As best I can tell, BJ seems to have adopted wholesale the Blairite innovations in spin and PR presentation, so we have lots of pics of BJ doing incidental things – jogging, cycling – with much instructing of officials to do what is expected of them in the New Order along with dire threats as to the fate that will befall them if they fail to come up with the goodies.

All that has been welded on to pre-Thatcherite Tory habits, namely in government you don’t waste time on analysing problems or issues. What you do is to find some plausible person to solve the problem and appoint him (it is usually a him) to do so with much fanfare. If (when) he doesn’t solve the problem, he gets fired. Top down prevails.

So I imagine that the 40,000 rejected first ballots are people who botched the whole thing and thus had their whole vote rejected, whereas the 400,000 rejected second preferences may have had their first but not their second preference counted. But it’s not entirely clear from the results page I linked too, certainly.

A gunman has fired for a second time on armed police officers in a stand-off near the King’s Road, Chelsea, a highly fashionable part of London – “So far there are no injuries and no one has been arrested.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7386569.stm

We’ve had pictures of Boris jogging and bicycling, laughing and looking mean. The lead is still on being especially tough on youth crime. Today’s call is to set up 100 “respect schools” – Saturday courses where troubled teenagers can combine sport and academic subjects:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23482556-details/Boris+war+on+knife+gangs/article.do

Great. I hope it works. Twelve young men killed in London so far this year is a dozen too many.

What isn’t encouraging is this kind of spin in one report – quoting: “The meeting comes amid reports that Mr Johnson had put Britain’s most senior policeman on notice to dramatically cut crime or face the axe.”

The fact is that the London mayor can’t sack the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police – only the government can do that and only the government can appoint the Commissioner. My guess is that if the Commissioner, or anyone else, knew where to find a silver bullet that could curb violent youth crime than it wouldn’t be the problem that it is.

For any here sufficiently interested to keep up with the pics of Boris doing things and all the spin, I can only suggest bookmarking the webpage of: This is London, and dipping in from time to time.

I don’t think Boris is stupid, though most of the kids I went to school with could have written those scripts if the kind of resources that went into Boris’s education. But, as dsquared points out in an earlier post, plenty of smart people cannot manage. My worry about bob b’s optimistic hypothesis is that Boris not only cannot manage, but can’t be managed. But we’ll see!

Boris as TV presenter: If I recall correctly, Boris wrote the scripts himself, and knows the subjects well. Correct me if I am wrong (I’m sure you will!)

5 Muslim votes per head: I wouldn’t claim that electoral fraud in Britain is confined to the Muslim community, but virtually all the recent cases have involved South Asians. I don’t think this is seriously in doubt.

What I’m saying is that David Cameron’s close association with BJ - they even went to the same school – will be a restraining influence. If that restraining influence doesn’t prove effective then the Conseravtives will surely pay a political price at the general election.

An interesting but neglected issue is the prospective influence of BJ’s classical education – a 2:1 in classics at Oxford – on the governance of London. I mean, will BJ be taking a horse into the London general assembly on the grounds that Caligula set a compelling precedent?

I can foresee many brushing up on Suetonius: Lives of the Twelve Caesars, for guidance as to omens.

http://www.london.gov.uk/gla/elections/mayoral/

The BNP was the first or second choice of fully 8%.

However, with regard to the electoral system, look at the numbers of spoiled votes (450,000) and votes with no second preference (400,000). Combined they almost match Livingstone’s first preference vote. Seems very high, no?

“Claire Provost, reporting on a demonstration outside City Hall on the night of the London mayoral count, finds herself put in a pen in by police. A case of democracy in action?”
http://www.newstatesman.com/200805030006

And engels comment seems right to me—there is a big difference between the comment Livingstone made in response to someone harrassing him (a social peer, what’s more) and Johnson’s history which dates back a long way (to the Bullingdon Club—whose behaviour, by the way, has been stunningly underplayed by the press, does no-one from Oxford at that time remember what they used to do? Kids from my school used to go to prison for less, but they were oiks of course).