News typically isn't made on a Sunday, so today's Boris interview has made much of the Twitterati quite excited. For those of you who don't know yet, Mayor of London Boris Johnson hasn't had the best of days today, after an interview with Eddie Mair on the Andrew Marr show. In the interview, Johnson inadvertently admits to forging a quote whilst working for The Times, colluding with a friend to have a rival journalist beaten up and failing to deny his goals to enter Downing Street. Subsequently, Mair referred to him as a 'nasty piece of work'- a far cry from the cuddly teddy bear pretty much everyone in London regards him as.
Plenty of pundits and bloggers have now predicted the end of Mr.Johnson. After all, he's basically admitted on live TV that he lacks integrity, is slimy and deceitful. How will he be able to communicate with anyone in London again? In fact, some have even suggested Johnson resigns after his traincrash of an interview.
Of course, anyone who knows Boris, will probably tell you that he'll survive. For no matter how much of an oath the Mayor of London may be, he's also tenacious, cunning and charming. Here are my reasons why the Johnson interview today has made less impact on him than you might think:
1. The AM show has on average about 2 million views each week, making it around 20% of the general audience share. This is compared to the 10.8 million average for Eastenders, and just under 3 million on an average Question Time Broadcast. And while the AM show has a higher viewing share than say, The Big Questions or the Andrew Neil Show, if you take into account the % of Londers who will watch it (probably less than 8% of this share) then it's a fairly modest amount. In fact, BARB shows that it wasn't even in the top 10 viewed this week.
2. Even when the Tories were receiving some of the worst polling stats, Johnson won 4% more preference votes than the Labour candidate, Ken Livingstone. Prior to the election, Johnson was voted the most popular politician ahead of national party rivals and mayoral contestants , and in all honesty, he'll probably be remembered more for the Olympics and the Boris bikes, than something he did at The Times more than a decade ago.
3. While a coherent dataset isn't available, this YouGov report from mid 2011 sees Johnson with over 50% approval rating. In 2012, Boris got 44% of the total vote share, increasing it by over a percentage from 2008. Ken Livingstone, whose popularity peaked in 2000, only recieved 39% (First preference votes. LM elections are done under the AV system). This is despite Boris being very Tory, in a city where Labour made big gains in the 2010 election.
4. I think it's probably common sense that Boris is unlikely to be elected Tory leader. Considering the Tories are well aware of their current crisis, and leaders being 'out of touch' Boris probably wouldn't pick up the nomination, or the PM role. After all, if British voters reacted to populism, Nick Clegg would probably be PM, with Nigel Farage as his deputy (lord forbid).
5.Anyone remember the Clinton/Lewinsky affair? Clinton's smooth talking and intelligence got him out of that pickle. And if Boris can pull of one of his renowned performances, he'll get rid of the whole issue before you can even say Lewinski.
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