When Boris Johnson was first handed editorship of the Spectator magazine, his friend and biographer Andrew Gimson famously commented that it was like “entrusting a Ming vase to an ape.”

The analogy wasn’t perfect. Boris for all his faults, is no ape. But his reputation for professional chaos has been well earned.

Routinely late for meetings and often woefully unprepared on the subject he has come to talk about, Boris has developed a knack for winging his way through his political career. For the most part he has got away with it. As mayor of London, he relied heavily on a team of competent deputies and advisers to run the show, while he dashed from photo shoot to photo shoot, cheerfully taking credit for the hard work done by City Hall’s army of bureaucrats.

But while the wheels of London governance kept turning under his leadership, he left little mark on the city. The few ideas and projects which were genuinely his own, tended to fail or go nowhere. Millions of pounds were spent on plans for a new offshore airport in the Thames Estuary, despite receiving almost no backing from government or the aviation industry and despite the fact that the proposed location was not even inside London. Millions more were spent on a new cable car to provide a link between the Greenwich peninsula and East London. The mostly empty carriages can still be seen carrying thin air across the Thames on windless days, while at weekends, confused tourists queue up to admire the airborne views of junk yards and refuse disposal centres on the northern side. Despite being sold as a vital new commuter link for Londoners, one freedom of information request found that it was used regularly by just four commuters. A later request discovered that number had dwindled to zero.

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His big election pledge to build a new fleet of “Routemaster-style buses” was achieved, although the buses are now notorious among Londoners for the faulty air conditioning and stifling temperatures inside. After five years of complaints about the vehicles, the outgoing mayor finally relented and agreed to install openable windows on the buses at significant cost. When Boris insisted last week that there was “no haste” to take Britain out of Europe, it should come as no surprise. When it takes a man five years to install openable windows on a bus, we can hardly expect him to be hasty about taking Britain out of its 40-year relationship with the EU.

The main characteristic of Johnson’s period in charge of London was inertia. London’s housing crisis grew throughout his term as mayor with Boris never showing much interest in tackling the problem. In his last year as mayor, he oversaw the construction of just 4,880 new affordable homes, the lowest level since the early nineties.

The wider problems of poverty and inequality also got little attention from Boris. Much has been made in recent days about the gulf between wealthy Remain-supporting Londoners and the poverty of Brexit-supporting areas in the North of the country. However, London actually contains the highest proportion of people in the bottom decile of wealth in the country. In 2012, the total wealth of an average household in the bottom 10th percentile in London was just £6,300, 57% less than the rest of Britain. Despite promising to tackle London’s eye-watering inequality levels, Johnson left London as the most unequal part of the UK.

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