Boris johnson

Boris Johnson is difficult to pigeonhole, but at Tory conferences he seems to be taking the role of counsellor-in-chief, cheering up party activists with a slew of jokes and slights on other ambitious colleagues or indeed his party leader. As ever, there were two huge queues outside the auditorium this evening for his event on London, and some of the only truly sincere and excited-sounding applause when he (eventually) arrived. And there were jokes - 'Ukip if you want to - David Cameron's not for kipping. Not unless, obviously, he's at his sister-in-law's wedding' and the definition of 'Milipede' being some sort of left wing insect - that left them all guffawing.

Boris Johnson sure knows how to make the front pages. His interview in the latest FT Weekend Magazine — with the cover quote 'for the first time in years, I wished I was in Westminster' — is a prime example of his strategy. He wants to remain in the public consciousness without revealing anything new. He’s done it several times before, often in similar ways: 1. After a period of inactivity, give an interview which appears revelatory Boris flits in and out of the spotlight, particularly when he’s busy trying to run London. Then suddenly, he appears front and centre with 'news'. In the FT's interview, he says ‘during the whole Syria thing, for the first time in years, I wished I was in Parliament. I watched that and I thought ... I wished, I wished’.

Politics abhors a news vacuum. So with the government on holiday, attention shifts to the opposition. This is why oppositions normally have a whole series of summer stories ready to fill this vacuum. But, oddly, we have heard little from the Labour front bench in the last ten days or so. One consequence of this is that criticisms of Ed Miliband’s leadership by the Labour backbencher George Mudie are going to get more play than they normally would in tomorrow’s papers. There’ve been none of the attacks on a government that you would expect from the opposition in the penultimate summer before a general election. It is hard not to feel that Ed Miliband is being let down by a shadow Cabinet that isn’t being as energetic as it should be.

Boris Johnson will not stand for parliament at the next election, The Spectator understands. The Mayor of London has told the Cameron circle that he will not seek to return to the Commons in a pre-2015 by-election, nor will he stand at the general election. Boris's decision not to be a candidate in 2015 indicates that he expects Cameron still to be Prime Minister and party leader after the general election. He has told friends that he has no desire to spend three years serving under Cameron. He reasons that if Cameron loses, creating a Tory leadership vacancy, he'll be able to persuade an MP to rapidly stand aside for him. The news that Boris is not standing in 2015 will come as a relief to Cameron's allies.

Boris Johnson’s Telegraph columns are often works of mischief, but today’s is a carefully constructed piece of politics. His subject is immigration – about which the political nation has been warring over the weekend. Boris is, famously, pro-immigration – as one would have to be to win elections in London, irrespective of whether one was a Conservative. And his attitude to illegal immigration is pragmatic: illegals need to be brought into the fold or deported. Boris treads this line again today. First, he writes a paean to the runner Mo Farah – who personifies a ‘sermon as to what immigrants can achieve if they work hard’. Then he says that illegal immigrants cannot run for their country, for they live beyond society and outside the law.

Everyone in SW1, it seems, has an opinion on this controversial scheme. Most people hate it. The general assumption is that this is a Tory stunt clothed as a government policy. The question is, though, has the van campaign been a successful policy pilot from a presentational point of view? Here are some thoughts: 1). The right-wing press. The Mail is utterly contemptuous. A leading column claims that only one illegal immigrant has stepped forward. The leader goes on to say that voters punish cheap stunts; what people want is action. And if that wasn’t enough, the paper’s front page (below) is uncompromising. All of this will have gone down badly in the Home Office, which has a good story to tell about reducing net migration. 2). Disaffected voters.

You might have thought that being the scene of a tabloid sensation — and one concerning a national treasure — could have spelled a tricky period for Scott’s of Mayfair. Not a bit of it. My man with a corkscrew says that the place has been packed with Tories all week. They had Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith in for lunch on Monday, before Boris and Gove dined (after a fashion) that evening. No one was at anyone else's throat on either occasion. Joe Public does, though, have a wicked sense of humour. The terrace tables, the very spot where Nigella and Charles Saatchi’s marriage ended, are particularly sought-after at present.

‘Does anyone seriously doubt that this amazing scheme is actually going to go ahead?’ boomed Boris Johnson last week. ‘No is the answer!’ He was waxing rhetorical about the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, the fourth such scheme since the landmark hulk’s turbines were switched off in 1975. The Malaysian consortium behind this £8 million gamble are ignoring both the site’s troubled history and my own advice — which was to lose the shopping mall plans and start digging for minerals — by going for a full-blown residential-retail-office complex that’s a sure sign of economic optimism, underpinned by mayoral enthusiasm.

It’s the peak of the summer party season. Half a dozen events competed for the Westminster crowd last night. The bookies at Ladbrokes made themselves outsiders by holding their booze-up on a boat that cast off a tad too early in the evening. The Adam Smith Institute hosted a bash on the Thames, while a stuffy parliament office saw the Tory Awkward Squad raise a glass to David Davis. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Palace of Westminster, whisky cocktails flowed for the Ladies and Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s Loyal Press Corps, whose summer bash was sponsored by booze kings Diageo. In the quiet surroundings of Dean Yard, a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey, the wonks of Policy Exchange were joined by a Pimms-fuelled Boris Johnson.

It is interesting enough that Boris Johnson has attacked high-speed rail in today's Telegraph: the Mayor is undermining the priorities of the current government (while attacking Labour a little too), and reminding them that they are dithering on aviation policy. He warns that the project's costs will balloon to well over £70 billion. But the Mayor makes one very important comment about the government machine that should not go unnoticed. He writes: Talk to the big construction firms, and they will tell you the problem is not the cost of actually digging and tunnelling and putting in cables and tracks. Those are apparently roughly the same wherever you are in the world.

You remember the climax of Jaws — the primeval moment when Quint the crazed Ahab-like fisherman goes mano a mano with the monster of the deep? He comes to the rear of the listing boat and straps on a leather belt with a phallic protrusion: a metal receptacle into which he shoves the haft of his puny fishing rod. And you look at this terrifying mismatch between a man’s tackle and the might of nature, and you think, ‘How the hell is that going to work?’ Such were my feelings, amigos, on a blustery day in the Indian ocean when I realised I had a whopper on the line. ‘That is a big fish,’ said Paolo the skipper, and his eyes widened as my reel spun and the taut yellow filament shot out behind us.

Even Boris can't help the toxic Tories. That's the upshot of Lord Ashcroft's latest polling, which asked 8,000 people (including several focus groups outside of London) about what they think of the mayor. Although Boris Johnson is the country’s most loved politician, he is not the voters’, or even Conservatives’, top choice as prime minister. David Cameron remains the favourite at 33 per cent to Boris’ 29: Half of those polled said that if Johnson was leader of the Conservative party, it would 'make no difference' as to whether they were more or less likely to vote Conservative. This is a blow to the Cameron dissenters, who have always believed that Boris would encourage more people to vote Tory.

Boris Johnson's powers of persuasion have once again wooed George Osborne. In today's spending review, the Chancellor has put aside £2 million to investigate Crossrail 2 — a new underground line for London. The fact the Mayor was able to bag another win from Osborne — Crossrail 1 was protected from funding cuts in 2010 — is testament to the political power of both the Mayor and the capital. Boris doesn't even have re-election to think about this time. Crossrail 2 is key to Boris' London legacy.