I spoke to Boris Johnson once. Kind of. I spoke at him instead of with him. He was being shown around the main media centre at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. As the then mayor of London he would accept the passing of the Olympic flag at the closing ceremony a few nights hence.
He was accompanied by a few of the International Olympic Committee’s public relations team as he looked in on the great unwashed in their working areas. Some English journalists were with him. It was a small entourage seeking some advice and guidelines for the 2012 Games.
Johnson wore that half-smile that provides him with the air of the harmless, gormless buffoon, his hands clasped behind his back as he walked, his head slightly bent forward, looking around.
I stopped. I wanted to ask him to do something for London. I wanted to ask him to make sure there was a decent bar for journalists in 2012. The media bar in Beijing was on a roof area just off the main media centre. It was pretty ordinary. A basic bar selling Tsingtao beer, some wine and spirits, with some chairs. It was okay, but, surely, London, the home of the pub, would create a special space for hacks to kick back.
“Make sure there is a decent bar for the media, Boris,” I shouted at him. He half-smiled a little more and waved briefly.
Johnson didn’t do it. The bar was ordinary. I should have known when he stood on the stage at the closing ceremony for the flag handover, his hands in his pockets, his jacket unbuttoned. He grabbed the flag and waved it like the fat kid who gets picked last for the team.
“I rolled my shoulders like Rocky and rehearsed the agenda again in my head,” he wrote for the Specator. “What could possibly go wrong? Take flag, get red circle out to left, wave four times, hand flag to flag bearer. Piece of cake. Just as I had it taped, just as I was in the zone, I became aware of a chap beaming and pointing at his midriff.”
The exposed tummy was a bit of a scandal among Chinese bloggers. They felt it was a sign of disrespect. Johnson thought it was particularly British and part of his “policy of openness, transparency and individual freedom. I reached instinctively for my middle button first, and then sought, ‘Sod it.’ ”
Johnson has been proclaimed as the man who delivered the Olympics to London by his backers in recent months, which has been questioned by the English media.
Tom Peck, a politics writer for The Independent, wrote in June: “Boris Johnson delivered the Olympics.” It is a line that is not so much creeping as shoehorning its way into the public debate over Britain’s next prime minister. It is one of Team Boris’s approved lines, when it sends ambitious Tory MPs into the TV and radio studios because Johnson is too conniving to appear himself …
“The question of who delivered the Olympics is also complicated. But none of its possible answers is Boris Johnson.”
The Olympics was run by a department of government. Johnson had no role in that government, but his team keep using the phrase to speak of a man who delivers.
My abiding memory of Johnson at the Olympics was that he got stuck on a zip line at Victoria Park. It should have been a grand moment for rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning, who had just won Britain’s first gold medal, but Johnson managed to hijack it for himself, grabbing two British flags to wave as he flew down the wire.
But it jammed, and he hung high in the air as onlookers snapped pictures as he hung like a “damp towel on a line”, as one person described it. It got extensive coverage across all media.
Johnson turned a moment of buffoonery into publicity for himself, another push for his image of the good old boy with the half smile, turn of phrase and bluster.
This week, he has discovered that the façade of the artful dodger does not carry weight as he attempts to lie his way through a process he does not understand, taking a country to a place he does not know and that does not exist.
He couldn’t organise a decent bar or wave a flag. How the hell is he going to run a country?
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