Category: Communications disease

The Mayor’s press machine have got themselves in a tizzy about an article in the Sunday Times today. The good news is that we will not the wretched Londoner anymore after February. The Mayor apparently does not reckon to publish it in March and April. Boris Johnson has promised not to publish it if he is elected so if you want to see the back of it vote Boris! Still nice to see the Mayor’s 265 comms people getting some overtime on a Sunday.

As ever these people are twisting the truth. This so-called paper usually comes out at the start of the month – not the end of it! They will get the February issue out at the end of the month so there are only two clear months between then and the elections.

In 2004 the election was on June 10th. The last issue of the Londoner came out in April leaving only one clear month.

I guess a month’s worth of the Londoner will not make much difference in a climate where the Mayor is spending £100 million a year on advertising and PR.

A posting on Guido Fawkes’ blog yesterday made me think that it was time to revisit the whole Livingstone self-promotion story. I have never linked to any Guido stories previously because the comments tend to be rather sweary and ranty, so be warned. Yesterday’s posting was about about how the Londoner is distributed to MPs. It also made a possibly erroneous claim about copies being posted to households outside London.

Many posters reported how they were not getting copies although they actually live in London albeit most of them reckoned not to want to see it anyway. For myself I haven’t seen a copy in months. I have been reduced to getting copies off the Mayor’s website in order to criticise its blatant bias.

The Londoner is one of the key elements of the Mayor’s £100 million a year comms spending. The figure makes the £1 million each the Mayor and Boris are going to spend on their election campaigns look like small beer.

The Londoner is costing £2.8 million in the current financial year. This is paid for by extorting levies from the GLA bodies in return for which they get advertising space. Transport for London have to pay £1.5 million and the London Development Agency has to pay £500K. Even the Metropolitan Police, who should probably be concentrating on stopping teenagers being stabbed to death, have to pay £250K. The net cost of the Mayor’s self-promotion to the Greater London Authority is therefore only £550K.

It is notable that the Fire Brigade (LFEPA) pays nothing. It is no coincidence that the Mayor has been complaining about LFEPA’s governance. In other words he chafes that he does not control it. They told him to get stuffed when he asked for a contribution to the Londoner.

The Mayor’s press officers and comms people now number 265. Let us assume that the average cost to Londoners of these staff is £50K per head, ie an average salary of £30K plus on-costs of £20K per head per annum to recruit and manage them and put them in smart, new, IT equipped buildings. That adds up to a £13.25 million per annum bill which is another important element of the Mayor’s £100 million a year comms spending.

We know that these people are tragically under-employed. As well as trying to police the Guido Fawkes blog, see above, the Mayor’s comms people have been keeping an eye on me too, see here and here.

To get the 265 figure Assembly Members have had to ask the question three times, it has taken over a year and the Mayor has dissembled all the way.

Today the Mayor is is telling us what we already know. People are in favour of other people’s taxes. This press release says that 66% of Londoners are in favour of the Mayor’s proposal of a £25 level of Congestion Charge for larger vehicles.

The Mayor spent over a million on this consultation. Today he publishes a poll rather than the consultation results. Back in September the bill was £1.136 million, see previous posting. Apparently it has now gone up to £1.4 million, see this list of £4.2 million worth of TfL consultations last year. Of this total £3.3 million was for two consultations. The Emissions related charging and the LEZ. Almost all of the money has been spent on adverts the only point of which is to promote the Mayor’s green credentials. As ever the Mayor’s main priority is his own re-election chances.

I suspect that the results of the consultation exercise are extremely disappointing in terms of number of responses. Maybe too many of the responses were negative. It looks like the Mayor then forced TfL to spend an extra £300K to do a poll which asked a question along the lines of “Would you like something really lovely at no cost to you?” Naturally most people said yes. The Mayor has not yet published the consultation report in spite of repeated questions from Tory AM Angie Bray. She asked for the results in November and December but she was stonewalled each time. Sounds like a repeat of the West London Tram consultation which came out against the Tram so the Mayor commissioned market research which “proved” the opposite. Talk about unprincipled.

Today most of the papers have caught up with the “Met spends £3.3 million on recruitment ads for PCSOs” story – see BBC for instance. The image right is taken from the MPA report and accounts which include the Metropolitan Police Service. As you can see their publicity spending, which includes recruitment ads, shot up 42% last year to £8.6 million.

You might ask how do they manage to spend this kind of cash? The LibDems found out that the current 2007 campaign (left) reminding everyone about the SNTs cost £800K, shared with TfL. Last year they admitted to me that they spent £485K on the original 2006 SNT campaign (below). They run a number of these high profile ad campaigns during the year, see the list here. They also contribute £250K per year towards the Mayor’s propaganda sheet, the Londoner. If you are kind there are 49 press officers working for the MPS or if you want to collar everyone involved the number goes up to 92, see answer to a question from Richard Barnes here. There are two press officers in the MPA.

You can understand that the Mayor would only want to spend £485K helping Labour councillors to get elected last year but he reckons that £800K is a more appropriate figure to get himself re-elected – I guess he thinks he is worth it. You wonder how TfL justifies spending out £400K on an ad that is about policing and does not mention transport security.

Last year I did a piece for ConservativeHome and on a back-of-a-fag-packet basis reckoned that the Mayor and his GLA bodies spent something like £100 million on advertising and the black arts of communications. Here we see that the Met, typically one of the slightly more retiring parts of the empire, manages to spend £8.6 million on publicity all on its own.