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For more than 30 years, the bungling mayor in the hit thriller Jaws has been a byword for municipal folly.
But now hapless Mayor Larry Vaughn, who urged townsfolk to swim into the film's famously shark-infested waters, has emerged as the unlikely hero of would-be London Mayor Boris
Johnson.
Johnson, who launched his bid to become the Conservative candidate for London mayor this week, has long praised the fictional mayor of Amity from the Stephen Spielberg classic for his refusal to bow to public hysteria about the risk of shark attacks.
His comments may have been relatively light-hearted, but from now on Johnson can expect all of his more maverick asides to be subjected to electoral-campaign style scrutiny. And he may live to regret some of them.
He said this year: "The real hero of Jaws is the mayor, a wonderful politician. A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beach open. Okay in that instance he was actually wrong, but in principle we need more politicians like the mayor. We are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense."
In the 1977 movie, Mayor Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton, ignores warnings of a brutal shark attack after the mangled body of a holidaymaker has washed ashore. He refuses to close local beaches for fear of frightening away the valuable tourist trade and insists that the death could have been caused by a motorboat.
In one scene the mayor berates a local councillor on the beach, demanding: "Will you please get in that ocean." He waves at the man's family, insisting: "Nobody's going in - move! Them, too!"
The former Conservative front bench higher education spokesman, who has had to apologise to people from Portsmouth to Papua New Guinea for various outspoken comments, faced criticism yesterday.
Stephen Pound, the Labour MP for Ealing North, said: "The mayor in Jaws was in a complete state of denial. He put his own ego in front of the needs of his citizens and that is a pretty poor precedent for the people of London.
"If elected as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson would be more Calamity than Amity."
The Jaws anecdote has been a staple for Johnson, who wrote in 2003 he was "heroically right in principle".
"In any other context but a Spielberg movie, his conduct would have been wholly intellectually defensible," he wrote.
Describing the scale of the challenge facing his mayoral bid Johnson said: "I have a stock speech in which I berate the British, and especially British politicians for being altogether too namby-pamby, mollycoddled and risk averse; and I think of that now as I contemplate the challenge of running for Mayor of London."
- INDEPENDENT
