How to win friends and influence people

The dramatic resignation of Sir Ian Blair as Metropolitan Police Commissioner last week vividly demonstrated how influence is changing in our city.

Mayor Boris Johnson told Sir Ian privately, in a "pleasant but determined way", that he did not have confidence in him. The nation's top police officer had no alternative but to go. And Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was left looking anything but influential.

I've been thinking a lot about the meaning of influence in recent months as the Evening Standard has been compiling its annual list of Influentials, the 1,000 most influential people in London, covering 22 categories from politics and business to fashion and society. It may come as no surprise to learn that the Mayor is the most influential. Boris Johnson features in no fewer than six sections.

In its simplest form, influence is about power — the power to shape our lives, our thinking, and our environment. But it is not about mere status or position. Plainly people with influence do hold powerful, high-profile jobs. Yet many of those who are influential operate behind the scenes or away from the public gaze.

So the Influentials are leaders and decision-makers. But they are also innovators, powerbrokers, thinkers and role models. Steve Hilton, Tory leader David Cameron's most trusted aide and strategist, is a perfect example — a man who eschews interviews, whose voice is never heard on radio or TV. Indeed he has recently been spending much of his time 6,000 miles away in California, directing Conservative strategy in Britain by laptop and telephone.

Since the days of Chaucer, the meaning of influence has had a magical quality. Then it meant, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, "the supposed flowing or streaming from the stars or heavens of an etherial fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men".

Even now, the word conjures up a sense of fascination and intrigue — of people making decisions and pulling strings, sometimes invisibly or unseen. Not for nothing is that most savvy of political operators, Peter Mandelson, newly back in the Cabinet, known as the "Prince of Darkness".

Influence certainly can have a sinister quality. The Victorians complained of "the offence of undue influence" in politics. American senators criticised the "influence peddlers" in Washington. To be "under the influence", even with alcohol, is never regarded as good.
But the Evening Standard is most interested in Influentials who are a force for good. Our magazine celebrates them because they are the people who help to make our city great — a global capital of influence. And Chaucer would have appreciated that every bit as much as Boris Johnson.

* Gideon Spanier is the editor of Influentials 2008 magazine, published free with the Evening Standard tomorrow