Boris Johnson

Simon Hattenstone

Boris Johnson has gone missing. He was due to open the winter gardens at Battersea Park 10 minutes ago. The steel band is playing; local dignitaries, members of the public, dachshunds and chihuahuas are standing waiting for the mayor of London, and there is no sign of him.

"Where's Boris gone?" panics Rosie Boycott, food tsar to the mayor, former national newspaper editor and co-founder of Spare Rib. "I saw him heading off to the playground."

"Don't worry," says Sarah, his publicist and nanny. "He's not lost, he's just prepping."

A couple of minutes later, Johnson emerges – crumpled grey anorak, crumpled black suit, crumpled blue shirt, pink cheeks, red tie, hair carefully dishevelled. At times, it looks as though there's a four-year-old running London.

"Yes, good morning," he says, glancing at the gathered few. "Huge crowd! Splendid! Yes… Good!"

Johnson, journalist and TV personality, has been mayor for three years now and is already on the campaign trail for 2012, where the same old battle will be fought with the same old protagonists over the same old issues. Boris v Ken, Tory v Labour, both claiming they will protect London's transport, housing and policing, both promising to embrace big business when necessary, both flying the flag for the Olympics.

It's a job that carries increasing powers, with huge status attached. When Johnson triumphed in 2008, it was almost a referendum on the popularity of the Labour party – Johnson beat Livingstone by 8%, while on the same day in local council elections in England and Wales, Labour suffered its worst results in 40 years, trailing the Tories by 20%. In 2012, the mayoral election may well be a referendum on the popularity of the coalition.

The 2008 election was remarkable for another reason – despite the fact that Johnson is a political beast, he won as a personality; not because of his political commentary for the Daily Telegraph, nor his stint as a Tory MP, but because he was Bojo the buffoon, the joker who made us giggle on Have I Got News For You, the maverick who gloried in saying the unsayable (remember his references to piccaninnies or his suggestion that Liverpudlians were self-pitying victims), the toff who quoted the classics and seemed to model himself partly on Just William, partly on Bertie Wooster. It wasn't so much a victory for Conservative politics as for standup comedy. The pundits reckoned the mayoralty would be the making or breaking of him – he'd either grow up or get booted out.

Today, Johnson stands on a bench to make his speech. As he gets up, you expect him to topple off. There's famous footage of him wading into a river and falling over. He gets up, dabs away the water and continues with his interview. A similar fall did for Neil Kinnock, but somehow it boosted Boris.

"Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you so much. What a pleasure to be here on this admittedly slightly parchingly cold morning in the presence of so many distinguished people, above all my former mentor, the serjeant at arms at the House of Commons." It's textbook Johnson. The man he's talking about was not the serjeant at arms, he was one of the deputies, but it's enough to give Johnson a riff, and he's off. "I'm delighted to see him because he reminds me of the first and last offence I committed in the House of Commons, when I misused an envelope. I was rightly corrected on that point. So I treat all House of Commons envelopes with great respect… and I do turn up at the opening of an envelope, of course, and I'm particularly pleased to turn up at the opening of this fantastic super new garden."

Everybody laughs. It's not so much what he says, it's how he says it – the actorly emphases, the pauses, the sense of the ridiculous.

"As I was cycling on my way here this morning, I saw what an amazing thing London is. And I thought the city is the perfect place for human beings to congregate. It is an unromantic but true fact that the city is the best place to exchange ideas, it is the best place for economic activity. People in cities live longer than people who live in the countryside; they do. They are better educated. I am afraid it's true. They are better fed, and there are many more opportunities for reproduction in the city than there are in the countryside, it is absolutely true." The more the anti-rural riff builds, the more the crowd love him.

Then he gets on to the serious bit – the need for green spaces. "We are dislocated, deracinated from our arable roots as hunter-gatherers, aren't we? We feel it in our soul, and that's why we yearn to create green space in the city, and that's why I congratulate everybody on what they have done. Well done, friends of the Olympic Park." Another wave of laughter. He pauses, milking the hilarity of his cockup. "Not the Olympic Park, Battersea Park. Sorry, misreading my handwriting here. Well done, friends of Battersea Park."

After the opening, he's quizzed about green issues. How are we are going to make London environmentally sound? "I'd urge every business to put in insulation," he says. "One thing I don't want London to be lagging in is lagging." He is asked about the four Rs he recently came up with. "Yes," he says. "Reduce, Recycle, I can't remember the others. Ah yes, Re-use. And…" He comes to a stop. Ramble, I suggest. "Yes, Ramble." He laughs. "No, not Ramble." But he can't remember the fourth.

The press dealt with, Johnson gets on his bike and rides into the distance, leaving behind the amused, elderly crowd, and his people to pick up the pieces. Apologies go out to the woman who was sent to pick him up from the railway station – Johnson decided to cycle at the last second and didn't tell his office. "Silly sod," she says. "I'd had the car vacuumed, specially."

At 6pm Johnson is due to unveil a set of giant Olympic rings at St Pancras station. By 6.20, he hasn't appeared. One hard-bitten hack tells me I'll still be waiting at 9pm. "He's always bloody late; probably getting a shag or two in."

Johnson has four children with his second wife, Marina. He also has a reputation as a ladies' man. In 2004, he was sacked as a frontbench spokesman by Michael Howard for lying about a four-year affair with Petronella Wyatt. In 2009, he was caught in a paternity row after it was suggested he was the father of socialite Helen Macintyre's baby. On the birth certificate she declined to identify the father.

A few minutes later, Johnson rides up, oblivious to the fact that, yet again, he has driven his team to distraction. "Ladies and gentlemen, it's fantastic to see so many of you here on this momentous 512th day to go until the 2012 London Olympics…" He talks about preparations for the games, including the "look and feel". "People sometimes say, what is the 'look and feel'? Is it the thing that comes after stop and search? And I say no, look and feel is all the things we are going to do to beautify and distinguish our great city in time for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. And how appropriate that the first great symbol is going to be here, in St Pancras International, so the first thing anyone sees when they arrive on the Eurostar is a tactful reminder to our French friends that London won the right to host the games in 2012."

Getting one over on the French is a recurrent theme in his speeches, and feels like a throwback to a Little England of the mid-20th century. It's hard to imagine any other mainstream politician getting away with it or to whom it is meant to appeal.

What is Johnson's big idea? Livingstone had the congestion charge, Oyster card and London living wage. Out on the road, Johnson takes credit for a number of projects (Crossrail, the tube extension and the Freedom Pass for older people), but they all go back to Livingstone. He also, understandably, claims ownership of London's bike-hire scheme – after all, the bikes are known as Boris bikes, even if they were originally Ken's idea as well.

The projects for which Johnson is responsible tend to have a back-to-the-future feeling – two months after coming to power, he scrapped the proposed £25 congestion charge on "gas-guzzlers" entering central London; last May, he unveiled his new-look Routemaster; he abolished the western congestion zone charge as a "Christmas present" to the Knightsbridge and Notting Hill set. His first policy announcement was to ban alcohol on tubes and buses – a surprisingly authoritarian stance for such a proud libertarian. But, like Livingstone, Johnson's politics have always been more of a pick and mix than he likes to profess. Perhaps his great achievement is to have survived.

Over the years, Johnson has spawned an industry of commentators – many of them based at the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that still employs him to write a weekly column for £250,000 a year (a sum he dismissed as chicken feed when asked about a conflict of interest). His biographer, Andrew Gimson, a fan, portrays him as a mendacious, lazy slob, documenting how he lied about supporting the then fashionable SDP to win the presidency of the Oxford Union and how, when he left his job as the Telegraph's Brussels correspondent, a colleague parodied Belloc's Matilda: "Boris told such dreadful lies/It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes..."

Admirers and detractors make similar points about Johnson before reaching very different conclusions. The former Telegraph editor Charles Moore has talked about his infuriating deadline surfing – sometimes Moore would ring at 5.30pm to ask where his copy was for the next day's paper and Johnson hadn't even decided what to write about. Occasionally, Moore would pull his column just to teach him a lesson. But, ultimately, he told The Week In Politics in 2008, it was worth putting up with Johnson's many faults. "He knew he could get away with it because, again, it's the genius… He does not think along conventional tramlines and, in a funny way, he does have the interests of ordinary people at heart, by which I mean he has a completely non-bureaucratic, non-party way of looking at things." Moore was convinced that Johnson was maturing; that he'd realised the time had come "when you stop being Prince Hal and you become the king. He believes you can do that without sacrificing, if you like, the true Boris."

Meanwhile, his colleague Simon Heffer could not have been more scathing. Johnson, he said, was an act, not a politician; that he suffered from "a blinding lack of attention to detail". Heffer continued: "Mr Johnson is the most ambitious person I have ever met. That ought to be a commendation for high office, since ambitious people normally understand they will go further only by doing their present job well. Mr Johnson's scattergun approach to life will not allow this," he wrote on the eve of the mayoral election, concluding that a Johnson victory would be "yet one more chapter in an epic of charlatanry".

Another day, another speech. This time, we meet at GLA's headquarters. On the top floor, looking out over the capital's great sights, Johnson is addressing the leaders of London's voluntary sector. "I've heard some cynicism about the 'big society', about it being an anti-obesity campaign, but I want to be absolutely clear about how I see the role of government and the voluntary sector." He talks about a return to Victorian values, "when people thought nothing of funding libraries and hospitals and orphanages and schools and heaven knows what". He says he'd like to see more volunteers working with uniformed youth groups ("The Scouts and all that kind of thing. Some people think they are old-fashioned. Kids love 'em"), before finishing off with a bit of French bashing. "If you want evidence that the village spirit is still there, in London after nine months of the bike-hire scheme, we have had only 10 of these bicycles stolen and I think this is a fantastic tribute to either the impossibility of stealing these bikes or, as I prefer to think, the huge number of police you now see on the streets of London to apprehend the thieves." This time the laughter is ironic – even his most loyal supporters know the number of police is likely to fall post-election. "But I think it's a tribute to the spirit of trust and people's understanding that these bikes are there as a communal resource. And I'd like to point out – and this is in no way a chauvinistic point, but there is a rival European city I won't embarrass by mentioning by name, except to say it's the capital of France, where they have a similar scheme and in an identical period they had 1,700 bikes stolen by the light-fingered people of Paris."

As ever, people enjoy the shtick, however sceptical they are of the big society. Straight after the talk, we meet in his office. There are pictures of his children on the wall, a Boris bike standing proud in the middle of the room and Boris himself sat at his desk surrounded by shorthand-taking minders. He has been happy for me to follow him around, but is less so to be interviewed, and the change in mood is obvious. The delivery is more measured. The excessive politeness now carries a hint of impatience and suspicion. "I want to rattle through this because I've got to give more speeches. You must have yards of copy."

Your talk to the voluntary sector sounded in tune with David Cameron's big society, I say. It's the perfect opportunity for Johnson to say something supportive about the prime minister, but as usual he declines. In the four talks I hear him give, he never mentions Cameron. Johnson is canny – if he's to stand any chance of re-election, he knows he cannot afford to be tarred by an unpopular Tory party. He ums and ahs, and sieves out grains of difference in their vision of volunteerism. "Well, what we're doing is something specific for London, which is an initiative to mobilise all the energy of the Olympics."

When Cameron announced a cap on housing benefits in London, Johnson said it could lead to a "Kosovo-style social cleansing". Was it easier for him as mayor under a Labour government? Another pause. "Look, the simple answer is I want more money for London." But the coalition prides itself on its incisive cutting? "Mistake number one would be to forget you need to support enterprise and wealth creation. But an even bigger mistake would be to forget the government and the state need to be there to support the economy. And that means investing in infrastructure and making sure people can move around and live near their place of work and that the gap between rich and poor doesn't get any wider – because it has got wider in the last 20 years." At times, it's hard to believe this is the former Conservative MP for Henley speaking.

"I have no hesitation in taking the fight to the coalition if I think they are short-changing London, and frankly there are some things where they need to think very carefully."

A couple of years ago, he was asked how he thought he was doing as mayor and scored himself 6.5 out of 10. What about now? "I'm scoring myself a bit higher these days. What I would say is I'm doing surprisingly well." Why surprisingly? "A lot of people were sceptical of the basic proposition of putting someone with not much experience of municipal politics to run the greatest city on Earth, and someone who was identified with writing articles and appearing on telly, rather than being the helmsman of London."

 What was Johnson like at school? A leader? 'I did find myself leading things. If there was a team, I’d tend to be captain.’ Johnson is pictured in 1986, when he was president of the Oxford Union Society. Photograph: Corbis What were his own doubts about himself? For once, he's silent. "I'm not very big on self-doubt…" The question almost panics him. "What was my biggest anxiety? God…" The seconds pass. "I don't want to sound as if I'm a monstrous zeppelin of self-confidence, because obviously one constantly worries that something is going to go wrong…"

But he is a monstrous zeppelin of self-confidence – he has to be to even think of comparing himself to one? "Hahahaha! I suppose I am. I suppose I am. But that doesn't mean I don't worry and I don't work very hard because I do."

What was he like at school? A leader? "I did tend to find myself leading things, yes. Yes, it's fair to say if there was a team, I'd tend to be captain. Do we have to go on about school?" This is an interview, I say – interviews cover a life. "I think we're going to avoid that subject. Yes, I think we're going to avoid that subject. Just because it will sound as if I'm obsessed with my school days, which I'm not."

Johnson steers you politely and gently away from subjects with which he does not wish to engage. And if that doesn't work, he steers you politely and not so gently. It makes sense that he doesn't want to talk about school. After all, Eton scholar Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson does not sound like London's man of the people. But his background is interesting and partly explains his hybrid politics. He has often talked about the positive influence of migrants in this country, and here he seems to be referring to his own family's experience as much as anything. His great-grandfather on his father's side was Turkish, a liberal journalist and senior minister murdered in that country's war of independence. His mother is the painter Charlotte Wahl, daughter of Sir James Fawcett, member of the European Commission of Human Rights. Johnson has described himself as a "one-man melting pot", with a sprinkling of Muslim, Jew, Christian, Turk and German. He was born in New York City and educated at the European school in Brussels, before going on to Eton and studying classics at Oxford.

I ask whether he regards himself as controlling. Typically, he takes it as a huge philosophical question. "Do you mean am I power-obsessed? Do I want to know what everybody's doing all the time?"

Yes, I say, but equally does he always dictate the way a conversation will go?

"I don't want to be disobliging and I have a healthy respect and admiration for our trade, and I know were I to say something even fractionally interesting about that aspect of my life, the risk is it would simply displace something that I think is more interesting about what I'm doing now." When he wants, Johnson can play cautious, pragmatic politics as well as anybody.

"Now, controlling… There are two ways of looking at it. Philosophically and politically, I want to give people as much freedom as possible. I don't like an administration that is too coercive, too bullying. I want to be enabling, inspiring, encouraging, but I don't want to be flagellatory or punishing, and so those are some of the ways in which we try to approach some of the transport issues, and certainly I don't want to be too authoritarian in policing. I want to make sure we have a system of trust between the public and the police." He pauses. "I'm trying to answer your question – your compendious question – and I'm limping slowly through the foothills."

He has a fabulous facility with language, somehow managing to praise and bury with the same word. "No, I'm approaching it the wrong way round. I've done the summit, and am in the foothills now. Am I a controlling kind of boss? Do you have every day the smack of firm government? Are people every day reeling from my abrupt barked orders as I move down the corridors cracking my sjambok." Cracking his what? "Or whatever – riding crop, then. The answer is no, not really, but I think I've got a very good team. A lot of them have their own identities politically. I'm keen to support that, and together I think we're doing a lot of work."

"Even your supporters have suggested you have no eye for detail."

"I don't agree. I think actually I do have an eye for detail. It's all a question of energy. If you're interested in getting something done, by God you focus on the detail, and you get it done."

"People say that beneath the bumbling buffoon you are ruthless."

"Ruthless?" He sounds astonished. "Well… you've got to take some tough decisions."

What was the toughest? "Well, I thought long and hard before having a conversation with the former police commissioner. I still pay tribute to a lot of the things he did… that wasn't easy."

Sir Ian Blair, routinely referred to as "New Labour's favourite cop", was forced out by Johnson in October 2008, and Johnson announced he would chair the Metropolitan Police Authority. Barely a year later, he stood down, saying he didn't have the time for it (critics suggested it might have been wiser to give up his Telegraph column). It does appear to be one of the big lessons he has learned – to delegate the major policy areas (transport, housing and policing) to experts, leaving him time to cycle in public, joke about the French and shine as London's frontman.

Early on in his administration, rarely a week passed without the resignation of a deputy mayor. He says his worst day in office was when Ray Lewis, a deputy with responsibility for young people, had to quit after it emerged he had falsely claimed on his CV that he had been a magistrate. "I really regretted it because he is a man with a fantastic amount to offer and I felt we should have handled it better… I could have protected him better."

He could have saved him? "Yeah. If I'd thought about it. But one of the things I'm most pleased about is that he's back doing great things. So you do learn. It's about endurance. Do you remember Odysseus – he smites his shaggy breast and says, 'Tetlathi de, kradie: kai kunteron allo potetles…' The great thing about doing the job for three years is you start to get some perspective. I now see all these disasters are temporary, you can move on."

But hasn't that been the story of his career – fouling up, apologising, surviving, triumphing, fouling up, apologising… "Well, you might as well say that's the history of the human race," he says loudly and not altogether agreeably. "That's our species. You're doing me too much honour."

In his three years as mayor, Johnson has also been accused of chronic cronyism. During the election campaign, the Evening Standard backed him while conducting a smear campaign against Livingstone. Last year he appointed the former Standard editor, Veronica Wadley, as London chair of the Arts Council after her appointment was initially blocked by then culture secretary Ben Bradshaw amid allegations that the process had not been transparent. Does he regret that? "I think that was unfair on Veronica. She really knows her onions. They weren't interested in getting Veronica, they were interested in getting me."

Was he wrong to campaign so hard for her? "The only thing we got wrong was that we were too punctilious… I mean, my predecessor, my illustrious predecessor, he just used to put people into this, do that…"

Another controversial appointment was that of Helen Macintyre as unpaid fundraising adviser to the Olympics, despite the fact that she and Johnson were rumoured to be having an affair. After Johnson found himself at the centre of a paternity row over her baby daughter, Macintyre's former long-term partner, the financier Pierre Rolin (whom she had persuaded to contribute £80,000 to the Olympic Park), described Johnson as a man with "no moral compass".

Some say that Johnson's libertarianism is little more than justification for his personal lifestyle – laissez-faire on public affairs, laissez-faire on private affairs. I ask what his ideal woman is. He waves his hands in the air, flabbergasted. "Golly."

"Do you really want to waste your last question on this?" asks his publicist, Rebecca.

OK, what does he think women like about him? "You're asking all these hypothetical questions. You know what, Rebecca? There's almost no answer I can give that doesn't involve being impaled at the bottom of the elephant pit. No matter how clever you are in trying to answer a question like that, you end up skewered. So what do you do?" He looks at her for help.

OK, what does the public like about him? "Well, what I hope they like is that they have a safer city, lower taxes from City Hall, a neo-Victorian age of transport investment and that London is poised to be the most exciting place in western Europe."

The big question, and one that probably torments David Cameron, is what happens if Johnson loses to Livingstone. The first thing he is likely to do is find himself a safe Tory seat. One Conservative MP tells me: "He'd be a very serious rival to Cameron. He is an explicit future leadership candidate." Why do Cameron and Johnson hate each other? "It goes back to Eton," the former minister says. "Boris doesn't have respect for his intellect, and I think David knows that. And there's nothing that breeds hatred so much as knowing you are despised."

I ask Johnson if he thinks about what would have happened if he'd stood against Cameron for the leadership of the Conservatives. "Well, this is one of those brilliant ideas that is dangled in front of me… all politicians are fed by their mad vanity and suffer from the necessary delusion that they can rise further up the greasy pole. I think there are two things going on. One, it is fun to see if you can make sure people are ambitious and then to watch them fail. But the other is that it's right that there should be a great group of people who are endlessly trying, like wasps in a jam jar, to be the survivor… because what politicians are doing is competing."

Would he like to be prime minister? "I think I've got as much chance as being decapitated by an asteroid." You never know, I say. "OK, I've got as much chance as being decapitated by an asteroid which bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mona Lisa! Look, I am unbelievably proud to be mayor of London. I have got further than I thought I would, is the truth."

I don't believe him, I say. Didn't he once say he wanted to rule the universe, and if that couldn't happen he'd settle for PM? He giggles. "This is what my sister alleges I said in a private conversation that took place when she was nine and I was 10."

"But you did expect to master the universe?"

"Hehehe. No, no, no, well, I can't win this rally…"

Look me in the eye, I say, and tell me you never thought you'd lead this country.

And he does look me in the eye. "Have I ever thought that I would? OK, I can absolutely look you in the eye and say I have never for one minute thought that I would definitely lead this country."

What does he get out of politics beyond power? "I'll tell you what. I love making things happen. What I loved doing as a child with my brother, we'd go outside and build villages in the mud, and you know when you're under 11 your imagination allows you to take immense creative satisfaction from almost anything you produce. I suppose that's what's so joyful about being mayor – that there are days you can do things that people like and enjoy. So when I see the bicycles flowing around, I have a deep prepubescent sense of creativity."

We've moved to committee room five, where the photographer has created a cardboard mock-up of London. Johnson is in his element. "Have you built this? God, it's fantastic. What is this? It's St Paul's. What's this toast rack thing? Oh, it is the Toast Rack." The photographer asks if he'll hover over his lilliputian London. "I now realise that my ill-advised line about a prepubescent sense of creativity is going to be…" He trails off.

Johnson's mood throughout the interview has swung between loud enthusiasm and surly defensiveness. I tell him I have an important question to ask, one he might not like.

"If you had handled your private life differently," I start to say. And already his hands are flapping wildly in the air. "Naaaah, no, no."

"Well, you might as well listen to the question before refusing to answer it," I say.

"Go on, go on, yes."

"You were fired as a shadow minister for lying about an affair with Petronella Wyatt…"

"Yesyesyesyesyes," he says in fly-swatting mode.

"No, it's a serious question. If you had handled your private life differently, would your political career have worked out differently?"

"Yes, I understand why you have to ask it, Simon, and I think the answer is almost certainly no." And with that he marches off, without so much as a handshake, and I'm left abandoned in a distinctly chilly committee room five. The Guardian