One of us

As Spectator readers would have expected, this magazine was an early and enthusiastic backer of Boris Johnson as the next Mayor of London. On 4 July we gave him our official endorsement and urged him to run on our Coffee House
blog (new.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse). Now that he has thrown his bandana in the ring, we shall be providing regular updates on Boris’s progress: Toby Young, who will cover the campaign in these pages and online, delivers his opening despatch on p14 and his first video diary can be seen on our website.
Yet our support for a former editor reflects much more than tribal loyalty. His entry to the race has been an energising moment in British politics. More than
any other recent political development, it
has been the subject of cheerful conversation in pubs and bus-queues, on websites and chat shows, among people who normally
dismiss local and general elections as a
dreary irrelevance.
Though only a few days old, Boris’s campaign has already put a smile on the face of politics. Some see this as an intrinsic debasement of the electoral process and a sad indictment of the state of political culture. The absurd implication of this is that politics cannot and should not be entertaining. In fact, the humourlessness of modern politics is one of many reasons that it so conspicuously fails to engage the interest or sympathies of so many people.
Just as it is possible to be deadly serious and epically shallow, so humour in politics need not be a sign of frivolity. In Boris’s case, humour reflects a rich capacity to communicate, to stretch out a hand to voters. Most politicians confuse being ‘in touch’ with slavishly following the instructions of their private pollsters. In the eyes of the public, most of them seem to be a caste apart, aloof and ineffective.