Brought low by Boris?

On Tuesday, the blonde will be back. Boris Johnson, former bon viveur and Henley MP, now super-serious mayor of London, will return to the House of Commons to be grilled by the home affairs committee about policing in the 21st century.

Two months into his coveted job, Johnson has problems. They start with his staff. Ray Lewis turned instantly from a shining asset to a political liability when allegations of financial impropriety (among other things) prompted his resignation. A few weeks earlier, James McGrath, Johnson’s brusque chief political adviser, was sacked after making a comment construed as racist.  

Far more serious for Londoners is their city’s knife crime epidemic; a problem that has resolutely failed to ease since Johnson became mayor. With the number of teenage deaths from knife attacks rising weekly, Johnson came under fire from sections of the press for advising people not to intervene if they saw an assault taking place.

The crime problems he currently faces may have brought home to Johnson how limited his role can be. In the run-up to May’s election each mayoral candidate made grand statements about the impact they would have on cutting crime. But the mayor’s powers in this area are far from sweeping. It is difficult for a new mayor, particularly one without a background in policing or home affairs, to make an impact in a short space of time. Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford, recently emphasised that the London mayor’s role was largely a totemic one. Johnson may be learning this the hard way.

How are Johnson’s travails impacting on life in Westminster, where David Cameron is trying to present himself and his colleagues as a government in waiting? 

They are undoubtedly inconvenient. Lewis’s succesful youth projects represented the sort of ‘tough love’ approach to Britain’s miscreant youth heralded by Iain Duncan Smith and praised by Cameron. Lewis’s programme in East London embodied the approach Conservatives favour to juvenile delinquency in two respects: it involved a non-state body, and a disciplinarian ethic. His fall has tarnished that project and embarrassed those who had so lavishly praised him.

The McGrath sacking is indicative of the Conservative hierarchy’s mindset at present. Conservative blogs fizzed with fury at his dismissal. They claimed that McGrath’s comment was blunt, but not racist, and lambasted Johnson for bowing to political correctness. But in the current climate, standing by McGrath and helping him fight his corner was never an option. Cameron is too terrified of the ghosts of Tory past – sleaze and intolerance – rising up to drag him down, to take such a course.

Both the mayor and the leader of the opposition would balk at the idea that Johnson’s regime is some kind of prototype for a Tory government. But if Johnson struggles, Labour will increasingly try to link Cameron with the mayor. For Labour the next election campaign will be about scare tactics - an inversion of John Major’s campaign in 1992. Labour will try to ‘recontaminate’ the Tory brand by resurrecting in the mind of the public those old ghosts that haunt David Cameron. In the process, any gaffes, sleaze or policy failures that emerge from City Hall will be seized upon with gusto.

But London isn’t Britain, and Johnson isn’t Cameron. Boris’s problems will have to get far more severe before they push back the rising blue tide in the polls.