BORIS JOHNSON'S lovable maverick schtick has been to dissemble himself beneath a mantle of suet, to pretend to inarticulacy, to oik about as the People's Primate, to wear a 10-year-old's hairdo, to laugh it off — no matter what it is, no matter how grave it may be — and to display charm learnt at a charm school with duff tutors.
This construct is going on threadbare. If one devotes such energy to a simulacrum of oafishness one becomes an oaf. The creature that his panto act was intended to occlude is evident in photographs of over 30 years ago when he still had cheekbones. In those days, the young apprentice liar was only a rapier scar short of the full Heydrich. The supercilious confidence, the hubris, the arrogance of the entitled and the languid bully's hardly suppressed cruelty are deafeningly manifest.

George Orwell was perhaps wrong. Johnson is now a spectacularly immature 53-year-old who doesn't have the face he deserves. Rather, he has the face he has struggled to create, a mask to gull the gullible Little Ingerlanders whose xenophobic legions — think, if you can bear to, of a million Andrea Leadsoms mated with a million beer-bellied fans — are as ever-swelling as their idol.
They feel no shame at belonging to the same species as the creature, no embarrassment. He doesn't make them wince. They applaud his blustering idiocies, his boorishness, his antinomian exceptionalism, his carelessness, his borderline criminality, his incontinent mendacity — a habit which, decades on, he has yet to stem.
And his despoliation of London during eight years of insouciant irresponsibility has, until lately, provoked astonishingly little concerted antipathy outside the milieu of urbanism conference delegates, infrastructural consultants, public-space gurus, despised planners who know their job and megalopolitan studies majors.
These people, no matter how distinguished and how clued up, were impotent in the face of an elected absolutist who listened to no-one and would be in chokey for life were pig ignorance a crime.
It's all very well spitefully damaging restaurants with your fellow sawdust caesars of the Bullingdon for loutish self-gratification. Spitefully damaging one of the great cities of the world, rendering it formerly great, for loutish self-gratification is a rather different matter.
This was the mayor who shat laissez-faire on London, who marked his territory with heavy loads of foetid bling, whose faecal legacy it will take decades to clear. Unhappily the second-hand water cannon — Wasserwerfer 9000s — which Johnson, evidently in Mayor Daley mood and too indolent to check their legality, bought from some smoothie on a back lot in Chemnitz, have been sold on. They weren't legal. The then Home Secretary Theresa May said so.

Johnson's was not normal autocratic behaviour. In 1977, Jacques Chirac was elected the first Mayor of Paris in a century. His predecessor was Jules Ferry, who used his position to undermine the president, the amusingly pompous Valery Giscard d'Estaing from whose cabinet he had resigned. So Chirac sacked Ricardo Bofill, whom Giscard had chosen by means of a rigged competition to rebuild Les Halles — which ought not to have been demolished in the first place.
Chirac denigrated Bofill's design as "Greco-Egyptian with Buddhist tendencies" and after that mouthful declared: "L'architecte...c'est moi." And preposterous as it may sound he was, insofar that he meddled and “advised” and censored the designs of Jean Willerval, whom he brought in to replace Bofill.
Willerval was an accomplished brutalist who was ill at ease with the tepid postmodernism that Chirac prescribed. His “umbrellas” would last less than three decades. Meanwhile Giscard d'Estaing was promoting the Gare d'Orsay as a counter to the Beaubourg, a project which he had wished to cancel when he was elected president. But once it was renamed the Pompidou Centre his hands were tied in enforced respect for his dead predecessor.