Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars. Boris Johnson
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you get stroppy, let me hasten to say that I have more than made up for it since. With the many thousands of pounds I have paid to the parking enforcement departments of Islington, Camden and Oxfordshire, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have contributed enough, over the years, to pay for a full-time teacher’s salary, although if I know Islington the cash has probably gone on more traffic wardens, or the endless abstract creation and destruction of road humps.
There was an amazing optimism, in those days, about parking, a prelapsarian innocence, a belief that even on a double yellow you would probably get away with it for an hour or so. It is with incredulity that I look back at my happy-go-lucky parking style—because even in that Elysium, in 1983, a terrible new plague had just come ashore.
It had been invented thirty years earlier by one Frank Marugg, a musician with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and a good friend of the sheriff, and it was designed to scare the pants off ticket-dodging swine like me. The first horrific sighting was in Pont Street, lovingly clamped round the wheel of a black Golf belonging to a record producer. From then on the yellow scourge spread like ragwort in our streets.
I remember in the mid-1980s rounding the corner of St James’s, where the Stallion was as usual stationed in defiance of all bylaws, and when I saw that evil metal gin about its forequarters I felt a sudden constriction in the throat: a spasm of rage and amazement.
How could they do this? By what right could the state take away my freedom of movement? Except that it wasn’t the state that had clamped my car, but a hireling of the state, a ruthless cowboy, and I was lucky compared to some.
In 25 years of tears, wails and ruined mornings, the clampers have immobilised a hearse with a corpse in the back, a Royal Mail van and a Good Samaritan who had stopped to help the victim of a hit-and-run driver. A disabled man of 82 was clamped in a pub car park because he walked out of the pub to post a letter before buying his usual half pint. The gangsters told him to pay £240 or see the fine increased even further. The other day they clamped the mayor of Middlesbrough while he opened a nursery.
If I sound bitter, it is because I am; yet the ruthlessness of the clampers is nothing next to the rapacity of their accomplices, the tow-truck operatives. An Englishman’s car used to be his castle, or at least his mobile fort. I mean it was unthinkable that some public authority could simply move it. Yet time and again I would arrive at my Spectator office in Holborn, park the car, go in and ask my then assistant Ann Sindall for some cash to put in the meter, and while she was rustling around in the desk I would look out of the window and—blow me down!—there it would be: my car towed ignominiously past with its rear in the air, and without so much as a by-your-leave.
Which left me with that bleached-out beaten feeling you get when you have succumbed to the might of the state, and then in my dejection I would remember the logic of what they were doing and I would see the other side of the story.
I mentioned that cars were rare at university in 1983, even a Belgian-registered rust bucket. Nowadays students at Oxford Brookes University have so many cars that they park them all over the adjacent village of Holton, causing a grade A problem for yours truly, the local MP. You may wonder how students can afford so many cars, with the top-up fees and the debt and all. The answer is that car prices have risen very slowly, so cars are relatively cheap these days and more plentiful, with the result that the very person who spends his morning hurling oaths at a tow-truck operative may then recover his car and spend the afternoon in a traffic jam sobbing with incontinent rage because someone else has parked in a selfish place.
Cars make two-faced monsters of us all, and as the number of cars continues to rise, our hypocrisy will grow. More and more households have two or three cars, but then think of all the people in Liverpool or Manchester, where 48 per cent of the population still do not have a car. How will the government prove that they have been ‘lifted out of poverty’? When they have a set of wheels, of course.
The more cars there are, the slower we all go, and although our machines are capable of ever more breakneck speeds, we are statistically less and less likely to break our necks. The current motorway speed limit is 70mph, which is a joke since the average—the average—speed on a motorway is 71mph, and 19 per cent of cars travel at more than 80mph. Yet in spite of the colossal increase in the number of these whizzing steel projectiles, the number of serious traffic accidents declined from 25,124 in 1992 to 18,728 in 2002 and the number of fatalities from 1,978 in 1992 to 1,795 in 1997.
If we keep going like this, in fact, we will reach levels of safety unheard of since the origins of the car. In 1914 there were only 132,015 cars on the road, compared to 30.6 million today. But in 1914 the total number of road fatalities—in England, not Flanders—was a stonking 1,328. What does that tell us? It tells us how much safer our cars have become.
Not that you’d ever guess, to judge by the way the Liberal Democrats of Islington go around installing these pyramids, these exhaust-scraping flat-top ziggurats, in the middle of the road. Sleeping policemen have multiplied 10 times in the last five years, says the AA. Across the country the ramps, pyramids and corrugations have become one of the divisive issues of our times: dividing communities, dividing us individually. We want them outside our houses to slow down the boy racers, but elsewhere we are fed up with driving as if through the badlands of Beirut. In 1983 we’d have thought it bizarre and decadent that the state should actually spend our money to make the roads worse. We never thought a government would be so Orwellian as to install the Gatsos, the oppressive wayside paparazzi, waiting to catch us driving in a compromising fashion and then—can you believe it?—actually threatening to send the grainy pictures to our home addresses unless we cough up.
The lobby groups love a new safety campaign, because a new safety campaign means an opportunity to raise new funds. The lawyers want new legislation, because new legislation means new grounds for litigation. The politicians are always hoping to identify themselves with some fresh measure to protect the electorate, so that they can imagine themselves as the new Gracchus or Disraeli or Shaftesbury. And the newspapers—well, the newspapers want to sell newspapers by warning their readers of some new terror and then demanding action.
In the face of this overwhelming pressure it is all but insane for anyone to object, even when the safety measure in question is manifestly pointless and anti-democratic. I will not now make a fuss about the ban on mobiles in cars, since I don’t think I could win a statistical shoot-out with the ’elf ’n’ safety boys. I merely point out that driving and telephoning does not seem to me to be fundamentally different from using your free hand to pick your nose, hit the children or turn the radio from Magic FM to something less glutinous.
Nor will I object to seat belts, since they plainly save lives, though my grandfather never wore one in his life, on the grounds (very reasonable, it seems) that they may induce a false sense of security, rather like cycle helmets. And I confess that the Johnson family has been pretty religious about the use of children’s car seats.
But what about booster seats? I mean, stop me if you’ve heard me on this subject before, but what the hell is that all about? When we were children we didn’t have car seats. We didn’t even have seat belts. We bounced about in the back like peas in a rattle, and although our Renault 4 was a glorified vomitorium we all felt pretty happy and safe.
What happened to the first Benz
machine upon arriving in London from
the docks in 1894? What do you think?
It was stopped by a policeman.
And now they tell us that if we have children under the age of 12, or four and a half feet in height, we all have to go to Halfords and lash out 30 quid on a plastic banquette booster seat, and we have to shove it under our children every time we go out in the car. I have done some research, and it is vanishingly improbable that you will make your children any safer with this device, yet the whole thing was cooked up in the dark by some EU transport official, rammed through parliament without any proper consultation. All it has achieved is the irritation of adults and the delivery of a serious blow to childish prestige.
The whole thing is mad, mad, mad, and shows, in my view, why important public servants like the police find it increasingly