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'Ab-dab-dab': Boris lost grip of his words and guppy-fished

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail
Updated: 15:26 EST, 6 September 2011

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Boris Johnson, ‘Mr Mayor’, was being quizzed about the London riots by the Home Affairs Committee. Some of us were abroad on holiday at the time of the early-August riots.

The advantage of that for a civilian is that one has an alibi and cannot be banged up for 30 years by the local Judge Jeffreys for being in proximity to looters.

The disadvantage of having been abroad, for a politician, is that it allows the scurvy media to convey an impression of neglect and privilege: ‘Mayor on £5,000 foreign jaunt while city burns!’

Fish out of water: London's mayor Boris Johnson arrives at Portcullis House for yesterday's meeting

Mayor Boris hated having to admit that he was in the Rocky Mountains, in a camper van, when the looters were torching Croydon.

More from Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail...

The Home Affairs Committee’s chairman, Keith Vaz (Lab, Leicester E), is these days impossibly grand. Yesterday’s meeting was attended by white-tied, tailcoated flunkeys. Endless police officers with bulletproof tabards were also hovering.

One of them indicated to me darkly that he was expectin’ trouble. Perhaps he thought Boris, who is notoriously not safe in taxis, might make a leap at Nicola Blackwood (Con, Oxford W).

Petite Miss Blackwood, an opera singer, defeated the Lib Dems’ Evan Harris at the last election. For that fine duty to British public life, she deserves our enduring gratitude.

The voice of Vaz kept interrupting MPs and witnesses, cutting in on them and saying ‘thank yew’ in a sarcastic manner, perhaps to indicate that his important time was not to be wasted.

Mr Johnson was determined to be boring.

He was in election mode, dropping his jowls so low they were almost resting on his chest. He used that breathy, staccato voice which is generally employed when he is under pressure.

Impossibly grand: Home Affairs Committee chairman Keith Vaz

‘Mr Ellis is going to probe you now,’ said Mr Vaz.

I say! That sounds painful! But it turned out that Mr Ellis (Con, Northampton N) merely had a couple of soft questions.

Once or twice, Mayor Johnson lost a grip on the next word and started to say ‘ab-dab-dab-dab’, guppy-fishing for time. Then the desired phrase would stray into range and Boris would leap on it, like a Canadian bear grabbing a fat salmon.

His eye gleamed with satisfaction to have made the catch and he licked his upper lip.

Did we learn much? He argued that London’s riots had been less destructive than those of Paris. He opposed (good for him) the introduction of rubber bullets and water cannon, considering them un-British.

Nor did he warm to the idea of that American, Bill Bratton, as next Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Quite right. We don’t want a top policeman who walks round in sunglasses. Himself seeking to play the tough guy, Boris asserted that ‘many more people are going to be arrested’ for their riotous excesses.

But Boris the Lazy Wet was evident, too, when he coughed up cliches about the importance of getting more ethnic minorities to join the police. Yawneroo. That won’t stop any future rioting.

Thrown: Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls was no match for his opposite number in the Commons

Stern discipline in classrooms, the withdrawal of benefits and the reintroduction of teaching the Ten Commandments at daily assembly: that’s how you could stop rioting. But I don’t suppose our liberal rulers will ever permit such a thing.

Next door, the Culture committee, which never seems to discuss high culture, was droning on again about ’phone hacking.

Tom Crone, a former lawyer for Rupert Murdoch’s News International, leaned back in his seat and coped languidly with the committee’s showboats. Mr Crone made Tom Watson (Lab, West Bromwich E) look obsessive.

In the Commons Chamber, the Chancellor, George Osborne, went a couple of rounds with his shadow, Ed Balls. Mr Osborne kept citing the words of Alistair Darling about how the Brown Government lacked ‘a credible economic policy’.

This threw Mr Balls. He started to meander all over the shop and a whiskered clerk had to prod Speaker Bercow into ruling that his chum Balls was out of order.

Until the Balls problem is solved, Labour may not prosper.