Boris Johnson may be the New Routemaster of British foreign policy
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Version 0 of 1. The rise of Boris Johnson to become foreign secretary and the fall of the New Routemaster, the bespoke London bus he introduced to the capital’s streets, have some illuminating common themes. Both are tales of novelty and nostalgia, of risk and symbolism and of style over substance. Both demonstrate the staying power of a particular idea of Britain and Britishness that Johnson vividly personifies. Last week, Transport for London (TfL) announced that the last of the so-called conductors who work on six of the routes the New Routemaster serves, will be gone by September. They say this will save around £10m a year, contributing to the efficiency drive required by Johnson’s successor Sadiq Khan. It will also complete the erasing of a signature mark of the “Boris Bus”, the most emblematic policy he pursued in his eight years at City Hall. When Johnson first ran for mayor in 2008, his promise to commission a special bus that revived defining features of the original Routemaster was a conspicuous weapon in his battle to defeat the incumbent Ken Livingstone. “Red Ken” had done away with Routemasters and brought in articulated “bendy” buses. These were good at moving people around and popular with many passengers, but they offended traditionalists. Johnson depicted them as an alien contagion. His new bus, he claimed, would restore the glories of the old and combine it with the best of the new. And so it came to pass that the New Routemaster revived the original’s open rear platform, enabling passengers to once more board or disembark between stops. Johnson saw this feature as a political metaphor – a rebuke to health and safety nannying and a return to the freedoms of personal responsibility. The new style conductors would provide passenger assistance, even though in the age of one-person operation and the Oyster card their former primary function – collecting fares – had disappeared. At the same time, the New Routemaster would break new ground as the cleanest, greenest bus there was. This very Tory combination of throwback and innovation was captured in the New Routemaster’s Thomas Heatherwick design, a bold blend of pastiche and modernity. But that is the sole part of the “Boris Bus” manifesto still being honoured. Cleaner buses are becoming available off the peg. The open platform is being designed out. The faux conductors, already scarce, are to become extinct. Only the look of the New Routemaster survives from the 2008 prospectus. That will be around for quite a while. Before leaving City Hall, Johnson got Transport for London (TfL) to order a further 195 New Routemasters, which means 1000 of them will eventually operate on the capital’s streets. Under Johnson’s successor Sadiq Khan, TfL won’t be ordering any more, but neither will there be a cull of those already operating or in the pipeline. It could be ten years before the first New Routemasters are retired. They will proliferate in parallel with Johnson’s progress as the UK’s most public senior diplomat, a role for which many - not least in the foreign office, it seems - regard him as alarmingly unfit. Yet Johnson’s long, defiant history of giving offence to other countries is matched by his gusto as a conspicuous, gladhanding international salesman, touting the virtues of London overseas. The “Boris” persona, an unapologetic, comic throwback to an idealised Britishness of free-spirited independence and cheerful muddling through, can be deeply seductive, as his part in the Brexit campaign showed. If may be shallow, it may be maddening, it may be a triumph of illusion over achievement. It may be like the New Routemaster in many ways. But as a human vehicle of UK foreign policy, maybe that is all Theresa May wants it to be. Dave Hill is the author of Zac versus Sadiq: the fight to be London Mayor and is now writing a book about Boris Johnson’s time at City Hall. His previous coverage of the New Routemaster is archived here. |