Boris becomes the face of Cameron's "new" Conservative Party. Oops!

I'm left wondering if David Cameron might not come to regret the victory of Boris over Ken Livingstone as, for the next few months, Boris Johnson is going to be the public face of what Britain might expect from a new Tory government.

His ability to commit staggering gaffes has obviously not been lost on Cameron who has taken action almost immediately.

Now the Tory high command will be keen to ensure Mr Johnson does not make embarrassing mistakes as Mayor, which could put a cloud over Mr Cameron's attempts to portray the Tories as a government-in-waiting. A strong team of experienced advisers is expected to be appointed by the incoming Mayor.

The problem isn't whether or not Boris is being properly advised, the problem is that Boris is an old Etonian toff who has views which quite frankly belong in another century.

Cameron has done a very good job of reinventing "the nasty party" into something which, for the first time in a decade, is beginning to look electable. The problem with having Boris as London's Mayor is that the gaffe prone racist homophobic is going to give the press an open season to mock him and this supposedly reborn Tory party.

Imagine these words being issued by the Mayor of London:

His line on Africa he gave out in 2002, when Blair visited Congo: "No doubt," he said, "the AK47s will fall silent and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird."

This was offensive enough when he was simply a laughing stock Tory MP, but he is now London's official representative. He is our face to the world. And, more worryingly for Cameron, he is now very much part of the face of his new Conservative party.

As Zoe Williams argued in a brilliant article in the Guardian the other day, part of the myth surrounding Boris is that he is nice if a bit dim. However, the truth is that Boris is not very nice at all.

Two mistakes we make about Boris: the first is that, because he says "unacceptable" things, then he must be honest; he must be outside the airless bubble of PC. This is bilge. He is no more honest than any other philanderer before him. He has lied flagrantly, flamboyantly, to save his marriage, and given how little else he's prepared to do for it, one must conclude that he doesn't put a very great premium on telling the truth. So if he gives out these apparently harsh truths about gay people or Liverpudlians or the people of Congo, it is not because the fire of truth burns so brightly within him that he can't snuff it out. It is because he genuinely despises these people. He despises gays and he despises provincials (you are all right with Boris if you come from Liverpool but don't sound like a Liverpudlian. Once you've been to public school, then you are from postcode POSH), and he despises Africans. He despises them, and he despises those of us who would hold such judgments to be bigoted and inhuman. [...]

The second mistake, by the way, is to think he singles out any one group for his casual bile. It's not just gay people or Muslims or Africans, it's not just people from Portsmouth or indeed anywhere else on the south coast. He despises people who are not of his class because he is a snob. That, pretty much, means all of us. A snob's London is a Monday-to-Thursday kind of affair, behind fusty doors, in clubs that only just let women in, let alone plebs, in restaurants that don't have prices on the menus, in the Regency offices of magazines whose only distinction is that all the staff are shagging each other. They disappear to the country at weekends, then come back muttering on Monday about how the poor generate litter.

Ever since he became Tory leader David Cameron has been doing his best to make us believe that his party has changed and that it is no longer simply the party of the privileged. Perhaps he has been fooled by Boris' appearances on programmes like Have I Got News For You into thinking that Boris is popular. He's not. His appearances on such programmes were such a joy because Boris was allowed to play the role of class clown, the class in this case being upper class values and the notion that people who think the way Boris does still exist.

It is quite a different thing for such a person to be put into the role of representing a city of such historical and economic importance as London.

So the class clown has been made Mayor. Cameron may well come to rue that day.

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Tags: Boris Johnson, London mayor, Conservative party, David Cameron