What a difference 18 months makes. Back then, as Boris Johnson campaigned to be mayor of London, the words most often used to describe the journalist-turned-novelist-turned-politician were buffoon, clown, oaf. This was a man who'd once joked, "Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW," who cheated on his wife with a woman named Petronella, who resembled, with his giant pink face and electroshock of yellow hair, a Muppet dragged half-asleep from bed.
Now, well into his first term, he's remarkably popular, winning over many of the critics who so loathed this posh Tory upstart. Perhaps every city gets the mayor that most resembles it, and if so, Boris and London were separated at birth - they're messy, overstuffed, jokey twins who are always the last to leave the party.
How has he managed this remarkable transformation? In short, he's made no major missteps and seems to have worn everyone down with his combination of self-deprecation and high spirits - a jester's cap can be a remarkably good disguise. So when he says, upon being asked if he would like to be the Prime Minister, "there's more chance of finding Elvis on Mars or my being reincarnated as an olive," you're too busy slapping your thigh to notice the unquenchable fire of ambition in his jolly little eyes. Every cab driver I've ever met says essentially the same thing: "I like Boris. 'E makes me larf."
His ability to co-opt his critics with a vaudevillian show is dazzling to behold. I went to hear him speak at a conference on recession and the arts, and he had a bunch of prickly, left-leaning arts administrators eating out of his hand, like he was the bureaucrat whisperer. The bankers were eating out of the other hand, quite a feat.
He was there trying to convince business to ignore the recession and invest in the arts, citing the de Medicis underwriting the Renaissance.
"And who were the de Medicis?" Boris asked. "Who were they?"
"Bankers," came a deadpan voice from the back. It was Simon Robey, head of Morgan Stanley UK, clearly resigned to playing Laurel to Boris's Hardy.
"That's right," the mayor bellowed, "they were bankers!"
Boris, formed by Eton and Oxford but equally shaped by the satirical BBC quiz show he occasionally hosted, understands that politics is performance in a bone-deep way (which separates him from Silvio Berlusconi, who understands it more in a boner-deep way). People say they want sincerity in their elected officials, but really what they crave is a bit of the old soft-shoe. So Boris appears on EastEnders , takes pratfalls into rivers on national television, and makes jokes at his own expense: Recently, having a picture taken in his office with a bunch of journalists (I was one of them), Boris noted that Nicolas Sarkozy always made sure in photos to be surrounded by people shorter than him. "From now on," paunchy Boris cried, "I shall only have my picture taken with very fat people!" It worked; we laughed, then ate out of his hand. It was a lesson my grandmother knew well ("you catch more flies with honey than vinegar") and one that Canadian politicians might wisely heed.
You may well be wondering: Does Boris spend all day tap-dancing across the city making children giggle and old ladies blush, or does he, you know, have any plans for Europe's great capital, the engine of its economic resurgence? Well, he's bringing back the popular old Routemaster buses and planning to air-condition the Underground. He's fighting for bankers' bonuses, and against the residents of the pig-rich boroughs of Chelsea and Kensington having to pay the traffic levy known as the "congestion charge." He has been a surprisingly strong defender of the arts, banging the drum for the economic impact of the West End, and implementing a plan where impoverished kids are given musical instruments to play.
Still, it's hard to pin him down when he's on a charm offensive. Conrad Black once called him "ineffably duplicitous" (that sound you hear may be the clink of the pot and the kettle becoming reacquainted). Indeed, some of his policies - like a dangerously backward-looking Euroskepticism - suggest that a Tory wolf lives inside the clown suit, and ate the genial buffoon long ago.
Any cartoon character is required to have outlandish adventures, and Boris is up for the job. This week, for example, the climate-change activist Franny Armstrong, director of the documentary The Age of Stupid, was walking through Camden at night when she was set on by three iron-bar wielding girls (they may have been as young as 12 - because really, if you're not cracking heads by 13 in London, you're going nowhere).
Armstrong called on a passing cyclist for help, and the man on the bike chased the girls away. The man on the bike? Boris, of course. Since the event, he's maintained an unnatural silence. But Armstrong, who campaigned for Boris's socialist predecessor, "Red Ken" Livingstone, has spoken up admiringly. "If you find yourself down a dark alleyway and in trouble," she said, " I think Boris would be of more use than Ken." The Cult of Boris has taken another brain.