I filed this at around 4.00 this afternoon. By 5.30 I was worrying it had been overtaken by events. There again, maybe it turned out to be a bit prescient...
Twice this week I’ve seen Boris Johnson devoid of jokes, Latinisms, ironic distance and all his other hallmark traits. In their place has been first sobriety then measured rage. The sobriety was on Wednesday when he was joined by Sir Ian Blair to talk about knife crime, which has now claimed its eighteenth teenage life of the year in London. The measured rage came yesterday, when he defended Ray Lewis, his deputy for youth, against allegations of misconduct following separate inquiries by The Guardian and Channel 4 News.
If there’s one policy area by which Mayor Johnson will be judged it his contribution to combating youth crime, both symptom and cause. Today, he announced that former Chief Inspector of Prisons Martin Narey, will conduct an inquiry into the complaints against Lewis. Johnson must be praying none are upheld.They made an odd, combative couple at a tense press conference yesterday, the celebrity Etonian and the school of hard knocks founder of Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, the Newham “respect school” that the Conservative Party has so tightly embraced. Yet the two have more in common than first appears. For all his reputation for indiscipline Johnson the other week gave vent to the plaintive traditionalist lament that children today are no longer punished when they do wrong and are deprived of the improving experience of failure.
Lewis’s philosophy is similarly infused with back-to-basics fervour. His Academy’s ethos smacks of a form of masculinism that takes as read the need to honour and maintain distinctions between the sexes and for manhood to be a state of continuous self-policing and assertion. I wouldn’t send a son of mine there, but I won’t need to. And given that taming brittle young male egos is Lewis’s business, maybe his approach begins the right place. Some, though, wonder where such approaches end. Do their benefits really last?
It might be interesting to argue the point with Lewis, but maybe not too fruitful. You sense that for him debates aren’t for sharing, only winning. “Have I made enemies over the years?” he declaimed at one point yesterday, “You bet I have. I say things that wind people up and rub them up the wrong way, and I hope I’m doing a good job today.”
OK, the pressure was on. But I didn’t warm to that little speech and I doubt I was alone. Whatever Narey’s inquiry concludes, I can’t help wondering how long Lewis will last in his new role. That’s not to doubt his determination but his capacity to adapt. He’s in a new environment and I don’t only mean the high stakes politics. City Hall is the home of a local authority that may be super-sized but has all the regular protocols of such bodies. This is not the society of doting or passive parishioners or of those of wayward boys and men whom it has been Lewis’s job, formerly as a junior grade prison governor and now as a youth leader, to bring to heel. He’s among metropolitan professionals now: self-possessed men and women who may have different ideas from his about how respect is won and shown.Johnson’s commitment to London’s young and their wellbeing is welcome and his loyalty to Lewis, plain to see. But recent days tempt me to think that for every hope I have that their chemistry might spark great things, I have a fear that it could all end in tears.
Still doing business here.
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