Category: Mayor Johnson

Boris Johnson came across reasonably well on last night’s London Talking debate as did Brian Paddick who quite impressed after a slow start. Livingstone looked tired and old and tried to blame the recent surge in teen murder on Thatcherism from what I could work out. Nothing to do with ten years of a Labour government and eight years of a Labour Mayor then.

I was disappointed by the audience to be honest. With only 12 per party they were all party representatives and horribly partisan. The candidates were models of reasonableness in comparison. In particular the questions from Labour and the LibDems to Boris were at best un-illuminating and at worst just insults. I don’t think many London voters would have been impressed by these questions.

Ealing councillor Ed Yeo was one of the Tory “audience”. He fluffed his question to the Mayor which came out essentially as: “Why are you being so nasty”. The Mayor was able to brush this off easily as he had indeed been pretty sweet through the proceedings. As we saw with the little helpers and leftie Muslim letters to the Guardian the Mayor can afford to sound reasonable when he has lots other people who can do the nasty stuff for him. So it proved with questions to Boris where a Labour activist raised the Darius Guppy slur and with a LibDem lady piling in too. Not very edifying when there are big issues of transport and policing to deal with.

The combination of children’s presenter Konnie Huq and a bunch of over-excited activists made for pretty jarring viewing.

Spartan Boris Johnson writes his last column in the Telegraph today. He has cut out all of his other commitments to campaign fulltime to be London Mayor.

The Independent reported yesterday that he would spend £1 million on his campaign.

Boris Johnson effectively launched his mayoral campaign today with a hard hitting column in the Evening Standard, a full page ad in the Standard and a redesign of his own website which brings his campaign themes into sharper focus. He has chosen to major on the wave of gang-related teen killings that plagued London last year ands looks like being repeated this year with two deaths to-date. Johnson is quite right to raise this issue. It is one that the Mayor and the Met Commissioner have consistently ignored because it flies in the face of their “we’ve cracked crime” mood music. If you look at the figures in any kind of detail it is easy to see that they are essentially talking rubbish, see previous posting.

Johnson’s ad in the Standard pretty much says it all. There is some argument about the actual number 26 or 27. I believe this arises from one of the cases which happened just outside the formal GLA boundary, see Assembly Member Roger Evans’ comment here. The Standard and Boris are going with 27. The BBC and I are going with 26.

Boris Johnson, Tory candidate for London Mayor, has come out fighting with a typically rumbustious New Year message:

ITS TIME TO GIVE LONDON BACK TO LONDONERS

I want 2008 to be a year of change and improvement in London.

It is time for an end to the tragic series of gang-related stabbings and shootings that have cost the lives of 28 teenagers and which are spreading a pall of insecurity over too much of the city.

I want all Londoners to have the optimism and confidence that goes with increased safety on the streets, on the buses, at station platforms – and the sense of opportunity that comes with better transport and wonderful new housing.

All these things can now be better achieved if we put an end to the tired, divisive and cronyist regime of Ken Livingstone, where there is now an epidemic of wastefulness bordering on corruption.

It is time for a new administration that stops the bullying and the bossing, that stops mainlining fines from motorists, that gets on the side of the hard-pressed commuter and stops the grotesque abuse of taxpayers’ money.

It is time we gave London back to Londoners. Happy New Year”.

He is right to prioritise public safety and highlight the continuing toll of death being visited on our young people. It was only a few hours into the New Year when London claimed its first young victim, see here.

Media personality and part-time MP Dianne Abbot tabled an Early Day Motion last week saying:

That this House condemns the reference by the hon. Member for Henley of black people as `piccaninnies’, of Africans as having `water melon smiles’ and of African people that `left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain’; notes that the leader of the Conservative Party, the rt. hon. Member for Witney, has been asked by leading members of London’s black community to disassociate his party from these remarks and has refused to do so stating that the rt. hon. Member’s remarks have been `taken out of context and fail to properly represent what he has said in the past’; further notes that the hon. Member has never disputed the fact that he wrote these comments about black and African people; and believes that there is no context in which such remarks could be defensible or justified.

In doing this she confirms that she is happy to be another of the Mayor’s stooges. She forgets that Boris is not the only person to use the P word – see Darcus Howe in the New Statesman here.

So far this ringing denunciation of Boris Johnson has roused just one Labour MP to sign up – another dismal lefty, Andrew Dismore.

As well as being the hypocrite who sent her son to the (very high) fee-paying City of London Boy’s School Abbot is another Labour figure sullied by her association with the disgraced, convicted and disqualified Miranda Grell.

A few minutes ago the ConservativeHome website reported that the results of the Conservative primary to select a candidate to be London Mayor are as follows:

Boris Johnson: 15,661 (79.0%)
Victoria Borwick: 1,869 (9.4%)
Andrew Boff: 1,674 (8.4%)
Warwick Lightfoot: 609 (3.1%)

20,000 people took the trouble to vote. I hope that most of those will join the Conservative party in working to remove King Newt and replace him with Boris.

We know that the Labour party are worried about this development from the amount of flak that Johnson got at the Labour conference yesterday. Ed Balls, he of the dodgy housing expenses claim, called Johnson “a gaffe-prone, TV quiz-show clown – a Bullingdon club throwback to a bygone age”. Apparently although Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper earn about £240K a year they still bend the rules to claim £27K per year to pay their London mortgage by claiming that their Stoke Newington home, where their kids go to school, is in fact their second home. Let’s see, you work in London, your wife works in London, your kids go to school in London but your main home is in Yorkshire. Talk about hand in the till.

The BACKBORIS site is carrying this message from Bozza:

I’d like to thank Londoners for giving me this opportunity.

As I visited all of London’s 32 boroughs in the last few weeks, the message is loud and clear – King Newt’s days are numbered. Across London I’ve met people fed up with paying so much to city hall and getting so little in return.

The job of the Mayor is simple – to get people to work on time, to ensure people feel safe on the streets, to help people find a place to call home, to celebrate our diversity and to champion our success.

My determination to lead this city is stronger than ever. After seeing both the good and bad that London has to offer, I am committed to making London greater and standing up for every Londoner that invests so heavily in our city.

I want to be a Mayor for all Londoners, from Zone 6 to Zone 1. A Mayor that will listen, will learn and will lead.

BBC London have a complete TV recording of Boris’ speech this morning – follow link.

They also have an interview with Boris recorded just after his speech – follow link.

I was invited to take part in Boris Johnson’s launch this morning. It took place at the old council chamber at County Hall. Things got off to a shakey start when the sound on the video was missing. After this was sorted all went well. Boris gave a bravura performance delighting 100 odd of his supporters who had turned out to see him along with the press. It is clear that he intends to be a mayor for all Londoners and focus on three core issues of housing, transport and crime.

He talked about making sure that London’s youngsters benefit from the Olympics and making London safer and more civilised. He spent a lot of time talking about housing which is a key issue for him, especially housing for families rather than rabbit hutches. He rightly points out that we manage to combine very low housing densities with very tiny flats. Doh!

I have put up a link to his campaign on the sidebar, right. If you think Livingstone has had his day and that it is time to have a mayor that cares about Londoners and delivers then go and have a look.

See Telegraph commentary which has majored on his comments about people having a go in the face of anti-social behaviour.