Category: Mayor Johnson

It took until almost midnight to get the official announcement. It was a relief when it came and both Boris and Ken gave gracious speeches.

Boris Johnson 1,168,738 votes.

Ken Livinstone 1,028,966 votes.

A majority of 139,772 votes.

The turnout was respectably high at 45%.

For full results go to London Elects website here.

Yesterday Livingstone launched his last big push and unveiled this poster. Typical Ken. £39 billion? Over what timescale? The context of this £39 billion is that London remits £17.8 billion net to the Treasury EVERY year. Livingstone’s big problem is that he has failed to get London’s fair share out of the Treasury. He makes out that it is such a big deal that he has succeeded in getting an additional £4 billion out of the Chancellor for social housing in London but fails to acknowledge what a poor performance this really is.

As I have blogged before the Mayor really screwed up the Crossrail negotiation. London will only receive a £5.1 billion government grant for Crossrail. London will itself have to pay the rest of the £16 billion with unlimited liability for overruns. As the Standard reported last week London’s Tube and bus fares will rise above inflation to pay for some of this bill. Livingstone is a terrible negotiator. He was so keen to add Crossrail to his train set he drove a really bad bargain.

It is the Mayor who is the joke.

After a night of Overview and Scrutiny Committee followed by West Ealing Neighbours I finished off with watching the Question Time mayoral debate on BBC1. It really was pretty disappointing as have been all the TV debates of this campaign. Why do TV producers think that the public is going to be engaged by a load of tittle tattle? The real issues remained unilluminated. The productivity of the Met – untouched. Cost control at Transport for London – untouched. The value of the London Development Agency’s spending – untouched.

At least three times Dimbleby took it on himself to have a go at Boris Johnson. He didn’t bother with Paddick and had a go at Livingstone maybe once.

Boris managed to keep it serious but he still had two of the best lines. He described Livingstone as “emanating from the bowels of the Labour movement”. In relation to the BNP’s suggestion that their supporters should give their second votes to Boris and asked to explain it he said: “You’ll have to ask the tiny minds of the BNP”.

On balance the two main candidates were pretty evenly balanced with Paddick looking like a pigmy. Paddick pretty much said that those voting for him should use their second votes, in effect their first votes if given to Boris or Livingstone, as they see fit.

Paul Waugh and the Evening Standard should know better than this. In the article Tessa Jowell Minister for London said: “Boris Johnson has been caught out admitting that his bus policy would cost £100 million more than he originally told us. For Londoners, that means an extra £2 a week on a weekly bus pass.”

This is voodoo economics. It confuses current spending with capital spending. But worse than that it shows why so many Labour politicians, including senior ministers, aren’t fit to run a piss up in a brewery.

On the current account TfL lost £617 million on the buses alone in 2006/7. In 2006/7 every bus journey cost TfL 87p but they only managed to collect 55p. Doh! Their bus fare dodging bill is £46.7 million of which £8 million is down to the bendy buses that Boris is seeking to replace.

One of the Mayor’s own capital expenditure plans for the buses, announced last November, is to spend £10 million on just 10 experimental hydrogen powered buses.

It does not take much wit to work out how you replace one capital asset, the bendy buses, which will have a finite life in any case, with another, newer one, the new Routemaster, and to fund this from the savings you will make by having bus conductors to clamp down on the fare dodging. We might not get £100 million of new buses in Boris’s first year but I don’t think anyone was planning for that.

The Boris campaign should just turn around and say we will buy new buses over time, they will be better than bendies, they will be paid for at least in part by reducing fare dodging, what’s the problem? The Livingstone campaign claims to be serious but this is just fatuous nonsense.

If you are not registered to vote or need a postal vote you need to get your skates on. The deadline is 5pm tomorrow, that is Wednesday 16th April.

You can download the form here to register to vote and here for a postal ballot (London Borough of Ealing residents only).

You then need to fill them in and run around to the Town Hall – probably too late to post now if you want to be sure.

London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham have a very good voting guide here.

Yesterday in the Evening Standard Andrew Gilligan did a pretty good job of explaining the importance of your second vote in the Mayoral election. If you vote for either Boris or Livingstone your second vote is totally irrelevant. You can not use it, vote twice for your favourite or vote for anyone else and it will make no difference whatsoever.

If one candidate gets over half the votes that is it and no second votes are ever looked at. But, if no candidate gets at least half the votes then all other candidates are excluded except for the two most popular, who will almost certainly be Boris and Livingstone. Then the second votes OF THE EXCLUDED CANDIDATES are examined and any second votes for the remaining two candidates are allocated to them. Therefore if you vote LibDem, Green, UKIP, etc your second vote is worth more than your first vote in effect. You get to chose the next Mayor. Boris or Livingstone. A fresh start or 4 more years of Livingstone?

Tonight Cllr Reen and I spent an hour at Northfield tube station handing out a leaflet with this graphic on one side and a few highlights from Boris’s crime manifesto on the other.

It reminded me of when we were doing this two years ago in the run up to the local elections. Although we won big time in Northfield it was dispiriting trying to get people’s attention on their way home. At the time I said:

This is experience slightly took the wind out of our sails. People in a hurry to get home don’t want to see yet another obstacle standing between them and their hearth. Maybe one in five took the leaflets with many muttering as they went past that we had their votes. I was impressed how polite and interested many people who you might think were not natural Tory voters were. Many new immigrants seem to be much less cynical about politics and happy to see local activists in their faces. Too many white, professional looking types were avoiding eye contact, tut-tutting and looking too important by far to engage with a mere candidate for the council.

Although Mark and I were not met like prodigal sons the reception was definitely warmer than I remembered it two years ago. I am confident that we will have a new mayor on 2nd May.

One London (ex-UKIP) assembly member Peter Hulme Cross stopped to chat. He lives locally. He suggested that Tories should use their top up vote for them as the Tories won’t get any top up seats. I don’t think so.

The hour was enlivened by a couple of heroin smokers who kept trying to use the loos along with a few hippies that had incense and cbd products for sale. We swapped banter with the station staff trying to sort them out. One was for Boris the other wasn’t – but then he wasn’t for Livingstone either. That’s how you win modern elections. You persuade your opponent’s voters to stay at home. Too many of Livingstone’s voters will I am sure.