The Candidates & The Gay Vote

Johann Hari meets Boris:

"The jokes – genuinely funny, which is almost unprecedented in politics – tumble out. I ask him if Eton in his day was a hot-bed of sodomy. 'To a degree I find personally insulting,' he says, 'it wasn’t really like that for me.' I ask him if he agrees with a Ken Livingstone line from the early 1980s, that we are all potentially bisexual. 'Oh, I am a polymorphous pervert,' he replies. But when we get onto the issues, I get worried. I ask him why he supported Section 28, the notorious legislation that banned teachers from “promoting” homosexuality – and it quickly becomes clear he doesn’t actually know what it was."

And then:

"The contrast with Ken Livingstone is startling...I pepper him with questions about very specific issues affecting gay Londoners, he always responds – without notes – with a battery of statistics and facts. I ask about the rise in HIV infections among gay men, and he knows the figures off the top of his head...He knows the names of STD clinics all over London, and I don’t think it’s because he’s coming down with ghonnorhea: he offers this level of detail on every question I ask."

When I say that Livingstone is plumbed in to London in a way Johnson will never be, this is the sort of thing I mean. And, significantly, he rows back a bit on Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Now read on.