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He has more Facebook friends. He's more widely recognised. He might even be more likely to win the next struggle for leadership of the Conservative party. And he's a hell of a lot more fun. But in the age of the city-state, as megalopolises become increasingly effective "nations" in their own right, could Boris Johnson not only be more likable than David Cameron – but more powerful, too?
The case for Cameron seems to be open and shut. In the traditional political-science definitions of hard power, Cameron has the edge over Boris all the way. He commands more soldiers and can launch more nuclear missiles. His budget is greater and he retains certain abilities to appoint officials in national politics that give him, and national leaders like him, a classical type of power.
Consider, however, that it is now cities which, across the globe, trump nations in getting things done, making government work, embodying democracy, generating civic trust and cooperating across borders. For example, take ideology: city governance has nothing to do with it.
Running a city is all about pragmatism. Boris may be a Conservative in name and inclination, but isn't above embracing a traditionally more liberal idea like greater immigration – just as Michael Bloomberg in New York abandoned first the Democratic and then the Republican party to become a self-styled independent. Boris calls himself an "anarcho-Tory", and in playing the prudent steward, the creative entrepreneur and the boisterous showman all at once, makes good his claim. This ideological freedom gives him the power to truly take on ideas that work, rather than being shackled to party will.
Boris and Bloomberg share far more than Cameron does with Barack Obama. The two mayors are drawn together by common urban challenges, rather than driven apart by rival sovereign interests. They need to forge relationships with Kiev and Moscow, rather than worry about how to stop Russia from swallowing Ukraine. As a great, multicultural world city, London need not defend English monoculture or spurn the diversity and tolerance that are a key to municipal success.
Mayors are free in a way national leaders are not: they do not require armoured limousines to travel safely, but ride public transit (Bloomberg) or cycle (Boris). That kind of public accessibility is civic trust: and a potent form of power.
What's more, Cameron and Obama, the world's most powerful leaders, achieve far less than do the heads of cities, which are supposedly inferior jurisdictions. When Obama was looking for viable responses to economic inequality in America, he invited 15 new mayors to Washington to share their urban strategies. Mayors must deal with the consequences of issues like poverty, unemployment, undocumented workers and market injustices without being able to control their origins in porous border controls or global markets that nation states are supposed to address but haven't.
Boris, like all mayors, gets things done. Mayors develop job programmes, build affordable housing, catalyse pre-school education and ensure the garbage gets picked up. (Teddy Kollek, a long-term mayor of Jerusalem, was reported in the 1980s to have told a group of clerics who were hectoring him about access to the holy sites: "Gentlemen, gentlemen! Spare me your sermons and I will fix your sewers!")
The US government closed twice in the last several years, and few ordinary citizens even noticed. Imagine closing Chicago or Edinburgh or London. Imagine Boris standing on a matter of principle to the extent that his administration stopped running. His popularity would evaporate overnight; he might be gone in a week.
Cities are not just a level of administration, they embody the human communities that define us: where we are born, study, work, marry, create and procreate, play, pray, age and die. Those who shape the conditions under which these defining human activities take place are, in fact, too powerful to be able to step back from their responsibilities. Real power is power too potent, too indispensable, to pause or freeze or postpone.
This isn't just about Boris. He has proven a capable and innovative and contentious mayor, as Bloomberg was in New York; yet Ken Livingstone before Boris was no less powerful and effective, and De Blasio after Bloomberg will be the same. These megacity mayors reflect and embody the ascendency of cities in a world of dysfunctional nation-states. In a fundamental way that is unrelated to their personal reputations, the answer is clear: Boris Johnson is more powerful than David Cameron.
Benjamin Barber is the author of Jihad vs McWorld and If Mayors Ruled the World
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