Capital Fellows.(London's mayoral election)

As the mayoral campaign in London officially got under way late last month, it occurred to me that, no matter how the voting turns out, Londoners will be electing a mayor with no equivalent in American politics. The incumbent, Ken Livingstone, is considerably more involved with free enterprise than he was when he was known as Red Ken, but he still describes himself as a Socialist and is still up to planning a celebration in Trafalgar Square next year for the fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro's revolution. The American political scene includes nobody who has ever been called red anything. Livingstone's challenger, a Conservative M.P. and former journalist named Boris Johnson, is sometimes described as a toff--a term that does not exist in the United States, since nobody, in or out of politics, quite fits the bill. ("Preppy" doesn't come close, and neither does "white shoe.") Johnson, whose full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, went to Eton and to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a member of a club, the Bullingdon, that is literally out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, having served as the model for the collection of drunken, furniture-smashing toffs presented as the Bollinger Club in "Decline and Fall." According to the satirical magazine Private Eye, Johnson's plan for Trafalgar Square is to replace the pigeons with pheasants so that his friends can shoot them. Among ten mayoral candidates, Livingstone and Johnson are the only ones thought to have a chance of winning, but even if the election is won by the candidate who is a distant third in the polls--Brian Paddick, a Liberal Democrat who was formerly a deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police--the mayor-elect still wouldn't be the sort of politician Americans are familiar with: after a few days in London, I began to think that Paddick's name must be particularly difficult for Londoners to remember, because I rarely heard him referred to as anything except "the gay policeman."

The word "toff " does not describe Boris Johnson much better than Red Ken describes Ken Livingstone. One model that Americans have of the privileged Englishman is based on what used to be called a "chinless wonder"--a sort of stiff who is (1) arrogant and (2) a bit thick. Johnson is neither. At Oxford, he was, in addition to being a member of the Bullingdon Club, the president of the Oxford Union and a student of classics. In 1999, when he was thirty-five, he was named the editor of The Spectator, a right-wing weekly, and was thought to be in line to be the editor of the Daily Telegraph, where he was a columnist, if he hadn't begun concentrating on politics. His manner is not stilted but what the English sometimes call "shambolic"--chaotic or disorganized--even when he is riding the bicycle that he often uses to get around London. Johnson, I was told by Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, plays to "a stereotype of the bumbling P. G. Wodehouse sort of toff that people find attractive." Even Ken Livingstone sometimes says, usually just before he says that Johnson is not the sort of person you'd want to put in charge of a large city, "Boris is charming."

In a 2006 biography entitled "Boris," an old friend of Johnson's named Andrew Gimson maintains that the stage-Englishman presentation masks not only a considerable intelligence but a fierce ambition: according to one of his siblings, little Boris's childhood goal was to be the "world king," and Gimson, among others, believes that he has lowered his sights only as far down as the Prime Ministership. Still, Johnson is probably best known for his humor, often self-deprecatory and occasionally unintentional--especially as displayed in several appearances, much revisited through DVDs and YouTube, on a television show called "Have I Got News for You." The label that Johnson's opponents try to stick him with in the campaign is not "toff " but "clown" or, particularly, "buffoon." If he is not best known for his humor, he is best known for his hair--hair that is blonder than is normally seen on a human older than about the age of five and is customarily worn in the style favored by English sheepdogs between groomings. According to his mother, blond hair is so strong in the Johnson family that "it defies attack from the genes of anybody else." Of her son's four children, she says, two of them have hair just as blond as his, even though his wife is half Indian. Because of his hair, Boris Johnson is ...