As I have written here before, I have never voted Tory in my life but I would happily do so next May if I lived in central London - simply to help ensure Boris Johnson is still in situ as Mayor when the 2012 Olympics come around.

If he loses out to Labour's former Mayor Ken Livingstone, the Games just won't be the same without him.

Eccentric, buffoon, clown. BoJo has been labelled all these things but don't be fooled. Under that well-cultivated court jester persona there's a shrewd and calculating political brain which could see him wearing the No 10 shirt one day.


London 2012 would be poorer - and certainly duller - without him.

I'll tell you why. These "diverse and inclusive" Games are set to be the most politically correct in history, emphasised this week in details of a guidebook to be issued to 200,000 volunteers, some of which the Daily Mail's acerbic columnist Richard Littlejohn has described as "drivel".

Apparently, Games staff are to be told they must avoid "patronising words" such as "dear" (a Cockney term of endearment visitors, notably from America and Australia, would want and expect to hear in London).

If an Aussie didn't call you "cobber" or "mate" at the Sydney Games you felt offended.

And no one must be addressed as "young man". Helpers must not make an assumption about gender in case the person happens to be a transvestite.

Dearie me.

So politically correct are these high-tech, "yoof"-oriented Games designed to be, they could be labelled the AC/DC/PC Olympics.

We desperately need BoJo putting his size nines in it occasionally to lighten things up.

We want to see Jacques Rogge's shoulders again heaving with laughter, as they were when Boris, a comical cross between Ken Dodd and Miranda Hart, was doing his stand-up act at London's year-to-go frolic in Trafalgar Square. As he was when flimflamming his way through the Beijing Games.

Sometimes I can't help feeling the shock-haired Boris would have made a much more marketable mascot than the androgynous Wenlock and Mandeville who sound more like a firm of old-fashioned tailors in Jermyn Street.

Last week he hosted a drinks do at his City Hall eyrie for a group of us who write about sports politics. As usual, he was in sparkling form, irreverent and achingly funny. Alas, it was an off-the record session but the ears of a few pompous bigwigs in sport - and politics - may well have been burning.

On a serious note, why I want to see Boris re-elected as London Mayor is because he genuinely cares more about sport than the other two candidates.


Livingstone (pictured above with London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe and former Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell), on his own admission knows little about sport, or the Olympic Games per se.

"I'm not a sporty mayor," he confessed to me during the run-up to London's successful 2012 Olympics bid. "I really couldn't care less about it. The nearest I've been to it was a snooker table at college." While a lack of passion for sport was about the only thing he had in common with Lady Thatcher he apparently was converted to its political worth on the road to Damascus - or rather, Stratford - conning the Government (his phrase) into splashing the taxpayers' cash via the Olympics to facilitate his grand design for the regeneration of east London, admirable as that may be.

And what of the third candidate, the Lib Dem's ex-Met Police deputy commissioner Brian Paddick? From what I gather, his knowledge of it could be scribbled on the tip of the truncheon he once carried as a beat cop.

When London's sporting colours changed from red Ken to Boris blue, his successor became a key player in the Olympics game, clearly concerned that the inheritance of the Livingstone legacy is something he had to live with. But when I interviewed him soon after he took over he insisted he would be tackling the then soaring costs of the Games head-on, a not unfamiliar approach judging from his tactics on the football field. "We are looking at ways of saving," he says. "Obviously everybody is worried that we are going to waste squillions on projects that are going to have no lasting benefit for east London. That is why I want to make sure that there is a proper legacy. I'll be using my position on the Olympic Board to make sure that we deliver value for money not only for London, but the whole country. We don't want to sink billions into East London without having a long-term benefit, keeping a cap on the costs and making sure the tax payers get good value."

Significantly, they are now coming in under budget.


Johnson's first move as Mayor was the highly controversial appointment of feisty ex-Labour Sports Minister Kate Hoey (pictured above) as London's sports mistress - her official title is Commissioner for Sport - and she is now not only his sporting coach, but cardmarker. For while there was no doubting Johnson's genuine regard for sport, he barely knew anyone in the game. But, like Livingstone, he knew how to play it politically.

In the three and a bit years bike-mad Boris has been Mayor, he has left his footprint on sport without dipping a toe into the mainstream. His concentration has been on schools and youth sport, ring-fencing cash for it at grass roots level.

When I went with him to a schools swimming gala in Dulwich such was the ecstatic clamour on his arrival that you would have thought the 300 kids were greeting Becks, not Boris.

"Standing in a clammy, overheated swimming pool, watching a kids' competition and feeling the adrenalin takes you back to the terror you experienced yourself," he says. "You remember diving in and fearing your trunks might be coming off."

Earlier he had told the youngsters: "I once swam in a schools competition and I was so slow that my teacher told me never to do it again."

While clearly he's more at home on Have I Got News for You than A Question of Sport, he's been a bit of a player himself. "I once challenged Seb Coe to a race down Fifth Avenue in New York. I didn't win. He's rather fast, you know. But I love any kind of physical exertion; it's made me what I am."

At Oxford, he played rugby as a tighthead prop for his college, Balliol. He jogs and cycles regularly. Son Milo, 16, one of his four children, was captain of his school football team and a promising cricketer who had trials with Surrey.

Johnson says: "I love sport but the fact is I'm no bloody good at it. Anyone who's seen that video clip of me playing [for the Parliamentary team in a charity match] will know that I am not God's gift to football, but I think it's incredibly important for building self-confidence, team work, competitive spirit, ability to cope with failure, all that stuff, which is so hard for kids these days. When I was running for Mayor, I was always conscious of the part sport might play in my life for the next four years.

"One of the things that made me really excited about the job was going to see a couple of boxing academies. I suddenly had this blinding flash that maybe this was a sport that wasn't being sufficiently encouraged because it is a bit politically incorrect." Boris says, "I love watching them biff each other but I don't really know who they are." Johnson says he sees sport as an essential weapon in fighting the ASBO culture.

"I'm not suggesting it's the whole solution. This is not just some crazed playing fields of Eton type of thing but it is something that inspires me and makes me feel that there is real scope for expanding it into evening out the differentials and injustices in London.

"I am really sad that competitive sport in this country has not been encouraged as much as it should be. These school races where nobody was allowed to win, how ridiculous - a load of bollocks. At school, I wrote something for a posh essay society about the importance of sport as a way of getting people to feel better about themselves, that sort of stuff. I remember it was widely mocked but basically it is true."

The former Mayor of Athens once advised him that his main task for the Olympics must be to get London enthused about them. Did he agree? "Oh, deffo. Absolutely."


So, vote Boris, the man best for the Games. For one thing, as a Latin lover, so to speak, he is certainly at home with the Citius Altius Fortius stuff.

Next year my hope is that he will still be playing the joker in 2012. For with him around at least we might have some fun with a Games that are in danger of taking themselves far too seriously.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire