This Peter Brookes cartoon in the Times today eloquently makes the point that Hilary Clinton has spent too much time talking about her opponent.
The London Mayor has made much the same mistake.
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Category: Mayor Johnson
Brian Paddick, the LibDem Mayoral candidate, today challenged Boris and the Mayor to join him in running the London Marathon on 13th April. If I was a LibDem activist I would not be too impressed with my candidate using up valuable campaigning time to do a marathon. What’s more his legs will probably be useless for the last two weeks of the campaign. Paddick is showing his inexperience. What’s worse for every picture of him looking butch in his shorts there will be ten of him red-faced and panting and woe betide him if he trips up along the way.
Brian Paddick says:
Running London is an extremely tough and demanding job and the Mayor needs to be mentally and physically fit. I am running the London Marathon this year and I challenge all Mayoral candidates to join me – it will be a real test of their mettle. If people vote for me on 1st May, they know I will be fit for office.
Yeah, whatever.
Having met Boris I don’t reckon he has the build for marathons. The Mayor has more sense too. He would be forgiven for using his age as an excuse – if he gets elected he can start to draw his old age pension during his next term. He already qualifies for a Freedom Pass.
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Boris calls Brown a lier
Boris Johnson is absolutely hopping mad today. At the Northern Rock press conference this morning Brown didn’t like a question about whether he was endorsing Livingstone for Mayor. He answered by talking about Boris and suggesting that if Boris won police numbers would go down. Livingstone has been stupid to talk about Boris so much and Brown is making the same mistake – why couldn’t Brown say something positive about Livingstone’s campaign? Probably for the same reason that he never uses his name – he absolutely hates Livingstone.
Anyway Boris was so mad he said:
The first time Gordon Brown said this he misled the House and I demanded an apology. Now he uses his Northern Rock press conference to spread the same lies. When I am Mayor of London, police numbers will increase in their hundreds in the Capital, as I explained in my 36 page crime manifesto. For the Prime Minister to say different is just plain rubbish. Mired in maladministration, Labour are just trying to deflect attention away from themselves at a time when the public are crying out for change. I offer that change in London – clearly the Prime Minister doesn’t like it one bit.
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Jake Morris, spankee, speaks up
Jake Morris was the callow youth who got duffed up at Boris’s crime manifesto launch on Wednesday, see Comment is free piece. He wrote yesterday evening to point out that Boris had lashed out at the wrong target – it was the Guardian not the Mirror that had had a go at Boris regarding his office space.
The “sound spanking” Boris gave to the Mirror was very good indeed. Though not remotely accurate.
The story he accused us over was, err, not ours. It was a Guardian one.
Jake Morris
Daily Mirror
If I had made such a tit of myself I might have kept quiet.
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Jasper suspended
News is emerging this morning that the Mayor’s sleeze-mired police and race advisor, Lee Jasper, has been suspended from City Hall. Jasper’s story is that he has voluntarily submitted himself to a police enquiry – he could have done that three months ago before proof emerged that he had meddled in LDA operational matters and six of his projects had been referred to the police for investigation. The Mayor’s office has produced this press release which is full of the usual bluster.
The Boris campaign sounds pretty narked:
This is an outrageous attempt to avoid scrutiny. It was only 12 hours ago that the Mayor informed us that he had full confidence in Mr Jasper. What has changed his mind? Mr Jasper has been suspended – presumably on full pay – until after the election, in the hope that the full facts will not come out. It is clear that the Mayor’s handling of City Hall is descending into sleaze, chaos, and now cover-up. Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been wasted or trousered by cronies of the Mayor. And we now have the police called in to investigate the Mayor’s chief police adviser. It is time to clean up City Hall, and time London had a change from this tired, stale, incompetent and increasingly decadent regime. How can the Mayor possibly focus on crime, housing and transport when he is mired in maladministration?
I went into town yesterday morning to listen to Boris’ crime manifesto launch. It was a treat to be in the 28th floor conference suite at Millbank Tower. It has 270 degree views of the London and the Thames which looked magnificent in the sunshine and receding mist.
I wrote a report for the Guardian’s Comment is free blog. Their deputy editor, Matt Seaton, has asked me to do a weekly piece in the run up to mayoral election. Apparently they want to make sure they’re “covering the waterfront politically”. Very commendable. Anyway don’t stress, I haven’t gone soft.
Back to Boris. The speech was absolutely rigid with numbers and the manifesto document is referenced and footnoted throughout. It looks more like a scientific paper than manifesto. Clearly Boris’ team are savvy enough to know that if they make uncosted promises or get the numbers wrong they will get into trouble with the more nerdy bloggers like me as well as the Mayor’s press machine. Although Boris retained his lightness of touch it would be hard to argue on the basis of this performance that Boris has not had his Prince Hal moment. For the whole piece follow this link.
At the event I introduced myself to Tim Mongomerie who did this piece yesterday for ConservativeHome. He congratulated me on this blog and the jacket I was wearing. He wondered if it was German. I explained that it came from Ted Baker and was a birthday present from my wife.
See it on TV here.
Today the Mayoral press machine went to town on the headline that the Mayor is to invest £500 million in walking and biking. Before you fall off your seat remember that this is over ten years – one way of making the number seem bigger than it is. Boris Johnson’s campaign team came right back and complained that the Mayor was was playing catch up and that his ideas were not ambitious enough.
Boris is right. We do need to change people’s behaviour and we do need to be more ambitious. You can only spend money once and Transport for London is burning £1.6 billion a year on the current account. Rather more of this needs to be directed at walking and cycling and away from other modes.
The £500 million sounds like a rather modest sum when you compare it with the bus subsidy over ten years £6.2 billion or the Tube subsidy over ten years £5.5 billion or the DLR subsidy over ten years £800 million. None of the later numbers include capital spending which would make the comparison even more grotesque. It looks like the two Green assembly members have sold themselves somewhat cheaply. The Mayor could not have got his budget through without them.
The picture of the Mayor and the rather cheap Jenny Jones on their Post Office issue bikes made me laugh.
Yesterday the Mayor was making a song and dance about police numbers in his budget speech, and the Prime Minister immediately contradicted him.
The Mayor claims 10,000 extra officers in London under his tenure. He is of course counting PCSOs as the equivalent of PCs whereas as even our dissimulating PM will not go that far. The Mayor also does a bit of erroneous rounding.
Yesterday dismal Andrew Dismore, Labour MP for Hendon asked this patsy question of the PM at Prime Minister’s Questions:
Will my right hon. Friend personally congratulate Chief Superintendent Steve Kavanagh, his officers and police community support officers, and especially the safer neighbourhoods teams on their achievement in cutting crime in Barnet by 8.6 per cent. so far this year, on top of 16 per cent. last year, with 24.6 per cent. in total? That is one of the best records in the Met. With 5,600 extra officers and 3,700 PCSOs in London provided by the Mayor, what does my right hon. Friend think the result will be of the cuts in the budget proposed by the Tory candidate for London Mayor?
Note that Andrew Dismore shows his ignorance of basic maths – you multiply percentage in this case not add them.
The PM answered as follows:
In the London area alone, there are 6,000 more police than there were in 1997. As my hon. Friend rightly said, in graphic detail, crime is down in his constituency. The choice in London will be between an administration that wants to employ more police and wants to get crime down, and what the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) has said, which is that he wishes to cut spending on the Metropolitan police. That would be disastrous for the police, disastrous for London and bad for the whole country.
This response caused Boris Johnson to lose his rag – quite right too. Read about it here.
So, the PM says 6,000, Dismore says 9,300 and the Mayor says 10,000. The rounding issue is important, if Dismore’s numbers are right, because the Mayor is talking about adding 1,000 officers next year. If he does we will then have 10,300 officer next year but the Mayor is already claiming 10,000 when in reality we have 9,000 extra – if you round like a normal person. It seems that the Mayor’s maths is as bad as Dismore’s.
Michael Eboda, who goes by the title of editor of New Nation (part of the Ethnic Media Group), today became the latest of the Mayor’s stooges to keep up the attacks on Boris Johnson on the Guardian’s Comment is free blog.
Eboda tried to suggest that as there was apparently some unpleasant heckling from the crowd at Monday’s Evening Standard London Influentials Debate that is somehow indicative of a general attitude of Boris Johnson, his supporters and the Tory party. One of the posters suggests that Eboda’s assertion is pretty much totally undermined by the online videos published by the Standard. I listened carefully to clips 6 and 7 on the Evening Standard’s website and you can’t hear even a murmur of the abuse that Eboda alludes to. You can hear Boris muttering “absolutely right” in the background whilst Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is speaking.
There is indeed uproar later, see clip 12, when the tiresome Eboda yet again brought up the whole piccaninnies thing. According to Eboda:
That language is not acceptable in any context.
He probably needs to have a word with Darcus Howe then, see here.
Judge for yourself if you think Eboda can voice independent opinions when he is so dependent on the Mayor’s patronage.
Follow this link to find out how in 2003 the GLA spent £261K on recruitment advertising. The bulk went to the Guardian and the rest to the ethnic press. No advertising in mainstream media outside the Guardian – pretty questionable in itself but the Mayor’s personal feud with the Standard seems to prevent the GLA from using it. Ethnic Media Group was given £38K but generated only 1 shortlisted candidate and no appointments.
Follow this link to find out how when the Mayor spent £793K to advertise giving away 100,000 free Oyster cards he spent £77K with ineffective ethnic press (including New Nation).
Is it such stretch to suggest that Eboda is bought and paid for?
After last week’s launch of Boris’s campaign in the Standard it was Brian Paddick’s turn for the LibDems today, see his piece here. He is majoring on crime obviously and points out that the Police could tackle knife crime if they prioritise it highly enough and ridiculed Livingstone for his impotence in the face of knife crime and his attempts to spin the crime statistics after his previuos pre-election pledge to halve crime.
Note that Gordon Brown was waffling on about knife crime on Sunday and talking about zero tolerance zones in London amongst other places. Where would the tolerance zones be? The main problem is that Brown’s state only sends 17% of knifemen to jail.
Ludicrously Paddick wants to close down central London by banning cars. I’d like to see Brown and his ministers give up the limos.
Paddick did have one good idea – kill the Low Emission Zone. This is a Livingstone con, see previous posting, and Paddick has rightly spotted that it will simply increase prices with little direct benefit that would not come in due course through normal upgrading of vehicles over time.
Phil Taylor 