Boris Johnson’s comments on his LBC phone-in show (“Ask Boris”) this morning are being reported as him ruling himself out of standing for parliament in 2015. Asked by presenter Nick Ferrari whether he was preparing to return to the Commons (following the Times’s story on Saturday), he said:
As I’ve never tired of telling you in the past 18 months, I’m going to get on with my job as Mayor of London.
Think of the joy of being Mayor of London. Do you know the things we’re doing?
Let me tell you about something we’ve been doing. They’ve been working for months in Hammersmith and Fulham on plans to take that flyover and make it a flyunder. We’ve been listening to these plans for months, thinking it’s never going to happen.
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But actually, it is brilliant. It’s a most fantastic scheme. We’re going to tunnelise the flyover. The timescale will be in three or four years. What was so interesting was that even the hardened TfL engineers looked at this, having been pretty skeptical, and they thought it was a great scheme.
“If you’ve got that kind of scheme on your agenda, the daily excitement of helping to run the greatest city on Earth, why would you want to do anything else?
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Then asked if he was “not going into the Commons prior to 2015 because of the excitement of the Hammersmith flyunder?”, he replied: “Correct. The sheer excitement of the Hammersmith flyunder is…the answer is I’m sticking to my job that I was elected to do in 2012.”
It is this response that has prompted the headlines stating he will not stand as an MP in 2015. But the question, as you will have noticed, was on whether he would seek to enter the Commons before 2015 (through a by-election), not whether he would do so at that year’s general election.
As for Boris’s assertion that he’s sticking to his job, there is nothing to stop him becoming an MP and continuing to serve as mayor. Indeed, there is a precedent. As he will know, after the 2000 mayoral election, Ken Livingstone remained the MP for Brent East until 2001.
One senior Conservative told the Independent last year:
He could not wear two hats for a long period but doing it for 12 months would not cause a great controversy. Tory associations in London and the Home Counties would queue up to have him as their candidate. He would say he was representing London in Parliament for a year.
For now, the mayor is wisely keeping all options open.