Boris Johnson managed to secure £93 million by threatening to overshadow the Conservative Party conference, according to the biography of David Cameron that is making headlines.
The London Mayor reportedly browbeat George Osborne into awarding London the money in exchange for not disrupting the conference with a controversial column that would steal headlines away from what was said at the annual event.
The claim was published today in The Daily Mail, as part of its serialisation of ‘Call Me Dave’, the book by Isabel Oakeshott and Lord Ashcroft that has also alleged Cameron put his private parts in a dead pig’s mouth as part of a debauched university initiation ceremony.
George Osborne wanted the 2011 party conference to be uneventful and feared Johnson would use his Daily Telegraph column to disrupt proceedings, as he did in 2009 when he wrote a piece saying there should be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty on the day Osborne was due to speak.
When Osborne rang him to keep quiet, Johnson said his column was currently a “blank page” and he wanted £90 million extra for policing in London to not make trouble.
Osborne agreed to hand over £93million and Johnson later told aides: “That was the best-paid column ever.”
The latest extract also claims Cameron was so reluctant to have Johnson be the Tory candidate for London mayor in 2008 that he even approached ex-BBC Director General Greg Dyke to run instead on a joint Conservative/Liberal Democrat ticket.
When Johnson found out about Cameron’s opposition to his candidacy, he reportedly called him “a fuck”.
According to the book, Mr Dyke said: “I was first contacted by Steve Hilton, who I liked a lot because he was not like a traditional Tory.
“I had just left the BBC and they obviously thought this would be clever. I said to them, ‘I am not a Tory’. To which they basically said, ‘It doesn’t matter’.”
Dyke allegedly met with Cameron but decided he could not run as a Tory and the idea of running on a joint ticket was dropped.
