London political bridge?

OPINION:

The most momentous political story of the hour is not what you might think … whatever you might think. It has to do with an American politician now living in London and his aspiration to become president of the United States.

His name is Boris Johnson. He, an exemplary conservative, has just beaten one of the most rebarbative left-wing reactionaries in the United Kingdom, to become mayor of London. Mr. Johnson ran a very fine campaign, an amalgam of high intelligence, sound principle, rollicking good humor, and energy that could be branded New Tory. Mind you, New Toryism will arrive on these shores in due course.

Presidential aspirants are often accused of pursuing office with the intent of using that office as a “stepping stone” to still higher office. The wife of a former Arkansas governor, when running for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, was accused of intending New York to be her “stepping stone” to the presidency. Her husband too was accused of using his re-election to the Governors Mansion in Arkansas as a stepping stone to the White House. And months after his re-election Boy Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign began.

For that matter, the New York Senate seat that Hillary now holds is the same seat once held by Robert F. Kennedy, who also was presciently accused by opponents of intending the seat as his stepping stone to the highest office in the land.

Incidentally, both Hillary Clinton and Robert Kennedy came to New York as outsiders, she from Arkansas, he from Massachusetts. Consequently, both were called “carpetbaggers.”

So using a governorship or a Senate seat as a stepping stone to the presidency is not new. Using City Hall in London is. Geographically speaking, Mr. Johnson’s presidential campaign will make him the most ambitious carpetbagger in American history.

Mr. Johnson He was born in New York General Hospital, New York, New York, on June 19, 1964 — the year remembered by American conservatives as the Goldwater Year.

It is now faintly circulating through American media that Mr. Johnson was born here, but so is the report that he gave up his citizenship in 2006 after encountering passport problems with fussy U.S. immigration authorities. The report is in error.

I can now reveal that the American Spectator in another of its world exclusives has discovered (see the June issue) that the newly elected mayor of London never terminated his citizenship. He is as American as Barack Obama.

The confusion arises because of a comical piece Mr. Johnson wrote in the August 9, 2006, Spectator of London, wherein he reported his rude encounter with our immigration authorities and his vow to give up his American citizenship. But hold! Now I can report that when he presented himself at the American Embassy to terminate his U.S. citizenship he good-naturedly changed his mind. The procedure threatened to become too expensive in terms of tax liabilities alone. When Mr. Johnson sets out for the Republican nomination, there will be no doubt as to where he stands on tax cuts.

Already Mr. Johnson’s presidential ambitions are being circulated in the British press. Apparently he has joked about his plans for years. This week Stuart Reid, a confidant of Mr. Johnson’s at the British Spectator, which Mr. Johnson then edited, has written that Mr. Johnson will not actually launch his campaign until 2016. Mr. Reid believes Sen. Obama will win the presidency this fall.

I doubt Mr. Obama will defeat Sen. John McCain, and readers of this column might recall that one year ago, in “The Clinton Crack-Up,” I predicted Mrs. Clinton’s faltering before a challenge from the Democratic Party’s younger generation. That was at a time when such political savants as Dick Morris were touting Mrs. Clinton as the “inevitable” nominee and next president.

Today I predict that Mr. Johnson, working from the City Hall of London, will have a salubrious influence on conservatives both in the United Kingdom and the United States. His campaign for the American presidency will begin long before Mr. Reid speculates that it will, and it cannot begin too soon for me.

I say Mr. Johnson will be a salubrious force because I have known him since his tenure as editor of the Spectator. He brings to conservatism something it has lacked at least on this side of the Atlantic since the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the retirement of William F. Buckley.

Frankly it is my kind of conservatism: libertarian, admiring tradition, and employing government only where government is needed.

After his stint in journalism (where he was superb), Mr. Johnson entered Parliament. There he was Thatcherite but with beneficent bacteria of skepticism, irony and a whiff of subversion.

All of this comess together on the campaign trail where he is a refreshing contrast to the solemn blowhards. Campaigning in upscale Henley, he joshed about his Conservative Party’s excessively grim slogan — “You’ve paid your taxes. So where are the police?” — employing his own whimsical alternative: “You’ve paid your taxes. So where are the tennis courts?”

Campaigning in 2004, Mr. Johnson famously declared “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.”

Now after all these months of Barack and Hillary’s poppy and cock imagine the heap Mayor Johnson would leave them in. It is only a matter of time before he returns to his native land and saves conservatism from Newt Gingrich.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His book “The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House” was recently published by Thomas Nelson.