By Sam Macrory - 17th May 2011
The outcome is obvious when Boris Johnson, playing the part of faux-naif to perfection, comes up against a committee rather too starry-eyed to focus.
At this morning's culture, media, and sport select committee, chairman John Whittingdale and his quartet of inquisitors played a willing audience to Boris at his – as cliché demands – blustering best.
For so perfected is Boris' act of appearing not to take himself seriously, a supposedly inquisitorial band of MPs seemed unable to take him seriously too.
Arriving with his familiar prop of a bicycle helmet, Boris ambled through his well-rehearsed answers on why the Olympic Games are good for London.
So far, so business-like. A few bored journalists slipped away.
Luckily someone mentioned the inconvenience of the mayoral elections, scheduled for a few weeks before the games.
A "formality", suggested Boris, before quite deliberately squirming his way through questions on whether Ken Livingstone, his Labour challenger for mayoralty, would be invited into pre-Games briefings.
"He never sat down with me" Boris grumbled. "I don’t remember being offered any briefing sessions."
The committee smiled at Boris' possibly mock-petulance. "I'll consider it," Boris relented. "I've got no objection to briefing anybody – time permitting."
Later on, when Therese Coffey, a Tory MP, returned to questions on Livingstone, chairman Whittingdale reminded her that he'd dealt with that particular area all ready.
Ask again, said Boris, admitting that he'd forgotten what he's said first time around.
When questions focused on the finer points of the Games themselves it was almost feet-on-the-table time.
"The frugality of the regime," bemoaned Boris, meant that he'd been forced to apply for tickets through the "peculiar" system like everyone else.
No "mayoral freebies" for clan Johnson either. So what had Boris applied for, asked Whittingdale, turning the screws.
We hoped for wiff-waff, or at least ladies beach volleyball, but the mayor wasn't saying: "A variety of events" suggested he couldn't quite remember.
The committee then reached its most fraught moment when it questioned whether the new Olympic swimming pools should be turned into a water-park after the Games.
Boris lurched his neck forward in mock-shock when told by Whittingdale that "a lot of people like flumes and slides", and may even prefer them to Olympic sized-swimming pools.
"Ah, well, it would be shame to turn it into an aqua-park, the type of which you and I have enjoyed," Boris replied, offering a hideous image of a speedo-ed Johnson and Whittingdale somersaulting into the deep end together.
"Have you ever been to Aqualud in Ostende?" Boris then asked the chairman, who looked rather taken by the mayor's excitable description of being a human "bolus" as you are "squashed through these intestinal tubes".
The committee looked on rapt, with Adrian Sanders joining in by singing the praises of his local Torbay waterpark. "You're making me jealous now," was the reply from the witness. Defenders of Olympic-sized swimming pools should be concerned.
A semblance of a testing question came from Jim Sheridan, a grumpy-looking Labour MP from Scotland, who wondered what use his constituents would get out of the metropolitan pool.
They're always welcome, Boris insisted, inviting "convoys" to visit.
"There'll find bags of water to swim in," he proudly declared.
Sheridan looked unamused at the paltry offering.
"Not bags. Pools", Boris corrected himself. "Er, lots of water."
With the merits of wave-machines and flumes put to rest, the pressing issue of whether the Olympic Torch relay would begin and end in London was raised by Tory Damian Collins.
Boris pointed out that it usually begins in Greece. "But will the first sighting of the Olympic Torch Flame be in London?" pressed Collins, grinning from ear to ear.
"I don't know when it will first be glimpsed," Boris merrily replied, a vague answer which left Collins and his colleagues looking satisfied.
For when this mayor is passing through, any answer laced with - in Boris-speak - lashings of lightheartedness will do.
But sometimes you can have too much fun, and Whittingdale called time well before the committee was scheduled to end.
For Boris Johnson, it was probably the most surprising thing he had heard all morning.
This select committee meeting had been more relaxing than anything the delights of Aqualud could offer.
Sam Macrory is political editor of The House Magazine.
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