Gold for Boris; early bath for Cameron?

The real winner at the London Olympics was not an athlete. It was Boris Johnson.

The Games was an exercise in political campaigning for leadership of the Tory Party.

He is a brilliant self-publicist and people love him. 60,000 were chanting ‘Boris, Boris’ in Hyde Park at the start of the games. He replied with a jest about bankrupt Europeans and then had a dig at Mitt Romney, who was busy making gaffe after gaffe on his first foreign tour.

One such was to cast doubt on whether London was ready. Boris lambasted him. ‘I hear there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we are ready’. Then, echoing Obama, he yelled ‘Yes we are!’ to roars of approval.

So who is the real Bojo?

Well, he sure has an exotic background. His great-grandfather was the last Minister of the Interior to the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. He is descended through his German aristo father from King George II. His wife, daughter of the great journalist and TV reporter Sir Charles Wheeler, is half-Sikh. He has Turkish, German, Moslem, Jewish , English antecedents. He is Mr Multicultural personified.

He was educated at the same state primary school as Ed Miliband before getting a scholarship to Eton. At Oxford he won just about every Classics prize going. This guy is no fool!

Unlike Cameron and others in the political hierarchy, he has worked for a living, as a journalist on the Times and DT and as Editor of the Spectator, and has published several books. He is also a very familiar face on popular TV programmes, such as ‘Have I got news for you’.

He is an expert on Europe. Part of his education was in Brussels, he reported on EU affairs for the Times, his grand-father was Chairman of the ECHR, and his father was a Brussels bureaucrat.

As a politician, he was a shadow Minister for Howard and Cameron before winning the Mayoralty of London, formerly a Labour fief, with the biggest personal mandate in history.

His eccentric persona is carefully calculated. His so-called buffoonery only endears him to people, as does his prolific sex-life. ‘Conservative Home’ puts him far in the lead to replace Cameron. The bookies have him level-pegging with Osborne, but little George’s star is rapidly waning after the most shambolic budget in recent memory, a classic case of sending a boy to do a man’s job.

Already, the right-wing of the Tory Party is briefing against Cameron. The Tory press is being consistently critical. When you have columnists of the calibre and influence of the likes of Janet Daley carving you up, you are in trouble.

The acid test will be the by-election to replace the feisty Louise Mensch. Corby is a bellwether constituency. When it was a rather nasty steel-town, you could put up a rusty bicycle, paint it red and it would be elected. It has since become more marginal. If Cameron loses but not badly, it may be shrugged off as mid-term blues.

But if Labour gets a landslide then I predict that Bojo’s moment will have arrived.