Mark Webb, who liaises closely with the police as chair of the local neighbourhood watch association, is one of many Camberwell residents who is disgusted that officers had to intervene following Boris Johnson’s row with his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, in the early hours of Friday.
“The limited resources of the police in Camberwell are stretched to breaking point, and to have our future prime minister setting such a terrible example beggars belief,” he said. “The police have no time to deal with domestic disputes. They’re too busy dealing with drugs and knife crimes.”
Johnson moved into Symonds’s flat in a converted Georgian house in Brunswick Park, after separating from his wife Marina Wheeler last autumn. Neighbours say he was once seen buying wine in a local shop, but otherwise keeps a low profile – emerging from the flat only to duck into a car parked outside.
He is wise to do so. Camberwell, with its arts college and large ethnic community, is overwhelmingly opposed to Brexit. Posters on the railings of a small park opposite Symonds’s flat yesterday showed Johnson’s face beneath the words: “We’d rather endure him as our neighbour than our prime minister.” Homes on nearby Camberwell New Road – the A202, which connects London to Dover – are festooned with EU flags.
“I hate Johnson,” Miriam Rogers, 28, a city planner and local resident, said on Saturday. “I’ve just come back from two weeks’ holiday and can’t believe he’s going to be our prime minister.” Another neighbour, who declined to be named, said: “He’s in enemy territory here and needs to move.” A third declared: “Everyone here thinks he’s a total wanker.”
But his presence could have one upside. Save for three months that Johnson spent as a trainee reporter in Wolverhampton, it may be the only time in his gilded life that he has lived as the people he aspires to govern do.
Brunswick Park has been gentrified over the past decade, but it is ringed by postwar housing estates that are home to feuding gangs. In 2000, 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death half a mile away, and the violence has scarcely let up. “Knifings and shootings are more than commonplace,” said Webb. Despite that the local police station, which had a dozen officers 10 years ago, closed in March.
“At least Johnson may glimpse the real world before he disappears into Downing Street,” Webb added.
