Hello and welcome to the political party on Tuesday 12 November 2019.

Episode 2 of the Special Election Series features Joe Tanner, Chief Executive of In-House Communications

and a former advisor to Boris Johnson. Her and her business partner Katie Perrier were

described by Boris Johnson himself. He said they are the fortenham and mason of communications.

They deliver and they deliver quality. Without them I simply would not have been made

mayor. Joe worked on his 2008 campaign and I started by asking her what were the key

bits of advice she gave him when she first came on board?

Let's get to the point in terms of the current Prime Minister. You helped mastermind his

mayoral victory in 2008. What were the key bits of advice you gave him when you first

came on board?

Oh my gosh, where did we start? Well one of the first things we did was took him to get

a new suit. I can remember looking at his clothes and you'll know that Boris is a very keen

cyclist and one of the biggest challenges that we had was that he had shoes that resembled

brakes. He was putting his feet down and he had a child. He had holes in the bottom of his

shoes because he used to use his feet, obviously, he'd sort of slowed down a bit and then do

the last bit with his nice, nice smart shoes and the bottom as he sat on a platform if

he put his legs out in front you could see holes in the bottom of the shoes. He was like

okay we need to sort that one out. And his suits were again, he had lots of people talk

about him losing weight at various points in his career and actually what's often happened

is he's got a proper fitting suit because he often would buy a suit bigger because of cycling.

So we went and we told him we had an interview at Selfridges about London's retail market

and stuff and actually when he turned out there was no one there, it was just us and we took

...