Is Mr Johnson "a nasty piece of work"?

Is Mr Johnson "a nasty piece of work"? Eddie Mair's comment surprises us because Mr Johnson presents a 'hail fellow well met' persona, but is Mr Mair correct?

Mr Johnson, like Mr Farage, had a privileged upbringing, studying at Eton then Oxford. He was president of the Oxford Union and a member of the Bullingdon Club. He is lazy, trying to do as little as he can get away with: "When I was about 16 I worked ferociously hard for two terms and laid the foundations for all future activity - I thereafter never really did any academic work." (His university tutor believes he could have achieved a First if he had worked.)

He is a philanderer, just as his father was. One of Boris Johnson's mistresses describes him as "a loner... who wants to be loved by the whole world", and believes that explains his ambition to be PM. She also says he lies to avoid trouble. Hardly something we want in a leader. And not only does he betray his wife but he betrays his friends.

Certainly Mr Johnson has proved himself a liar. He was fired from The Times for inventing a quote. He was dismissed from the Front Bench for lying to his party leader. He promised as part of his Mayoral manifesto not to close a single Underground ticket office then closed them all. He promised not to cut the London Fire Service while knowing he was going to fire 600 firefighters, close 10 stations and remove 27 fire engines (of even greater concern post-Grenfell). He promised the 'Boris bikes' (actually conceived of by his predecessor) would not need public funds then subsidised them to the tune of £11 million a year (the Paris scheme earns £13 million a year). He approved the Greenwich cable car (rejected by his predecessor on economic grounds) again promising no public funding would be needed - the cost to tax payers so far is £16 million. His 'New Bus for London' was to be paid for by industry but TfL ended up having to pay for development (£11 million) and the resulting buses are mobile saunas costing double what a regular bus costs - no one is buying any more of them, not even London. Not to mention his Orbit tower - £3 million to build and currently costing us half a million a year to maintain.

Fortunately the new Mayor, Sadiq Khan, managed to halt Mr Johnson's most expensive vanity project, the 'Garden Bridge', but only after £38 million of public funds had been spent on it (without a single stone laid). A project reeking of cronyism and lies, with costs undisclosed or worse: “The maintenance cost will not be borne by the public sector, I’ve made that clear,” was his public claim, “The mayor has agreed in principle to provide such a guarantee [for maintenance costs]" was what the sponsors were told. The project is now the subject of four official enquiries, looking at the suspect procurement process and where the money has gone and how it was spent so quickly. Given that the pair who selected the bid then took up senior positions at the firm that won, these are serious questions.

Mr Johnson is popularly associated with the London Olympic Games, though the successful bid was headed by his predecessor. Its legacy however was under Mr Johnson's control - whereupon promised affordable housing vanished and the athlete's village was sold off at a knock-down price. His claim that he built more affordable housing than his predecessor is entirely undermined by the fact that he redefined 'affordable' to mean up to 80% of the market rate, breaking the link with local incomes. So an 'affordable' house in Westminster would require an annual income of £109,000. He intervened in disputed housing schemes, allowing as few as 12% of the planned houses to be 'affordable' ones, even at the Boris rate, far far short of the 50% target, and accepting densities above his own guidelines. He even removed social rented housing from the London Plan.

He blusters and evades when interviewed, rarely giving a straight answer to any question. The most common description of him is 'a buffoon', and he even says of himself: "The inner buffoon has a way of emerging!". He regards his gaffes and inappropriate comments as humorous and forgivable, even joking he would have to add further nations to his "global itinerary of apology".

Nasty? Or pitiable? At any rate, not someone to be trusted with the UK's future.