November was a big month for Boris Johnson. Policy initiatives flowed, on transport, on culture, on youth crime; some were still at the consultative stage but all have given shape and substance to a regime initially defined by its haplessness. For months, the Mayor Boris story was one of drift and departing advisers. Now, at last, true political battle can be joined. A year ago, candidate Johnson seemed too posh, too daft and too much of the cartoon right to become London's mayor. Today, his opponents may find him a more elusive target than they'd hoped.
There was widespread expectation that the Blond's ambition was to be Ken Livingstone's antithesis. Reality is proving more complex. In keeping with his mandate and spurred by the downturn, Johnson has cut jobs and spending across the Greater London Authority bureaucracies, yet has talked up the virtues of public spending on Crossrail, the Underground and an Olympics legacy. Public transport fares will rise above the rate of inflation in January, but discounts for the poorest will be retained. Most intriguing of all, Johnson's gut economic liberalism is being complemented by his own version of its social counterpart.
There is more to this than his broad adherence to David Cameron's "caring Conservatism" agenda. Johnson has gone strikingly further, in supporting the London Living Wage and in commissioning a study into the effects of granting earned amnesties to long-term illegal immigrants.
Both moves have had Tory top brass leaping to safe political distances, but they pose a greater threat to Johnson's challengers. There are cases to be made that his housekeeping will hurt the vulnerable most and that his housing policy favours those on middle incomes. But it's harder to depict him as a Thatcherite xenophobe when he's bumping up working-class incomes and lobbying for 400,000 rule-breaking foreigners to be freed from the underground economy.
Opponents will have to respond imaginatively to his line on inclusion and opportunity. Though he is wearingly persuaded by the rightwing whine about so-called political correctness, he has acknowledged that the agitation for minority rights Ken Livingstone fostered in the 80s had good reasons for existing.
Johnson still often recoils from such stuff. Endorsing Barack Obama in his Telegraph column he wrote that a benefit of the US electing its first black president would be the end of "race-based politics" and the associated "grievance culture". With typical Tory dimness, he seems to imagine that Obama's victory could still have happened had "race-base politics" not prepared the ground.
His strategies on culture and equalities are similar in disdaining the identity politics that emerged from those civil rights campaigns. Yet they emphasise widening access and encouraging participation. Johnson's approach highlights important questions. Identity politics are often defensive, a reaction to hostility. In the city London has now become, is such defensiveness necessary? Is targeting grants at minority groups the best way to tackle discrimination, or does it sometimes institutionalise a limiting introversion? If the goal is to break down barriers against full participation in society, what is the best way for the mayor to help achieve it?
Johnson is feeling his way towards a formula that works for him, a blend of can-do, moral intervention and an old-fashioned Tory pragmatism that recognises that the capital is the loser if hundreds of thousands of people are marooned in its social margins. At the same time, it seeks to address Johnson's image problem. Yet paradoxically, it's also one that could build on some of the finest achievements of the left. If it does, how will the left respond?
• Dave Hill blogs about London at Guardian.co.uk/Dave Hill's blog
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