'But he'll get scared and that's what I want him to do.'

'OK, Darry, I've said I'll do it, I'll do it, don't worry.'

'Boris, I really mean it, I love you.'

Yes, er, taken out of context

that conversation could indeed seem embarrassing, I...

But it's completely in context.

The reality is nothing eventuated from that conversation,

it is perfectly true...

But the point is you didn't demur when he said this,

this guy will be beaten up and a couple of broken ribs and so on.

This is a friend of yours who wants the details of a journalist

who's making his life a misery

and you said you would get the address and so on.

Well...

-"I said I'd do it, Darius, I'll do it."

-Yeah.

Er, nothing eventuated from that conversation.

It was, you know, what can I say, nobody...

What do you feel hearing it again now, because you were laughing.

Well, obviously I feel indignation

that people taped my private phone calls, that's what I feel.

And I feel what a load of old cobblers, that's what I feel.

15 years ago,

the Guppy tape drew Johnson straight into an elephant trap.

Boris was caught on tape as well.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, richly comic. Yes.

Boris was on tape talking to Darius Guppy.

A very great man,

I don't want to be totally stitched up here.

What you want and what you don't want...

No, he was a school friend, wasn't he?

And a great chap.

A great chap despite being a convicted fraudster.

Convicted fraudster, went very sadly wrong. Major goof.

And one of the ways he went wrong is ringing you up on tape

and suggesting you help him beat up a journalist who was looking into him.

That did come up.

I won't deny that did come up. I'm not ashamed of it.

What are you not ashamed of, Boris?

Whatever there is not be ashamed of.

Boris had bumbled so endearingly

that he became a regular on Have I got News for You.

There is a sense of guilt that part of Boris's success has been built

on his performances on that show, and I know Paul feels very ambivalent

about whether he should feel proud about helping this man

to become Mayor, let alone the next Prime Minister

or whatever fate we've got coming for us.

Boris Johnson survived the Guppy incident

when Max Hastings let him off with a severe warning to behave himself.

He'd returned to London as the Telegraph's star political columnist

and was much in demand on celebrity TV.

Johnson so impressed Conrad Black,

the notorious Telegraph Group proprietor,

that he made him editor of the Spectator.

Johnson promised he would not seek to become an MP while he was editor,

but he almost immediately broke his word to Black's fury.

Boris is a scoundrel.

I said to him, "You just can't do this. I mean, not to us, anyway."

So we kind of took that as the cue that, yes, he could go on and be

as devious as he wanted as long as we weren't the victims of it, you see.

Boris had married Marina Wheeler

after his first marriage had broken down.

She was a successful left wing lawyer who didn't share

her husband's love of the limelight.

But she put in a rare public appearance when Johnson was selected

as the Tory candidate for the safe seat of Henley on Thames.

I'm amazed, bowled over and thrilled beyond my wildest dreams.

Thank you, Marina, for turning up...

Johnson duly won Henley in the 2001 general election

which saw David Cameron also become an MP

for a nearby seat in Oxfordshire.

Both men were quickly marked out as Tories to watch.

Johnson, who was 37, continued to edit The Spectator

even when he was promoted to being a junior shadow minister.

He characteristically believed he could get the best of both worlds.

Well, I said my policy on cake was pro having it and pro eating it.

I did a kind of circus act

where I had these two ponies

and gradually they got further and further apart

and with inevitable results.

Johnson found himself regularly in trouble

when his mischief-making Spectator articles

were taken to be official Tory policy.

On top of that the tabloids reported he was having

a long-term love affair with Petronella Wyatt,

who was one of his staff.

Johnson dismissed the reports as an inverted pyramid of piffle

and arrived at a Spectator awards lunch.

Johnson, I'll collect it in a minute.

The Tory Leader Michael Howard had accepted Johnson's denial

but couldn't resist ribbing his shadow minister.

Well, thank you, thank you very much indeed,

Boris, there is nothing like The Spectator for stirring up

and stimulating political controversy.

Indeed, in all senses of the word it could best be described

as political Viagra.

Keep it up, Boris.

Johnson said, "That's below the belt."

Two days later came confirmation of the affair.

And Michael Howard sacked Johnson for lying to him.

I don't, if it's all right with you, wish to...

And I understand why you have to bring all this sort of thing up.

I don't particularly want to get into stuff

which is done and dusted and very largely concerns my private life.

Well, very largely concerns,

but it's also a political thing, because as a result of this

you were forced to resign from the front bench.

Whoa, I was sacked.

Let's be clear, I was sacked.

-Let's not muck... I said, "Sack me, or sack me."

-Yeah.

-And he sacked you.

-Yeah.

I suppose in a way you made it worse for yourself.

Because you had publicly said that these stories about this love affair

were an inverted pyramid of piffle, which you said with

your characteristically inventive language,

and then it turned out to be true.

So can you see why people don't necessarily always feel

they can take you at your word?

All that kind of thing, which as I say,

very largely concerns my private life, has been the subject

of exhaustive questioning put to me over many years.

I had to leave The Spectator one way or another.

All that turned out for the best, in my view.

One of Howard's chief advisers was David Cameron.

And I asked Cameron at the time about Johnson's sacking

in an interview that hasn't been seen before.

Did you think it was a good idea

for Michael Howard to sack Boris Johnson?

I think, I mean, it's obviously...

That's one for him rather than for me,

but I mean, I think there's a very difficult issue

when you've said one thing publicly and then you have to say

something else publicly and even though it's about your private life,

when you're talking to the press it becomes part of your public life

and that's incredibly tough.

But I think that is something that, you know,

you've got to deal with in one way or another.

You haven't really answered the question, I mean, you...

Well, the short answer is yes, I think, I think,

you know, that was, you know,

given the circumstances I think that was the right decision,

but, I mean, Boris is a very close friend of mine and colleague

and you know, it was obviously a very tough time for him as well.

Boris, are you going to save your marriage?

I'll do whatever I can... She's locked me out.

Boris was in the doghouse.

His wife kicked him out of the house for three weeks.

I think all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

And he was out of a job. He realised his political career had stalled.

And he watched as David Cameron, his Eton and Bullingdon buddy,

dramatically overtook him by winning the Tory Leadership race in 2005.

Cameron excluded Johnson from his inner circle.

While professing loyalty to his new Leader,

at the party conference Boris stole the headlines from Dave.

Johnson, who was soon to have another affair,

exceeded his shadow brief by publicly contradicting Cameron.

What do you do with a problem like Boris?

Boris has strong views about lots of things, I try to get him to stick

to higher education and I think that's probably the right answer.

In fact, it was to turn out that Cameron had other plans

to make use of Boris Johnson's undoubted media celebrity

and public name recognition.

Having failed to find a suitable Tory candidate

to stand for Mayor of London, Cameron sounded Boris out.

Which way is the exit?

I remember when Boris was trying to decide

whether he would run as Mayor of London, and he asked me out to lunch.

I said I thought he should go for it, I thought he could do it

and I thought he'd do it very well,

all of which I think I was right about,

but he said, "Have you got any advice?"

I said, "Yes, lock up your willy."

After some dithering, Johnson decided he would stand for Mayor.

Many people at the time thought it was a hopeless cause.

London was traditionally Labour

and the incumbent Mayor Ken Livingstone

had seemed to make the job his own.

This is an excellent opportunity for London to have someone

who I think can unite Londoners, can inspire Londoners,

and can give leadership to what is one of...

the greatest city in the world and it needs a great leader.

What do you mean, "one of the...?"

-You're quite right.

-The greatest city in the world.

London is the greatest city in the world. Sorry, I don't want to interrupt you.

He's making a very good point.

It's a fantastic chance to change the government of London

and to institute a new type and style

of administration in this city.

I recognised immediately he said he was going to run,

this was going to be my most formidable opponent.

Because people laugh at him, you know, I would never miss

Have I Got News For You when he was on, I'd almost fall off the chair.

That's a very powerful quality.

Boris makes people feel good about themselves.

It's an incredibly powerful force to have in politics,

not many people have got that. He therefore can get away with a lot.

Though his popular appeal wasn't in doubt,

his mayoral candidacy raised the key question -

which was the real Boris Johnson?

Was he competent and serious enough to do a big job,

or was just a gaffe-prone joker who flew by the seat of his pants.

He gets up incredibly early and then he will run and have breakfast

and then he'll write a speech and then he'll go to work.

I mean, he's already done a full day's work by eight o'clock.

Because there is this extraordinary sort of contrast

between that sort of drivenness and how he seems to look,

as if he's a shambles.

Yeah, it's very, very clever.

Boris isn't pretending to be chaotic,

he really is utterly chaotic,

and getting Boris to do his expenses or to fill in pieces of paper

or sign forms is an almost impossible task.

He's always been like that and in a way it's a form of...

It's unusual, he's got discipline when he wants to have it,

when he thinks something's important enough,

but if it's something that is going to seriously promote his interests,

Boris will be there at the right time on the right day.

He's a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear.

He's very clever and he's very likeable.

Do you trust him?

Do I trust him not to betray me personally? Yes, I do.

Do I trust him to do everything he says he will do

if doing it subsequent to his promising to do it

gets in the way of the shortest possible distance between where he is

and where his ambition wishes to take him?

No, I do not.

David Cameron was delighted when Johnson beat Livingstone

to become London Mayor in 2008,

as it showed the Tories then still in opposition

could win in a traditional Labour stronghold.

I remember a terrifying sense of responsibility

and the real, real weight of the, you know, sense

that I'd taken on something that was of massive importance

to millions of people and I'd jolly well better get it right.

Johnson regarded his new job as a public audition

for an even higher political stage.

To help project his image,

he appointed a former BBC political reporter as his chief spin-doctor.

Guto Harri has never talked publicly before about his role.

What I thought was that there was a mission there

over four years of taking him from celebrity to statesman,

but crucially without losing the celebrity.

One of Guto Harri's first photocalls for the mayor

was to promote a clean-up of London rivers.

The mayor had made the wrong kind of splash,

one of a number of early pratfalls.

To help fight crime in London,

Johnson had appointed as his deputy mayor Ray Lewis.

He saw Lewis as an inspirational figure with a direct line

to disaffected black youths.

But Lewis came under harsh public scrutiny,

when he was reported to have souped up his CV.

The Mayor was determined to stand by his man.

But in an agonised meeting at City Hall,

with his enemies calling for Lewis's head,

Johnson was reluctantly forced to concede that his deputy mayor

was dead in the water after just eight weeks.

Just tell me the story of when it became clear

Ray Lewis had to go.

Infandum jubes renovare delorem.

You're asking me to go over terrible...

You want to renew the misery.

What do you want, what do you want from me?

Well, I want your account of what it was like for you

when here was a guy who you'd brought in, he was symbolic...

He was, yeah.

And then, er, he had to go.

It was, it was a grim business.

And I feel, I feel,

I feel sad thinking about it, but maybe that was a function

of being so, so new in the post. How about that?

Ray Lewis wasn't the only one of Boris Johnson's newly appointed team

of advisers to run into trouble.

Today David Ross resigned from his position,

the fourth key adviser to go since the Mayor took office.

There was an expectation that the Boris mayoralty

would be a disaster and there were a number of people who fell

by the wayside in the first few months, but with Boris,

it was taken as evidence that he couldn't organise the proverbial,

you know, drinks session in a brewery.

Ironically, Johnson had inherited the responsibility for organising

the biggest party in London's history,

the forthcoming Olympic Games.

I don't think that Boris had remotely understood the size

and complexity and scope and scale of it,

and I think at first he probably came there

thinking that this was a sort of a bit of an extravaganza,

did London need it?

Am I going to have loads of resources

diverted from other things?

I just think he looked at it as something that he didn't grasp.

I think what Seb is saying has a grain of truth,

I did start off being probably for him and for LOCOG,

but thinking, you know, I think they began thinking,

"Oh, golly, is the Mayor going to start screwing things up?"

But I rapidly became an evangelical believer in it.

I'm sure the public persona, the public perception

is that this is somebody that sort of bumbles from decision to decision

and from event to event.

It's much, much sharper than that.

You know, he knows exactly what he's doing.

You know, I don't believe there's a moment of his day

that isn't choreographed to either London or him.

After his shaky first few months,

Johnson was developing his own way of playing the role of mayor.

Although he had relatively few formal powers,

he saw himself as London's champion.

Recalling his immigrant roots,

Johnson viewed the city as a dynamic melting pot

that could help power Britain's economic recovery.

Bonjour, ce'st moi, Boris Johnson, Le Mayor de Londres.

SPEAKS RUSSIAN

Have a very, very happy Chinese New Year, everybody.

SPEAKS MANDARIN

The key place that Boris Johnson would bang the drum for London

was in Whitehall.

By now David Cameron was Prime Minister,

and the two men would engage in friendly sparring in public.

But behind the scenes their political rivalry was much fiercer.

When Number ten announced cuts in housing benefits

that would worst affect London's poorest families

Johnson launched an uncompromising assault on the Cameron government.

We will not accept any kind of Kosovo-style, you know,

social cleansing of London,

you are not going to see, on my watch,

you're not going to see thousands of families being evicted from the place

where they've been living and where they have put down roots,

that is not what Londoners want to see,

it's not what we are going to accept.

Johnson's social cleansing jibe infuriated Cameron.

And sources close to the Prime Minister hit back.

The 11 o'clock daily briefing to journalists came at Number 10

and is one of the rare occasions, to be fair,

with the Prime Minister, where somebody in Number 10 authorised,

you know, a pretty brutal briefing against Boris.

The net day's headlines reflected the tension between the two men.

It was one of a series of clashes

that the Mayor would have with the Prime Minister.

Almost all the arguments are about us

trying to get a better deal for London,

and to make sure that the Government doesn't make a mistake

and sometimes I will say something that seems to be very critical

of the Government or a Government policy

and yes, a lot of plaster comes off the ceiling,

but that is the job of the Mayor.

Johnson was reshaping the Mayor's job in his own image.

When he persuaded Barclay's to promise £50 million

for his cycle hire scheme

the bank wanted them known as Barclay Bikes.

But almost inevitably they became Boris Bikes.

And Brand Boris even advertised himself

on the BBC's most popular programme.

I'm going to have a pint of bitter.

It's such an honour to have you here, Mr Mayor.

Oh, please call me Boris.

I nearly went into politics myself, you know.

Really? Well, if, if you have any ideas for how I could help Walford,

here's my card.

-Thank you so much.

-Good.

Yet Boris Johnson's winning manner was to land him back in the soup.

He was a risk-taker, as he showed when promoting a volunteering scheme

at a go-kart track.

And there were new reports

that the Mayor hadn't been following Max Hastings' advice

to keep himself zipped up.

It was claimed he was having an affair with an art dealer

who he'd made his unpaid adviser on urban sculpture.

David Cameron was later to joke

that he was going to give Johnson a book called The Joy Of S...Cycling.

But Johnson himself was again kicked out of his house.

And Cameron's then-spin doctor Andy Coulson advised the mayor

he should hold a confessional press conference.

Johnson vetoed the idea.

He argues the public isn't interested in his private life.

And he imposed what might be called a blanket ban on talking about it.

The difficulty is that one statement invariably poses another question,

and one thing, you know,

one line of enquiry leads to another.

OK. If you talked about your private life,

there would be more interesting things that would come out.

Just to go back to what I was saying just now,

and again I admire your journalistic technique,

but I think I've given you the answer that I'm going to give.

Boris has been fantastic copy for the Eye,

I mean all the way through, from his earliest performances as an MP,

through to the mass infidelities which have littered his career.

I mean he's our Berlusconi, but somehow it's funnier.

The bounder Boris bounced back once again,

but he was in for a rude awakening.

When the London riots broke out in the summer of 2011,

the Mayor was on a family holiday

in a camper van in the Canadian Rockies.

Johnson at first refused to return home but then changed his mind.

He headed for south London,

the scene of some of the worst rioting,

and for a change he was met by a hostile crowd,

who wanted to know why the police had gone AWOL.

Let me tell you, let me tell you, tonight...

You talk about robust policing, what does that actually mean?

Tonight we are going to have a huge number of police on the streets...

Where were they?

By 5 o'clock we knew they we're going to hit and no-one was here,

I was in the salon when a brick come through the wall,

through the window, and no-one was here to defend me.

I know. And that's why we are putting many more police on the streets.

It was tough, it was really, and the people felt angry,

because they'd seen their shops, their property attacked

and sod it, the sodding Mayor had been somewhere else.

Back in City Hall, Johnson worried that that the riots

might have wrecked his pitch for London,

and his chances of re-election.

But in his first term, he'd carved out a reputation as his own man.

And he was far from an identikit right winger -

he has an unpredictable mix of beliefs,

he is pro-banker, pro-immigrant, a Eurosceptic who's pro-gay marriage,

but likes to be seen as tough on crime.

Police officers! Police!

Last year's mayoral election was a Johnson vs Livingstone rematch.

Each man accused the other of being a tax avoider.

-No. That's not true.

-You don't avoid tax on that.

You have to pay tax on the money you take out.

-The guy's a liar.

-Can I get a word in edgeways?

The guy's a barefaced liar.

Following that programme the two men had nearly come to blows.

But it was the mayor who sought to kiss and make up.

What I found amazing, was here is someone

who very well may be Prime Minister one day,

may have to lead the nation,

and he was worried that I was angry with him.

And this is a breathtaking weakness in a politician.

He wants to be loved, even by the people he's destroying.

Johnson once more beat Livingstone -

and after four years working and playing

as hard as he had ever done in his life.

the Mayor, who has the ability to take a power nap anywhere,

recharged his batteries in preparation for the summer of 2012.

The London Olympics really took off with the Hyde Park rally.

The games gave Boris Johnson an unparalleled opportunity

to project himself as London Mayor to the whole country

and across the world.

I've never seen anything like this in all my life.

The excitement is growing so much,

I think the Geiger counter of Olympomania

is going to go zoink off the scale!

Are we ready? Are we ready? Yes we are!

The venues are ready, the stadium is ready,

and our team GB athletes are ready, aren't they?

There's going to be more gold, silver, bronze medals

than you'd need to bail out Greece and Spain together.

Final question - are you...?

CROWD: Boris! Boris! Boris!

Can we put on the greatest Olympic games that has ever been held?

Well, I was very lucky to be Mayor

at the time of the Olympic Games, is all I can say,

and it was a jammy, it was a jammy, jammy old trick to pull.

But what was it like for you to hear that huge crowd

chanting, "Boris, Boris, Boris"?

Very, very bad for you, I mean, don't do it!

I mean, very, very bad for the ego,

but you do understand why Roman emperors put on great games

and great spectacles, I mean, suddenly you think,

"Wow! This is obviously a big thing." So, you know.

So, I mean, would you like to be a Roman emperor?

No. they invariably came to sticky ends!

A sticky end was the mot juste for Johnson's celebrated trip,

which climaxed with the daring young mayor stuck on the zipwire.

I want you to know, it's going well, it's very, very well organised.

Get me a ladder!

I want you to know that was far more painful

and frightening than you might think.

In what way?

To start with it was jolly high up,

and after you're stuck up there for a while

stuff starts to chafe and so on and so forth.

Round your groin?

I don't want to go into these details, Michael!

It was chafing. Chafing was involved, but...

I thought you wrote in your book...

Yeah, yeah, the actual... I'm only quoting you, Boris!

This is what's so difficult, I quote you...

I can never remember what I've written!

You said it got very, very tight round your groin area.

Did it? Well, if I wrote it in my book it must be absolutely correct.

If any other politician anywhere in the world got stuck on a zipwire

it would be, you know, disastrous,

but with Boris it would be an absolute triumph.

He defies all forms of gravity.

His Olympotastic performance enhanced his image

as a political celebrity.

-Boris!

-Good morning!

-When will you be back on Have I Got News For You?

I know! Those days are over!

The Mayor is able to connect with a range of people

outside the Tory stockade.

It's a rare gift for an Eton and Bullingdon boy.

-No more cuts?

-No, no more cuts!

He is the only feel-good politician we have in Britain.

Everybody else is far too busy being responsible

or telling you that austerity is going to be very miserable

or that things are tough, or that toughness is required.

What Boris does is make people feel good.

At last year's Tory conference there was a hero's welcome

for the mayor who'd again won in Labour London

and was reaping the dividend of a successful Olympics.

He was able to indulge in a favourite pursuit

of teasing the Prime Minister.

Where is Dave? Yes. Good morning. Good morning, everyone.

There you are, Dave!

I know that Dave will win in 2015, when the economy has turned around

and when people are benefiting from the tough decisions you have taken,

not least coming along to hear this speech today.

So many... Happy birthday, by the way!

I couldn't help laughing when Boris was making the speech.

"Where's Dave?" And poor David Cameron,

the wretched Prime Minister, was obliged to laugh heartily.

I think that David Cameron would actually have liked

to have sort of whacked him to death on the spot.

While Cameron applauds dutifully,

his people mutter darkly that Boris is not a team player,

and is always scheming to steal the PM's thunder.

Often there's that pattern

where he seemed to want to upstage the Prime Minister.

Nine times out of ten the row is about something of substance,

not some sort of game being played between him and the Prime Minister.

And the tenth time?

Tenth time there's a sense of mischief that goes back

30 years to school,

and we all know how we are with school friends

and we all know the assumptions we have with them

and even if one of them has ended up as Prime Minister

and the other is Mayor of London,

to a certain extent they are both there in their short shorts in Eton,

sort of sparring with each other slightly.

That view of the importance of the Eton connection

to the Cameron-Johnson relationship

is shared by the Mayor's sister.

What I've seen is when they're together

it's rather sweet, because David Cameron

sort of slightly, even though he's taller,

looks at Boris as if he's still head boy.

Gee, thanks, Rach(!)

This programme was such a bad idea!

These relationships are set very early,

it's like birth order,

so people shouldn't forget that he was head boy,

Cameron was two years younger, the young pup.

So doesn't that make Boris rather resentful

if Cameron's become Prime Minister?

No, it gives Boris a sense of continuing superiority.

Why wouldn't it? He was head boy. Captain of the school.

That is my sister at her very best,

she is brilliantly causing trouble.

But is there something in what Rachel says?

Guto Harri told us that when there are rows

between you and David Cameron,

nine times out of ten it's about serious politics,

but on the tenth it goes back to your time at Eton

when you were both in short trousers.

I don't think that's fair, I mean,

I think a lot of sort of psychobabble about personal relationships,

actually it comes down to the necessity,

the hard necessity as Mayor of a great capital city

to go into Number 10 and fight for funding for Crossrail

or whatever it happens to be,

to make sure by hook or by crook that you come out with what you need.

In his five years as Mayor,

Johnson's political stock has constantly risen.

But though he's now often talked of as a future prime minister

it's a frightening prospect for some who know him well.

He is still pretty wild, he is still a pretty wild card,

and I for one, just supposing Boris became Prime Minister,

the idea of Boris's finger on the nuclear button,

one day he'd get it mixed up with the button to call the maid or something.

The classic question I get is,

"Can you imagine him with his finger on the nuclear trigger?"

That sends shivers down many spines,

for me, I can imagine if Boris did have his finger

on the nuclear trigger he would be guided

by all kinds of classical considerations

of how bad decisions had caused carnage for centuries thereafter,

and he would be wise in the decision that he took.

Guto Harri says if Boris was Prime Minister,

the thought of Boris Johnson's finger on the trigger,

most people say it sends shivers down their spines.

Well, as I say, the shiver can remain firmly, up their spine

or wherever the shiver...

the shiver has no need to go anywhere

because the chances of my being in a position

to send such a shiver or such a nuclear warhead

are vanishingly small.

Despite his protestations,

many of the people who know Boris best have no doubt

about his ambition and desire to reach Number 10.

And his father even believes he should put himself in the running

for the Tory leadership

by returning to Westminster as an MP before the next election

while he is still Mayor of London.

If Boris were to ask my advice,

on the question of whether he ought to be considering

being a candidate in the next election,

OK, I'm talking about the election of 2015,

I would say to him put your hat in the ring

because he has done a fantastic job as Mayor

and why not go for leader of the party?

And if there's some mechanical thing

saying he has to be a Member of Parliament,

well don't tell me we can't get over that,

we'd either change the rules

or find a way of making him a Member of Parliament.

Johnson won't thank his father for that,

because he has always publicly insisted

that he won't try to become an MP while he's still Mayor.

And until now he has repeatedly claimed

that he has as much chance of becoming Prime Minister

as of being decapitated by a Frisbee

or of being reincarnated as an olive, or as Elvis Presley.

Do you think Boris Johnson will reach the top of the greasy pole?

Ten years ago the idea of Boris being Prime Minister was laughable,

now we're not laughing anymore.

There are quite a lot of people in the Tory party

who in their panic are liable to turn to Boris

and say, "But he's a winner."

Everybody likes him, they all love him, he's popular.

And they're desperate for somebody who is popular.

I think they'll be very silly if they do that,

because it will mean they've stopped wanting to be a serious party.

He knows that life is a competition,

and he wants, always wants to be top.

And when people ask me if he wants to be Prime Minister

I always say, "No, he's much more ambitious than that."

As he would put it, David Cameron, who read PPE, is Prime Minister,

he wants to do better than that.

So what does he want to be?

You'll have to ask him, Michael.

No, this is just, this is just full marks to Rachel

for causing maximum, maximum chaos,

she's, you know...she is joking.

Well, you did want to be world king before.

-She's joking around.

-Would you like to be Prime Minister?

Well, I would LIKE to be the lead singer

of an international rock group,

I mean, that was my aim, or a good guitarist.

I would love to have been a world famous painter or indeed a composer,

there are many, many things that I would like to have done

or to have been able to do.

But would you like to be Prime Minister?

I think it's a very tough job being Prime Minister, very tough job.

I mean, obviously if the ball came loose from the back of a scrum -

which it won't - of course it would be a great thing

to have a crack at, but it's not going to happen.

Do you have any doubts about your ability

to fulfil the role of Prime Minister?

I think people who don't have doubts or anxieties

about their, you know, ability to do things

probably have something slightly terrifyingly awry.

You know, we all have worries and insecurities

but I think we've done a pretty good job so far in City Hall

and that's what I want to continue to do.

Throughout his life people have underestimated Boris Johnson.

But he has shown himself to be far cannier player

of the political game than he likes to let on.

And he's now gone further than ever before

in admitting his desire for the top job.

OK, I've got that one. Oof! Yes!

His charisma and wit have helped make him

the most popular politician in the land.

And he now resembles the great comic actors of the past

who yearn to play Hamlet.

But his life story so far suggests

that if Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson

were to become the country's leading man,

the British people would spend his time in office

on the very edge of their seats.