Waiting for Boris

If being best known for acting like a fool on ‘Have I got new for you’ is now a route to political power, then the odds on Brian Blessed being the next Prime Minister must have shortened dramatically tonight.

Somehow I was under the (sad) impression that Brian Blessed was dead. So I went to look him up on Wikipedia, so I could be a little pedant, and am happy to find him alive.

Nathaniel, I did the same thing (look Brian Blessed up on Wikipedia to check he wasn’t dead) while watching the programme. So who is it that reminds us of Brian Blessed that has died?

On the BBC website they give the mayoral voting patterns by area. It looks like those of us in Inner London should declare independence from the Outer London ring of Boris lovers.

“Boris? Jesus christ, what the hell happened to common sense. Why, I mean, why? He is such a prat. This is really the person that Londoners want to run their city? Thank god I don’t live there is all I can say.”

My 16 year old niece…
somewhere in the Midlands.

Well, I guess Ken shouldn’t have taken up with his new pals in New Labour. He was endorsed by the City, for fucks sake (no offense, Daniel). He even urged people to cross Tube picket lines, iirc.

Moving right never works. It has ruined the SPD in Germany, the Democrats are a joke, Labour is self-destructing, and I shouldn’t mention the center-left in Italy, just out of decency.

Sadly, I doubt liberals will learn their lesson.

Bloody good news! Praise the Lord! Thank God! There is hope for Londonistan. What will Red Ken do next?

:)

.
absurd thought –
God of the Universe says
elect a communist

someone who will work full-time
to destroy your country

.
haltterrorism.com

lulu.com/uspace
.

Well, engels, I’m glad I’m not the only one using the dreaded f-word in this thread. As bad is that the BNP got a seat on the GLA.

Don’t blame me for the election result or anything that follows – and I didn’t vote for Ken in 2004 either.

However, I can recommend this blog piece in the Guardian with lots of quotes from the Telegraph:

“The Telegraph columnist’s article attacking Boris Johnson is a reminder of the old adage that, in politics, your opponents are on the other side; your enemies are sitting next to you.”
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/04/im_not_sure_guardiancouk_has.html

Perhaps a factor in the result is that the BBC has been recently reporting that 40 per cent of present London residents were born abroad. As for me, I was born and raised in inner London ages ago. Cue for this:

Was out on the beers last night – only one of the gang admitted voting for Johnson (‘Ken is an alcoholic with his head up his arse’ was roughly his reasoning). The rest dissolved into hysterical giggles at the thought of Mayor Boris. Even my oil industry mate voted Sian/Ken, which begs the question ‘who does Boris represent anyway?’.

Coming home at 5:50 and catching an early morning bus, slapping my Oyster on it and being home by 6:20 I thought to myself ‘yes, Ken really has presided over an appalling transport system’.

So long, and thanks for all the buses. Total pisser about the BNP, but at least it’s relatively harmless.

Whatever else, on the strength of what is in that BBC video clip (link @16), it is more than just difficult to blame Ken (or the many migrant settlers in London) for either damaging London’s economy or for frightening off investors and tourists.

On Eurostat figures, inner London is the most affluent subregion (or ‘NUT’) in the EU, with a margin to spare, in terms of per capita GDP at PPP exchange rates. The challenging question for New Labour is how is it that after 11 years of NL governance inner London also includes four of the poorest districts in Britain among all that affluence?

Of course, there is one credible answer: maintaining the poor districts boosted the Labour vote in London.

Btw in London’s long and illustrious history, since it was founded by the Romans almost two thousand years ago, the city has had several unusual characters as mayors.

Among them was Richard Whittington with his fabled cat:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Whittington#Dick_Wittington_-_Pantomime_character

Another was John Wilkes, an admitted libertine and atheist, who made signal contributions to establishing freedom of the press and in demonstrating that even government ministers are subject to the law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes

A fascinating insight is that Wilkes’s popularity waned after he, as Lord Mayor of London, called out the troops to quell the Gordon riots of 1780. The riots, which effectively amounted to an anti-Catholic pogrom, led to loss of life and widespread looting and destruction of property, including Newgate Prison, which was burned down.

Anti-Catholicism has been a far more significant running theme through English history since Henry VIII than anti-semitism ever was. Disraeli, one of our more illustrious past prime ministers, was the grandson of immigrants to Britain. In one of his novels (1846), he put in the line: “London is the modern Babylon,” which is still resounds.

In 1848, hounded out of mainland Europe, Karl Marx and family as asylum seekers settled in London. Visitors might like to go to Dean Street in Soho and look up at the blue plaque on the front of the Quo Vadis restaurant which marks one of the places where the Marx family lived. There is a curious irony that the arch exponent of the inevitable collapse of capitalism should seek asylum in the capital city of the capitalist superpower of his time.

Notwithstanding Ken and his famed views about the fatalities inflicted by global capitalism, among the causes and consequences of London’s premier standing as a world city:

“The City of London is globalisation in action. It is, first of all, thoroughly international, handling more of the world’s deals in over-the-counter derivatives, global foreign equities, eurobonds and foreign exchange than any other financial centre (see chart 3). Second, its firms specialise in innovative, high-value-added products. Third, the City is living proof that clusters work in the way that economists claim. Capital can move like mercury. The main reason why international finance has made London its home is that everyone is there, making it easier to do complicated deals and to trade quickly in large quantities. The City offers a cluster of talent—financial whizz-kids, lawyers and due-diligence accountants—that is second to none, and self-renewing. It helps that English is a near-universal second language and that London’s time zone makes it possible to trade in a (long) working day with both Asia and America. Regulation is mainly deft but not lax, and the taxman takes a hospitable view of foreigners’ personal earnings.” (subscription)
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8582323

“The worldwide volume of foreign exchange trading is enormous, and it has ballooned in recent years. In April 1989 the average total value of foreign exchange trading was close to $600 billion per day, of which $184 billion were traded in London, $115 billion in New York, and $111 billion in Tokyo. Fifteen years later, in April 2004, the daily global value of foreign exchange trading had jumped to around $1.9 trillion, of which $753 billion were traded daily in London, $461 billion in New York, and $199 billion in Tokyo.”
Krugman and Obstfeld: International Economics (2006) p.311

Strong anti-immigrant sentiment there?

Looking on the bright side, Boris used to be the Tory higher education spokesman. I would far rather he was running london than being in charge of Universities……

I heard Johnson’s father explaining last night that, because Boris studied Classics, anything else, including running a major city, will be a cakewalk.

You couldn’t make it up!

some reasons:

1: very strong generic anti-labour vote across the country
2: strong unspecific “vote for change” (related to 1, but less politically savvy)
3: revolt of outer boroughs against transport policy (which requires that they pay — quite a lot — for the privilege of using the inner boroughs as a rat run; and incentivises — via penalisation of alternatives — use of public transport, which the penalisations largely fund, over private transport, which would otherwise be at gridlock levels)
4: amorphous but potentially vicious protest vote against “multicultural society”
5: a city-banker vote against ken cz he’s anti-capitalist (in acts as mayor he isn’t even slightly; but now and then in rhetoric he’s still red ken of yore)

way down list:
6: bendy buses — a ken innovation with mixed response on london streets (they’re long and they’re a pest if yr on eg a bike, they hog lanes and have a huge sweeping and quite dangerous turning circle); as a bus user i’ve gone from disliking them quite a lot to being fine with them
7: a ton of rather unspecific handwavy stuff that ken is a wrong’un — hangs with a bad crowd blah blah (this kind of gladhanding has obsessed a very small number of pseudo-bien-pensant commentators but i doubt swung many votes)
8: the for-a-laff vote, boris is a breath of hilarious air in the general dreary tight-assed world of politics (boris here getting the same kind of pass that mccain gets from journalists and the public — he feels like a change cz he doesn’t put a padlock on his mouth, and the stuff that as a result comes out of it is chuckled away rather than used against him)
9: boris TV persona is cuddly and harmless and bumbling (further to 7, but less “for a laff” as “what harm can he possibly do”)
10: as mayor of a vast vast city with hugely complex conflicting needs and weirdly limited powers, ken has been a pretty good manager, but explain how this is so makes every listener’s eyes glaze over, and large numbers of foax think (like abb1) that “good management” is an oxymoron, so he doesn’t get the benefit of this — it will only be noticed when it is gone

in the pub last night my friends and i were harangued by a cheerful scot — ex-communist — who voted “left list” on primary vote (ie unelectably far left — this is swp territory) and boris on second transferable: his far left credentials established at some length, he happily (and repeatedly) denounced ken as a c*nt, and then something endless abt what his car did to the gallon and how it was a crime he had to pay £25 a time to enter london in it: i wondered if some of this extreme animus was the remains of sectarian ultra-left in-fighting from years back (ken as trot, this guy as old CP — but “left list” is trot-oid also, so that won’t fly)

so anecdotal: but some of the war here is car-users vs bus-users

(re 8&9: not my view in yr getting ready to be riled, my ventriloquising of the possible view of a small number of boris voters)

“as mayor of a vast vast city with hugely complex conflicting needs and weirdly limited powers” — er yes that wd be the MAYOR that has the weirdly limited powers

think (like abb1) that “good management” is an oxymoron

Hey, it’s not true, I protest. It’s quite the opposite. Organizing things is important and this inner-city driving toll, for example, is on of these things.

In fact, it’s my opponents who were arguing that optimization is not management at all. They equate ‘management’ with ‘motivating your underlings’ aka ‘leadership’. Their main argument consisted mainly of a quote from my comment followed by “stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid”. Check it out.

I’m not a Londoner – thank God – horrible snobby, bossy, greedy people – but if I was I’d have voted Ken. Being London mayor doesn’t give you much power, but Ken has used what power he has to improve London’s transport and traffic. Its still terrible but would have been catastrophic without him.

Its worth remembering, though, that while Ken is red and strongly against the Iraq War (not that it makes any difference what the mayor’s foreign policy is), Boris is a sort of palaeo conservative who has also come out strongly against the Iraq War (before he was running for mayor).

I think Ken’s main mistake was ever rejoining Nu Labor. He’s been dragged down by them. And serve him right.

In the news: Boris has signed up and formally starts on Sunday at midnight.

From this, it appears that top priority is being given to a Law ‘n’ Order agenda, which is fair enough given the regular London news of casual stabbings and street robberies but this is staple Tory stuff and hardly novel in respect of policy aims and objectives:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7381999.stm

It is yet to be seen whether the policy implementation proves to be innovative, effective and value for money spent.

Chances are come the general election Boris’ performance as mayor will be Gordon Brown’s greatest asset . . .

One of Boris’s most high-profile tasks this year?

The Olympic closing ceremony. Take the flag from the mayor of Beijing, wave it about, etc.

I shall be watching from behind the sofa.

there seems to have been quite an extensive fuck-you-ALL (= futile protest) use of the transferable second vote: viz half a million of em for neither ken nor boris

(source: a friend via glum email so treat fact with caution — he might not know what he’s talkin abt)

With the gap between Boris and Ken being about 120,000.

I must say, considering the amount of smears and rubbish printed in the Evening Standard over the last few months, the repeated bleat about nasty smearing Ken Livingstone makes me want to laugh uproariously and then vomit on the people making it.

And then vow never, ever to vote Conservative. Wake up, guys, your man got in by using the same tricks Blair and co. have been using for years.

Health warning: what follows is my personal interpretation of the politics of getting BJ elected as London mayor based on various clues and hints in the news. I cannot document this and the interpretation may be partly or wholly wrong.

The Conservatives have not finally and demonstrably taken leave of their collective senses in putting up BJ and getting him elected as the Conservative candidate for London mayor. BJ’s capacity for buffoonery and disasters is hardly mythical as the current entry for him on Wikipedia shows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson

It was a testimony to the acknowledged electoral potency of Ken Livingstone that it was necessary to find an alternative Big Personality to stand against him and few Conservatives were willing to take on the task of the campaign when there seemed little electoral prospect of success and where the powers of the job are strictly limited – unlike, say, the job of the mayor of New York:

“In broad terms, the mayor is responsible for transport, police and fire services and the general economic development of London. His powers are limited . . ”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3868095.ece

Why then the high risk strategy? The motivating intent was to totally humiliate Gordon Brown and New Labour and in this the strategy has been completely successful so far. BJ’s team of (carefully vetted) advisers will ensure that the policies pursued by the mayoralty fully accord with official Conservative thinking.

David B, what’s the deal with the five votes per head comment?

How many of those sneeringly citing the ‘piccanininies’ article have actually read it? If they had, they would know that Boris was putting the word in the mouth of Tony Blair, in a way well within the scope of legitimate satire.

Um, not exactly:

What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness.

They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

Sorry, but I think that @54 misses the essential point.

The point of BJ’s successful candidacy was to disseminate this sub-text message:

The Conservatives, with David Cameron’s leadership, new policies and a honed election machine, are now capable of getting even BJ elected as London mayor despite KL’s potent image. New Labour has now been vanquished in London as well as the rest of the south east.

There is absolutely nothing teasing about the interview at the link in #29. It is brutally open and frank.

Harry, this is a high stakes game. Conservative Central Office knows perfectly well that if BJ f**ks up then that will be hugely damaging to Conservative prospects in London and beyond at the general election.

The fact is that London’s economy prospered during KL’s eight years as mayor – mostly, not because of what he did but because of what he didn’t do. The silly, socialist stuff was mainly rhetoric although there was too much wasteful tax ‘n’ spending going on.

David Cameron is very much associated with BJ’s candidacy so if he flounders badly then DC will have to take the blame, which I’m sure he appreciates and will therefore take necessary administrative precautions against contingencies.

bob b, while they can probably manage his policies to avoid embarassment in that area, are they going to send him around for the next four years (or however long the term is) wearing a gag? I can see nothing short of that being enough to avoid a fairly solid stream of gaffes and negative sound bites, and as we know policy achievements are a trivial part of modern politics.

@61: We can only wait and see but I expect that it has been impressed upon BJ in discrete ways what the political cost of gaffes could be at the general election with, perhaps, occasional reminders from his fellow Etonian of the Duke of Wellington’s reputed observation that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of the old school.

Btw nowadays, we are very properly concerned about about the care of battlefield casualties among our troops but I suspect we incline to under-rate the scale of slaughter in those historic battles of the Napoleonic wars two centuries ago and that is a mistake. The combined casualty rate on both sides at Waterloo in 1815 exceeded 6,000 an hour:
http://www.napoleonic-literature.com/WE/Casualties.html

Casualty lists for Waterloo, posted on the web, include many surnames from the most illustrious families in Britain so it wouldn’t be at all surprising if many of the commissioned officers had attended Eton as pupils. Late during the battle of Waterloo, Henry Paget was on horse besides Wellington when his leg was hit by a cannon shot. He exclaimed, “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” — to which Wellington looked down and replied, “By God, sir, so you have!” and reputedly resumed his survey of the battle through his telescope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Paget,_1st_Marquess_of_Anglesey

Curiously, as a link with those times, David Cameron is apparently a descendent of one of King William IV’s many illegitimate children.

As for Oxford, the university famously declined to award an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher – possibly for reasons explored at length in Simon Jenkins: Thatcher and Sons (Penguin Books, 2006)

MArtin — are you criticising me? I’d have gone for Livingstone first, Paddick second. My point above was just that if you wanted to be rid of Livingstone that was no reason at all to give first preference to Johnson — at best second preference after Paddick. Those who voted for Johnson had to have other reasons than dislike for Livingstone’s moral character (not least because there is no reason at all to believe that it is worse than Johnson’s). All this in spite of bob b’s rosy optimism about the ability of Tory central office to control BJ.

Harry be realistic. People who hated Ken were hardly likely to be the types lining up to vote for a gay ex-copper who created a cannabis-tolerance zone in Brixton. Also, I think UK voters really really aren’t used to the idea of transferable voting. We’re not used to it, and the tactics of it are not simple.

There was no media discussion whatsoever of the tactical possibilities inherent in the system. Indeed, I consider myself relatively savvy when it comes elections and voting and it took me a good long while on the internet to even find an official explanation of how the Mayoral and the GLA voting system works.

Basically, the whole thing was treated as a FPTP elections between Johnson and Livingstone, by both the media and the electorate.

katherine — sorry, I should have been more specific — I was only criticising whoever it was on this thread who said they voted for BJ because they disliked Ken. I imagine most people who voted for BJ did so because they resent the congestion charge. I don’t mean to imply that voters were duped, or anything like that. I accept the point about people not understanding the system or how to use it. It is not a good idea to have a wide variety of voting systems in place, nor (in my opinion) to have the proliferation of levels of government that new labour has encouraged. (I was opposed to setting up the office of Mayor in the first place, and remain opposed to it, but that’s another story).

Shorter Stigand: On one occasion while being harassed by a reporter Livingstone lashed out with a comment which was insensitive but not racist. I affect to see no significant difference between this incident and Johnson’s lifelong litany of gaffes, insults and casual racism, expressed not only verbally but in published articles.

Is this to be the way of the future? Readers may be interested to read this in the New Statesman on 3 May:

“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

james –thanks. They list rejected 1st choice votes and rejected second choice votes separately. Did each voter have two separate papers? I don’t understand exactly what didn’t get counted. The figures do, indeed, look extremely high, in both cases.

Because they thought “it says second so it must be secondary”.

“in spite of bob b’s rosy optimism”

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.

Well, I can’t get poole’s link to work, but the context of the quote as he blocks it is, in fact, fairly damning.

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!

This evening’s news from London doesn’t look to be an auspicious start to curbing violent crime:

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

More important now IMO than continuing to speculate on whether BJ is an incorrigible or redeemable buffoon is to observe and assess the styles and ways of the new mayoralty in London.

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.