--- title: 10 Questions for Boris Johnson | TIME description: London Mayor Boris Johnson talks about the Olympics, the euro-zone crisis and the inventor of the toilet. canonical: https://time.com/video/6FY5jcdv/ og:title: 10 Questions for Boris Johnson og:description: London Mayor Boris Johnson talks about the Olympics, the euro-zone crisis and the inventor of the toilet. og:url: https://time.com/video/6FY5jcdv/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/6FY5jcdv/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 10 Questions for Boris Johnson twitter:description: London Mayor Boris Johnson talks about the Olympics, the euro-zone crisis and the inventor of the toilet. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/6FY5jcdv/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 10 Questions for Boris Johnson > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 10 Questions for Boris Johnson [Watch (HLS stream): 10 Questions for Boris Johnson](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/6FY5jcdv.m3u8) (6:58)  _Published 2012-06-14. London Mayor Boris Johnson talks about the Olympics, the euro-zone crisis and the inventor of the toilet._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:25 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Trump Answers Questions on Impeachment, Boris Johnson, and Emmanuel Macron’s NATO Comments](/video/sziuTzQp/) ### Trump Answers Questions on Impeachment, Boris Johnson, and Emmanuel Macron’s NATO Comments [Boris Johnson is Britain's New Foreign Secretary](/video/7RDoI5lu/) ### Boris Johnson is Britain's New Foreign Secretary [Introducing Boris Johnson](/video/8YA1m0Oe/) ### Introducing Boris Johnson --- ## Transcript He looks like a Bond villain. He talks like Hugh Grant and he writes like a graduate of Oxford, which he is. Boris Johnson is the mayor of London. He's written a new book, Johnson's Life of London, about a little city across the Atlantic known as London. And he's here today. Welcome. Thank you, Belinda. So what are you doing here? You've got all these problem things going on in London. I mean, shouldn't you be pouring concrete something for the Olympics. To quite remarkable degree? We've got our preparations on track. We're on time. We're under budget, and London is ready. How ready is London? Last Olympics, the Brits won, I think, 47 medals. 94 gold medals. Country of 60 million. Yeah. My own. Brasilia, with a country of 20 million, won 46. Medals. UFC, Right. And you know, our Australian cousins did well last time, but we were very proud to come fourth in the medal table. It's going to be difficult to repeat that, but the aim is to get more medals in more sports than ever before. That's what I'm briefed by the British Olympic Association. Whether we can achieve that, I have not the faintest idea. Let's talk first a little bit about your book. In the book, you do, in fact, make the case for London being the the capital of so many things and you try and get people to rethink London. One of the first claims you make in the book that was interesting to me is that London invented the Internet. It did quite I quite sure. Absolutely. I was quite. Sure. Well, you kind of remember the man's name it. Tim Berners-Lee, but. He was not in London when he did that. He was there with everybody. And he was certainly born in. He was in Geneva. He was born in London. It's so unfair. Geneva has nothing. Geneva has zwingli. It has the convention that it has. And now you're trying to keep. Interest from it. Has the tables run. You also claim it was not. It was a British guy who invented the toilet. I do. It was a guy called John Harrington. It was because he was called John Harrington that in America a toilet is still referred to as a John. Do you know? I did not know that. The one of the interesting things about being British mayor is that all your expenses are online, so I can. Go, Oh my God, if you have to. My expenses. The derisory. The derisory. There's an interesting one where you have to have emergency dental surgery just before you have to make a speech at FIFA, which does not. Some speak well of that whole British stereotype of bad taste. It's perfectly true. Why does that appear on my medical? You had to take a taxi and then you had to take one. I did. I did. I had to. That's absolutely true. It was an awful thing. I had an abscess in a tooth or something like that, and I had to. I was about to give a speech and it sort of ruptured. And what did the speech go? Well, I don't know. I think I was so under the influence of various painkilling drugs. I think the speech was slightly surreal by the time I eventually delivered it. You've been elected mayor twice. Congratulations. And you were in parliament before that? Yeah. But you were born here. I was born here in New York. And I'm very proud of that. Proud to be a New Yorker. If you were president or if there were some sort of goodwill exchange between America and England, what is the one thing about England, the English system that you would like America to have? Maybe it is socialized health. No, I mean, the thing about the American system, you'd love to import England. I was very struck by the the sheer weight of American coverage of the queen's jubilee. I know I couldn't help but wonder whether there was some regret. Just want to export the queen. Some regret for, you know, the the error of 1776. As it's known in England, the error of 1774. The one thing I think we could do with a little bit more of from from the United States is just that sense of get up and go. And I am not blaming everybody else if you fail. And that ability that Americans seem to have to start again and to get on with things. So there is a perception over here in in New York City that if you are a banker, you find Wall Street to be too risk averse, that you go to the city because over there, they're crazy. Do you think the city should be more regulated? I'm a believer in regulation. That goes for London and New York. But I think these days you've got to wonder whether actually regulation is the is the answer at the moment. The problem is not that the people taking wild bets and putting the economy at risk. The problem is that there's not enough confidence. The problem at the moment, and it's affecting Barack Obama's chances of reelection, as far as I can make out, is affecting everything is is the eurozone. And the real difficulty in sorting that out and the complete inability of European leaders to come up with a convincing answer. The eurozone balloon needs to burst one way or the other. There needs to be some sort of resolution of that before the whole thing can move on. Okay. You said a lot of times in this interview that London is the greatest city in the world, but we're going to play a game called London has. And I'm going to tell you something, that New York has it going and you have to tell me what London has. Okay. So live, for example, New York has the Empire State Building and London has. London has some Paul Cathedral. I mean, you put that in your pipe and smoke. Thank you. Okay. New York has at least two great songs. New York by Frank Sinatra and Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. Right. And London has well. London calling by The Clash. And London Bridge is falling down. Well, thank you. Yes, that'll do it. For less than $3. Yeah. New York offers two reasonably square meals. The hotdog with the works and the bagel with a meal for less than what is it, a pound 50. London has. You can eat like a king. Like a king for £2. You could definitely get a delicious, delicious life giving Savoy. Frankfurt people. And or you could have about half a pint of beer. New York has a gazillionaire mayor who takes $1 in salary. Yes. And London has. A, relatively speaking, a pauper of a man who's who takes a bicycle to work. What do you plan to do after you've finished being mayor? That's not such a long time away, you know. It's four years away. We've got the games coming up. We've got then a big job of making London profit from those games and making sure that we have a real legacy from from the Olympics. JOHNSON Good luck with it all. Thank you very much. Thank you. 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