SEOUL, South Korea – “Never eat a hippopotamus,” said Boris Johnson the distinctive blond-haired Mayor of London at his opening gambit at a press conference in Seoul on Monday. In town for the C40 Cities Summit on Climate, he’d recently heard the Korean saying, believing it means never bite off more than you can chew, and thought it apt for London, faced with the Olympic Games in three years and cleaning up the city in the process.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson attends the C40 Cities Summit on Climate in Seoul, South Korea.

As a politician, Johnson is known for his charm, scruffy hair and occasional gaffs, qualities that divide many Londoners on his suitability for mayor, but make him one of the most recognized public faces in the UK.

He served up a few trademark “golly gosh” Boris-isms during press questions on London’s Olympic preparations and environmental plans: “Shall I shut up now?” he asked to the mostly local press as he realized his answers had to be translated; “Gosh, did I really say all that,” when it was; as well as asking what “bosquey glades” was in Korean.

Bashing on with his earlier metaphor to say that London is in the process of “eating the hippo” in its staging of the Olympics (“we’ve probably consumed about one leg of it”) he also stated his plans to make London the “cleanest, greenest city in the world.”

Bold aims, but as mayor of London his duties are municipal at home, but as much about good PR and promoting the city for investment and tourism when abroad.

As for his green policies, in the past he’s been criticized for not having a coherent environmental vision for London: his former Mayoral rival Susan Kramer called his policies “window box environmentalism” and Johnson has previously been something of an environmental skeptic.

But the practicalities of office have changed that and it was in building retrofitting that he said his big green hopes lie for the capital and the plan to reduce London’s CO2 emissions by 60 percent by 2025. So much so that he mentioned retrofitting six times during the short press conference.

Yet it was still hard for the eloquent politician and former journalist to add his usual enthusiasm to his big ticket green policy. “God, it is boring talking about retrofitting, people’s eyes glaze over” he admitted later to CNN, but recovered with a ready line: “No more lagging in lagging, we must be leaders in lagging.”

Electric vehicles were another big area for the Mayor’s greening plans and the Olympics was a means to drive that, turning the city’s municipal vehicles electric and creating more low-carbon public transport. 

He touched on a number of other green ideas, that were maybe just that rather than fixed policies – training and creating building retrofitting jobs, manufacturing electric batteries, building a network of cycle lanes, planting 15,000 trees in the capital, unearthing covered rivers in London as they have in Seoul.

He admitted that poor air quality in the capital was caused by vehicle emissions, but dismissed the role of the London Congestion Charge in cleaning up the London air, calling it “infinitesimally trivial” in comparison with introducing low carbon vehicles. Last year Johnson scrapped plans to extend the area of London where congestion charging was in place.

How would he tell if his term in office had been a success in terms of making London greener?

“I would he happy if the bike hire scheme has been a success, if the cycle highways have gone well, we’ve been able to plant our 15,000 trees; I’ll be happy if we’ve defeated plans for a third runway at Heathrow, which I think we will and winning on the big ticket items which is retrofitting, changing the way we think about buildings.”

He was able to call on some statistics (so popular with the Korean press, who asked where London ranked in terms of air quality among other things) to back up his plans as well as others for entertainment: “London’s a wonderful city where it doesn’t rain 94 percent of the time.”

By turns looking serious, attentive and slightly distracted during translated answers, he looked aghast at one claim that public transport was too expensive. He replied that transport in London is good value before continuing to do his bit for the London tourist board saying how London is now ten percent cheaper for South Koreans thanks to recent devaluation.

The Games open in the summer of 2012, when Johnson’s first term as mayor would be over. Was he planning on attending as mayor? “If things are going well, I’d be crazy not to run again. At the moment I’m very happy the way some things are going. I’m doing a job that is very demanding and gluts the appetite for power” he said downplaying the continuing speculation that he has designs on the conservative party leadership and one day Prime Minister.

As for the C40 Cities conference that was set up by Johnson’s predecessor in 2005, Johnson was looking for “more than warm words and hot air” as “the problems of the planet are urban problems.”

Press duties over on his whirlwind tour of the city, there was time for a quick chat with one of his policy advisors on his speech at a business lunch. Apparently he’d slightly fluffed the Hippopotamus saying, so that was going to be off the menu.