Boris's hero? The mayor from 'Jaws'

For more than 30 years, the bungling mayor in the thriller Jaws has been a byword for municipal folly. But now the hapless mayor Larry Vaughn, who urged townsfolk to swim in the film's famously shark-infested waters, has emerged as the unlikely hero of London's latest candidate for mayor, Boris Johnson.

Mr Johnson, who launched his bid to become the Conservative candidate for London mayor on Monday, has long praised the fictional mayor of Amity from the Steven Spielberg classic for his refusal to bow to public hysteria about the risk of shark attack.

His comments may have been light-hearted, but from now on Mr 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. OK 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 1976 film, Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton, ignores warnings of a shark attack after the mangled body of a holidaymaker has washed ashore. He refuses to close local beaches for fear of damaging the town's lucrative tourist trade.

Vaughn insists the death could have been caused by a motorboat and attempts to claim that the threat has been lifted, but several people are mauled to death in the water. The mayor even berates a 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 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... 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 Mr Johnson, who wrote in 2003 that he was "heroically right in principle". He wrote: "In any other context but a Spielberg movie, his conduct would have been wholly intellectually defensible."