The hard choices that face the Father of the Mayor

Stanley Johnson is adjusting to his new constitutional position in the life of London: not least deciding which clubs to avoid at lunchtime in order to dodge Boris’s journalist foes

Last July, soon after Boris had announced he would be a candidate for the post of mayor of London, the editor of The Spectator very kindly invited me to give my reaction in the columns of this magazine. In the article I wrote then, I described the circumstances of Boris’s arrival in this world, in a hospital on New York’s East Side, around 70th Street.

I recalled that, as a modern man, I was perfectly ready to be present at the birth but that unfortunately I missed it, having slipped outside for a moment to buy a pizza. So the first view of Boris that I had was in the crèche of newborn babies. I couldn’t see much of him, since he was neatly wrapped in swaddling clothes. I did, however, note that for security reasons the soles of his feet had been dipped in black ink and his ‘footprints’ taken.

‘It didn’t occur to me at that moment,’ I wrote, ‘that I might be looking at the insteps of a future mayor of London.’

Well, those tiny feet have marched a long way since then! As I suspect most people know by now, the Conservatives under David Cameron, with Boris leading the charge, took London and over 250 seats in the country as a whole, signalling emphatically a revival in the fortunes of the opposition and a considerable crisis for the government.

As the proud father, I was interviewed on a couple of occasions by the BBC and Sky News and invited to comment on the results. I argued that I had probably known Boris as long as anyone, apart from his mother.