Belated Boris Comment!

When students in Year 10 (14 and 15 years old, for those unfamiliar with our education staging system) ask you whether you've seen the Boris interview, you know that this politician is still a cut above the others.  There aren't many who could draw the interest of teenagers, but Boris is still there, making waves.  The Tories' famous politician "who reaches the parts others can't reach", yadda, yadda, yadda.

But this most recent interview was something of a disaster for him, and a success for the relaxed and humorous Labour leader Ed Miliband.  Who'd have thought - Ed just needed to sit on a sofa with Boris in order to look good.



The virtue of Boris is that he does indeed have a wide appeal as an individual, though not one that necessarily lifts his party.  He has also suggested that his politics might actually be a little broader, One Nation based even, than the average Tory politico.  The problem of Boris is that he doesn't really do detail, or precision, or seriousness.  All of this was in evidence in the Marr interview.  Imagine if this had been a meeting of two party leaders.  There's Ed Miliband, confident of his policy detail, relaxed enough to have a few pops at Boris about his and the Tory party's strategy chief Lynton Crosby.  And there's Boris Johnson, still using bluster to get his way through an interview, looking bemused when challenged on policy detail.

Not all of the critics of Boris' interview are as clearly opposed to his politics as this pretty fair-minded piece by politics.co.uk's Adam Bienkov.  But if sympathetic critics think that Sunday's Marr interview was a bit of  a car crash, they should remember that it wasn't the first.  Boris' integrity was well and truly skewered by Eddie Mair when he stood in for Marr once.  Mair was unimpressed by Boris' joker status - something Marr consistently tries to play to - and as a result produced one of the most lethal interviews the London Mayor has done.  There's a long way to go yet before he becomes Tory leader.