DECEMBER 5 ― Courtesy of the Board of Governors of Epsom College in Malaysia chairman, the British High Commissioner to Malaysia and Khazanah Nasional, I saw the London mayor in full international diplomatic mode during his recent visit to Malaysia as part of his Far East tour — a handy feather in the cap for any potential future prime minister.
His events were in Negri Sembilan and Kuala Lumpur, a combination which I told Boris had been visited by another Johnson: Lyndon Baines. I explained that a village close by had been named after the US President, but the newly credentialled British High Commissioner to Malaysia, Ipoh-born Vicki Treadell, stopped me in my tracks lest the unpredictable mayor decided to visit it, or worse, contemplate a Kampung Boris.
As it turned out, Kuala Lumpur essentially became Kampung Boris for the two days he was here. From the moment he arrived in klia2 via AirAsia — “in economy class, where I ate a delicious chicken sandwich which I paid for myself” —people were clamouring for wefies and shouting out his name, possibly the only Western politician to be known by his first name across the world (there were no cheers for “David” or “Barack” when Cameron and Obama were here).
His palpable popularity gives him the power to comfortably ignore protocol: before catching his flight home he presented the Sultan of Perak and the prime minister each with a box of locally sourced “London” cupcakes — “the kind of which have never before been seen in London” — and to cycle a Malacca trishaw on the stage where he delivered the 11th Khazanah Global Lecture, which anchored around the journey of rubber to Malaya and ended with a suggestion to abolish the requirement of a local stake for FDIs.
Throughout, his Tory-blue Hermes tie floundered against a shirt whose cuffs had seen better days — a metaphor for the sheer intelligence routinely deployed from under the famously uncombed hair (a trait shared by moderator Datuk Charon Mokhzani, Khazanah Research Institute managing director who was his contemporary at University of Oxford).
It was easy to be bamboozled by the fun and games (and parts of the British press have criticised his tour as a wasteful ego-boosting exercise), but each event embedded diplomatic progress on trade and investment, education and tourism, invoking a relevant history. At Epsom, in the presence of Malaysian Old Marlburians and Old Etonians he suggested that a Malaysian flavour would enhance the tradition of British education.
At the unveiling of the Mulu Caves-inspired design of Malaysia Square at Battersea Power Station, he recalled the regeneration of another part of London catalysed by another Commonwealth connection: Canada Square in Canary Wharf.
In his speech at the reception in the Jubilee Room in the residence of the High Commissioner, in front of photographs of Tuanku Abdul Halim and Queen Elizabeth II during her 1974 visit, he listed a slew of recent investments symbolising the frenetic pace of economic activity linking the two countries. In the audience at his final lecture were KLites who visit London more often than they visit their kampung, who board flights MH1-4 as if they were double-decker buses: and next year AirAsia X and British Airways will restore their direct flights (naturally Boris plugged his plan for a new airport in the Thames estuary).
“Saya datuk bandar London,” he began his speeches (enunciating clearly because he knew the meaning of “sayur”), and though this was affectionate it also implied a profound relegation, for the London mayor is a directly elected position, whereas the Kuala Lumpur mayor is an appointee of an appointee of the prime minister. The London mayor has significant power over transport, policing and tax, while the Kuala Lumpur mayor does not: and while Boris was munificent in his praise for the future plans of Kuala Lumpur, it must have dawned on him that his Malaysian counterpart was not the prime mover for any of it.
We in Kuala Lumpur are still enduring a chaotic change in historic road names. At first, the Conference of Rulers was blamed for requesting that roads be renamed for former Yang diPertuan Agong, but after convenient political capital was accrued out of this, it emerged that the august body had nothing to do with the initiative, which actually came from the Federal Territories Ministry.
Disappointingly, it’s not even possible to traverse the eponymous roads in the chronological order of reigns.
If we had a directly elected Kuala Lumpur mayor with substantial and clearly defined powers, such a shambles may have been avoided. And if we were lucky, they’d be a brilliant international ambassador for our federal capital, regardless of the state of their hair.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
