Boris Johnson’s enemies are hoping for a final snow-down
London woke to snow and people wondered whether this time Boris Johnson would show true grit. His enemies reckon there’s no business like snow business for catching him out. They trust he will be found wanting, as he was by the unexpected snowfall in February 2009, when the city ground to a halt. Many people treasure the belief that the Mayor of London is fundamentally incompetent, and are disconcerted to find that sometimes whole months go by without any real evidence that the Tories have, in the words of the immortal Polly Toynbee, ‘put up a clown to run a great global city’.
The snow reached Scotland and the north of England first. On Monday, when it had already been freezing in London for several days but snow was not yet falling, I contacted City Hall to ask: ‘Is London ready for the snow?’ Back came the gung-ho reply: ‘You bet,’ together with a reassuring picture of the 27,000-tonne London Strategic Salt Reserve, at Cortina Drive, Thames Avenue, Dagenham. All sorts of preparations had been put in place, including huge reserves of salt, and Transport for London issued an assurance that with ‘our fleet of 38 gritters and ten gritting quad bikes’, it was going to keep the key roads open, including, crucially, the access roads to bus stations.
On Monday night, when I cycled home, the streets of central London were already strewn with grit. By Tuesday morning the first snow was falling, but the buses were still running. My eight-year-old daughter, who catches a bus at 8.15 each morning, said the service was the same as normal. It is true that this snow did not present a supreme challenge, for much of it melted the moment it touched the ground. Even cycling was not in the slightest bit dangerous, though there seemed to be fewer cyclists about. The press was forced to lead its bad weather coverage with the story of a train that got stuck for two hours in Kent, and did not say a word about the many parts of the transport system which worked normally.
On Wednesday morning, it was a lot colder, and a further dusting of snow had fallen, but the buses were still running. But these are early days: like Russia, the British press has always been able to rely on Generals Janvier and Février. And it will only take one bad day to confirm the comforting stereotype that Boris cannot cope. A single snow shower could achieve what the Cameroons have so signally failed to do: it could show that far from being a prime minister in waiting, Boris is the kind of man you would not trust to make you a cup of tea.
Hence the extreme agitation with which the Mayor reacted on 3 February 2009, when Keith Vaz (Lab, Leicester East) declared with mock solicitude that Boris would not be able to appear as a witness before the Home Affairs select committee of MPs, because the Mayor had ‘more pressing matters’ to attend to, in the form of the snow which had fallen on London. Boris leapt on his bike, pedalled in eleven and a half minutes from City Hall to Westminster, declared to anyone who would listen that Mr Vaz was talking ‘epic bollocks’, and insisted on his right to appear before the committee, which was taking evidence on the arrest of Damian Green (Con, Ashford).
The previous morning, Monday 2 February, had been a disaster for Boris. Snow fell overnight and Transport for London decided ‘on the grounds of safety’ to shut down its entire fleet of buses after some of the vehicles began to slide around: it claimed that on Sunday evening there had been 30 bus-related accidents, and that because of inadequate gritting many of its vehicles could not get out of their garages. All but one tube line was shut down too. By the time Boris was informed of these pusillanimous decisions, some time after six on Monday morning, it was too late, and he was left struggling to defend an ultra-cautious policy which it would never have been his inclination to adopt.
For months Boris fought with the utmost vigour to clear his name. He swore down the phone at Mr Vaz, who he was quite sure was trying to ruin his reputation, and in April he threatened to walk out of a meeting of the Transport select committee, which he accused of ‘political bias’ and talking ‘complete tripe, nonsense, bollocks, nonsense’, when it ventured to question him about why the snow had brought London to a halt. The snow must go on, but so, Boris thinks, must he.