Matthew Norman: Ken and Boris: are they the same person?

At least we can now forget 1 May 2008. With it being the 11th anniversary of the first election won by a Prime Ministerial luvvie whose name dare not be spoken, perhaps it was always unlikely that Gordon Brown would choose that particular Thursday. Even if he was tempted, however, confirmation that Boris Johnson will stand for London Mayor on 1 May surely rules it out completely. The potential, however remote, for a Boris bandwagon to flatten Labour incumbents in a dozen or more pivotal south-east marginals will hardly have escaped the PM and the 57 varieties of number cruncher with whom he'll be closeted this weekend.

No, if Worcester Woman gave Mr Blair his landslide on 1 May 1997, this Prime Minister is far too neurotic to risk one of his own at the hands of (Bertie) Wooster Man. In fact it's an indication of his concern that, having already primed his pliant think tank Compass to savage Boris, quite idiotically, as a neo-fascist monster, Gordon dispatched his best little helper Ed Balls to the conference dais to raise the spectre of P G Wodehouse's finest chump.

According to Mr Balls, who cannot be accused of attachment to original thinking, Boris is "a gaffe-prone, TV quiz-show clown – a Bullingdon club throwback to a bygone age". To which Boris might privately respond by doing what he used to do, before mayoral ambition matured him, whenever that minister rose in the Commons, and shout "Balls, Balls, absolute Balls!!!"

But is it an inverted pyramid of piffle? Beneath all the cripeses and strike-me-pinks, and all the foolish blunders followed by winsomely exaggerated mea culpas, is there a proper politician burrowing for freedom? Does Boris even want a demanding, technical job that would cut his income by three quarters, or is he after the publicity that would hike his after-dinner speaking fee from its current nadir of £10,000? If he is in it to win it, can he really threaten Ken Livingstone, the self-styled Spirit of the Second London Blitz, or by New Year will David Cameron (assuming he's still Tory leader then, which is no small assumption), be shouting "May Day, May Day, this is a ship-to-shore distress call for a Mr Shagger Norris"?

Soothsaying on this least predictable of campaigns seems such a mug's game, frankly, that I am compelled to say the simplest of all sooths and confess to having no clue about the answers. But one thing I do know is that far more links these these than divides them. They are, to put it bluntly, the two most brazen rogues and chancers (or "mavericks", as they might prefer it) on the political stage. With no shame in Ken's case, and faux shame in Boris's, they will reverse any position in an instant.

The sight of Ken embracing Gordon Brown at Labour's conference this week was, by any standards, a shocker. Barely a year after New Labour came to power, he started demanding the Chancellor's sacking on the grounds that his economic policies guaranteed a catastrophic recession. He was wrong about that, but right to fight the disatrous public-private partnership which Gordon – largely motivated, it was felt, by hatred for Ken – imposed on the London Underground.

Ken loathes Gordon, who ferociously resisted his readmittance to the Labour party, in return. And there he was in Blackpool this week, grinning like a starstruck baboon, raising Gordon's arm aloft like a boxing ref venerating the new champ. This was such a display of opportunistic hypocrisy that even Boris may have been impressed, despite being such an ace backtracker himself that, were he to commission a mayoral flag, it would be a white cross on a white background.

Admittedly Boris glides through his crises by surrendering with demented vigour where Ken survives by rigidly refusing to accept any fault ... but then even their differences seem mirror images. Boris, with his basso profundo Eton Boating Song brogue, is perceived as a snob; Ken, with his narky Neasden drawl, as an inverted snob. Boris adores fancy cars so much that he wrote a book about them. Ken once said: "I hate cars. If I ever get any power again, I'll ban the lot".

The similarities are more striking still. They may use different chat-up lines – hard to imagine Boris using Ken's old faithful ("Come home with me, dahlin', I'm like a broomstick in the morning") – but they share, or used to share, a penchant for women journalists. They have the same talent for finding trouble through perceived racism and alleged lawlessness. Where Boris once used the word "picanninies" in a naive crack at irony, a squiffy Ken compared a Jewish reporter to a Nazi. Where Boris agreed to give a lead to a friend who had a plan (never realised) to beat up a troublesome hack, Ken was involved in an incident (though never charged with any offence) which left a journalist badly injured after falling off a wall.

They also have in common a relationship with the literal truth that seems hands-off even by the standards of their trades. Boris was fired from his first job on The Times for inventing a quote, while Ken possibly faces the sack from his current post for manufacturing one of his own ("I will not extend the Congestion Charge"). Both are fantastically ruthless in the pursuit of personal ambition, and like Tony Blair, the patron saint of political charlatans, enjoy careers wrought from galvanised rubber.

If the entire electorate met them both, Boris might well bounce to victory. If the endearing buffoonery began life as deliberately comic pastiche, like any long-sustained self-parody it eventually became the reality.

The one time I had the chance to study him close up, at the home of a boss we had in common, I walked into the kitchen to find him on the phone to a mini cab firm trying to arrange delivery of a notebook – "I say, look, I hate to be a nuisance, but it is rather urgent. I have to write up this interview in the morning," – that he'd left in the back of a taxi in Southampton some 90 miles away. How can you not be a little fond of such a man? Although every bit as narcissistic, Ken is an altogether icier presence, but on telly he does understated warmth surprisingly well.

Between two such entertaining, utterly unscrupulous exhibitionists, this will be anything but a clear-cut choice on party lines. Personally the decision may come down to which of them least often piously informs us that a) "London is the greatest city in the world" (it isn't; if it was, infinitely stronger candidates would want to be its mayor), and b) "this election is about policies, not personalities". Never can any election anywhere have been less about policy and more about personality, and on that basis Gordon Brown's pre-emptive attempt to lop the wheels off the Boris bandwagon before it gets starts rolling makes perfect sense.