To add to the list – how many of the people now being fired at CCHQ worked on Boris’ election campaign?

At least he hasn’t claimed he’s saved the world!

“At least he hasn’t claimed he’s saved the world!”

If only he’d come out with something that coherent. ‘La la la la!’. Cripes!

Gilligan’s been awfully quiet lately. I hope he isn’t pining for his lost partner ‘kennite’.

I get terribly confused with Sunny , one moment he is gushing about O boring and the land of the Free and the next minute supporting Ken Livingstone whose KAs are and were a rogues gallery of the Palaeolithic authoritarian hard left . Ken divided his time between grovelling to dictators world wide and inviting homophobic loons here , the IRA and wasting peoples money taking his little chums to China where he pretended Tiananmen Square was just or Poll Tax riot .
Boris may have had a little bad luck here and there but then he is drawing people in from the real world not relying on a coterie of parasites from the GLA gravy train and the Empire of graft surrounding London’s L A housing welfare and services sinks .
To me the word Liberal sits very badly with a bossy supporter of Chavez and quite comfortably with lovely collegiate Boris who , for example , gets no credit for calling for am amnesty for illegal immigrants which is the sort of thing you people like ( I gather)

It is increasingly clear to me that the Conservative Party has more in common with Liberals than the left who seem to be reverting to type under Brown and dreaming once more of public control of the means of production distribution and exchange.
This continued support for Ken Livingstone is might well be the issue that sorts the sheep form the goats

Incorrect..

You have also spent too much time in America, because the Moore/Gandhi piece obviously generated a loud wooshing sound over your head.

Happy Christmas.

I have to be honest and say that the whole idea of investigating Boris for ‘politically corrupting’ the investigation into Damian Green is pretty thin and more than a little bit disreputable.

Unless there’s anything to suggest that he’s tried to directly influence or hinder the course of the investigation – in which case he should be charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice – then I personally wouldn’t pursue this because the whole thing seems no less petty than the whole ‘camp guard’ farrago that was directed at Livingstone.

I do think, as well, that the current enthusiasm for trying to stick it to Boris is missing an important angle.

Ross and the others may have been, notionally, Boris’s appointments but if you look a little more closely you’ll find that they are all Cameron’s placemen in BoJo’s administration and much more closely connected to CCHQ than to Boris.

Good to see Tory appointees doing the honourable thing and resigning. A lesson that some Labour taxpayer parasites could learn. The complaint by the Labour leader in the GLA is just petty party politics.

As a Londoner, I’m quite happy with Boris cost control measures, losing some of Ken’s bureaucrats and sensible decisions, such as scrapping the Western c-charge extension and allowing motorbikes in bus lanes.

Its great to see my money is not being funnelled into the pockets of Ken’s cronies, his pet projects, corrupt or opportunist minority groups or Ken’s old militant pals.

‘Ken divided his time between grovelling to dictators’

Unlike the tories of course who only grovelled to dictators who were close friends of Thatcher; or if they could sell them weapons.

“if they could sell them weapons”

Good business for our manufacturers. Farming lentils won’t keep thousands in jobs.

“Boris who , for example , gets no credit for calling for am amnesty for illegal immigrants which is the sort of thing you people like ( I gather)”

Fair point, why has LC not highlighted this? My concern is that the opposition to Boris is based on the fact that he is a Tory with a posh accent who went to Eton and who dared to defeat Ken Livingstone, not the actual substance of his policies.

“My concern is that the opposition to Boris is based on the fact that he is a Tory with a posh accent who went to Eton and who dared to defeat Ken Livingstone, not the actual substance of his policies.”

I don’t give a stuff where he went to school and I’m fairly sure I’ve never mentioned it as being in any way relevant. People who say ‘he’s just an Etonian toff’ are the inverse of people who say ‘I must be down to earth and worth listening to because I went to a comprehensive’ and such people are usually wankers. What Boris definitely is is the brightest of the bunch, but then the bunch does include George Osborne and David Cameron.

I do give a stuff that we repeatedly see his adminstration do stuff he doesn’t announce, and what he does announce his administration don’t do, or what he announces contradicts stuff he’s already announced. In other words, he’s as big a user of spin as any of them, and the question then arises that you ask whenever spin is discovered – why can’t they just tell the truth? I think it’s because he’s trying to reconcile conflicting interests but has no experience of deal-making, the necessity of compromise or limits on power, which explains why he ended up involved in the Green affair – no one would have noticed him saying nothing, and Labour were going to end up in the shit, so why say anything? This also showed in the lost first four months where the divisions were blatantly obvious and he didn’t get a grip. There’s still no clear direction for the city, which, just now, isn’t a great thing.

Unity – are they really the CCHQ placemen who are going west? Boris’s City Hall is split between the borough boys (lead by Sir Simon Milton), who are competent and experienced within a Thatcherite framework and evidently see the Mayoralty as an opportunity to help out certain favoured boroughs and individuals and demonstrate tax cuts rather than as a city government with its own independent identity, and the Policy Exchangers (*cough* and Iain Dale *cough*) who seem to see it as a mandate to work out their neuroses about foreigners and the loss of British identity and manliness, which is why they get so worked up about a carol service and Routemaster buses. On the whole the better decisions come from the first group, while the second group ends up costing money and being generally useless. There’s obvious tension there if a favoured policy reduces the scope for voter-friendly tax cuts or if the PXers actions result in an image of incompetence.

The PXers would count as CCHQ up to a point, but I’d read them as really an adjunct to the Conservatives rather than central (if it is central, we’re all officially fucked, since they’re incompetent and dreadful judges of character, something which needs wider attention on a national level). Boris, I strongly suspect, doesn’t belong to either category – he’s in the Boris Party and always has been. Strangely enough, this is something he shares with Ken Livingstone, who was quite happy being the sole member of the Ken Party. Apparently they get on quite well on a personal level.

No, his policies (shelving lots of affordable housing and not daring to build any in Tory boroughs, getting rid of the subsidy for low-income families using London’s buses and putting fares up at a time of economic difficulty) are enough reason to oppose him.

The amnesty he is proposing is a highly conditional amnesty that is badly thought through. For example, it only applies to people who’ve been here for 5 years with no criminal record, so what happens to familiy members who’ve only been here for 3 years? What happens if you committed the “crime” of arriving sans papiers? The only workable amnesty is an unconditional one.

In some ways I’m glad the issue is being aired – and I disapprove of my own party’s policy as well as the Tories and Lib Dems’ policy on this – but I suspect he’s raising it because it’s popular to do so amongst key voter categories in London that he needs to get from Ken if he’s going to win the next election when turnout in Croydon etc will be lower.

last comment aimed at RichardJ if it wasn’t obvious; thought I could type quicker than I could

What tim f said above, on amnesties. Besides, he only gets kudos if he pushes his party on it – not just announces it with the full knowledge that the Tories would never support it anyway in practice.

“My concern is that the opposition to Boris is based on the fact that he is a Tory with a posh accent who went to Eton and who dared to defeat Ken Livingstone, not the actual substance of his policies”

In a nutshell.

Any minute chavscum’s friend Andrew Gilligan will no doubt turn up and accuse of sour grapes again. I wonder how long it will take before Boris supporters will wake up and smell the coffee.

Sunny “I wonder how long it will take before Boris supporters will wake up and smell the coffee.”

The trouble is that Boris is he is one of those rare politicians who seem immune to every fuck up that they make. No matter how many cock ups, the public don’t seem to care. I mean, it is not as if it was not known that he is blundering idiot before the election. To be honest, his entire staff could end up resigning and it won’t make much difference to the way people view of him. He will just go on Have I got News for you and fall of his chair and every body is laughs.

He has an army of petrol heads to protect him. The fawning interview Jeremy Clarkson did with Boris on Top Gear last Sunday was a great example. “London used to be communist ,but now it is free” Clarkson claimed as he introduced his hero. I can just imagine the Daily Mail letting that go if it was a BBC presenter interviewing a Labour politician with so much love. But the BBC seems to be quite happy to let Top Gear, and Clarkson become a 1 hour propaganda show for Right wing politics. (I know it is all quite amusing, and tongue in cheek, but the Right wing media would be having a field day if this was a left wing love in.

Boris is the Teflon king and it would be much better our side ignoring him as a personality and concentrating on his policies, which are basically the same old Tory stuff.

“I wonder how long it will take before Boris supporters will wake up and smell the coffee.”

‘Never’ – I suspect. Boris-as-Mayor is like one of those nice dreams you sometimes get that you don’t want to wake from. In this case they don’t *have* to wake from it, since he’ll still be there and, unless you actually bother to look, the spin and friendly coverage from Dale and co. will ensure you can stay happily in your fluffy blue cloud and ignore reality.

Meanwhile we’ll be asking questions along the lines of ‘why, when the economy’s going down the toilet and the pound’s going down would Boris cut the budget for promoting London abroad and dismantle one of the core teams involved?’. There’s a story in the Evening Standard today about Americans and Europeans coming to London for a cheap break – sounds like just the time to get Boris out and about promoting us as the great budget destination, where, with the right prompting, he might actually work (although I don’t have high hopes that his sense of humour travels too well).

Instead he went out a couple of days ago and was rude to the EU and the Scots.

sally – Top Gear also once said that they wanted to ‘burn Ken Livingstone’, which again couldn’t be said about any right wing politician on any other BBC show without someone saying that it’s just what they expect from the communists at the BBC and it was typical and when was something going to be done?

Actually I find Clarkson and co. a rather useful rock to throw at accusations that the BBC are full of tree-hugging communists, if only because of the huge amounts of licence payers money they demand every year. I also find the show quite funny, although not as good as it was – running low on ideas in recent series, with the mix wrong, plus looking horribly out of place in the current economic climate.

[I once saw James May in Hammersmith. Walking. I was in a car at the time, too. Eat my exhaust, May.]

Tom “Actually I find Clarkson and co. a rather useful rock to throw at accusations that the BBC are full of tree-hugging communists, if only because of the huge amounts of licence payers money they demand every year.”

I think that is why the BBC let Top gear get away with so much, to appease the right wing press. Trouble is , you can never appease the brown shirts. A bit like having Andrew Neil as the the face of their politics show, it appeases the Right wing. How the BBC think it is balanced to have Neil and Portilo Vs Diane Abbot on ‘This Week ‘ beggars belief. Or hiring American Republican pollster Frank Luntz to do their polling on News night is again another example of the BBC right wing bias.

As Dave Hill quite rightly said, they should be called right-whingers, cos that’s all they ever do.

Sally – possibly, we’ll have to see. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. These idiots so live in their own world that when the world comes crashing down, as it did with their idol George Bush, then they won’t know what to do.

“As Dave Hill quite rightly said, they should be called right-whingers, cos that’s all they ever do.”

Whereas some on the left whinge about inequality, global warming, public attitudes to immigrants etc. I recall some right-wingers used to refer to the Guardian as the “Whinger’s chronical”.

In short, both Left and Right are guilty of whingeing.

There’s a certain lack of equivalence between whinging, as you put it, about potentially catastrophic rates of climate change and whinging about whether someone said ‘bum’ on the BBC. It’s not so much the whinging as the banality of the whinging I object to.

On the Top Gear issue, it’s a rare episode that doesn’t at some point mention that some piece of automative equipment makes them feel six, or seven, or ten years old. It’s a kid’s programme in many ways. Similarly, perhaps the current rise of the Conservatives is a sign that the British people are fed up with being treated like adults and fancy the freedom and lack of responsibility of childhood again?

To finish off with this, has anyone noticed how journalists are increasingly moving into public administration? Boris is really a journalist (fired from his first job at the Times for making up a quote, which makes me wonder where he really got the ‘bendy buses kill cyclists’ line from). Anthony Browne is a journalist. Clarkson is a journalist. Perhaps we’re moving from a stage where government is subservient to the right-wing press to a stage where the government *is* the right-wing press? Dictatorship of the commentariat, indeed?

Tom “Perhaps we’re moving from a stage where government is subservient to the right-wing press to a stage where the government *is* the right-wing press? Dictatorship of the commentariat, indeed?”

In a corporate state, the corporate media is the state media.

Hence the constant attacks on the BBC, which occupies the position of a rival state media. It does all start to make a sort of sense, really. Of course, this is on the day Cameron’s writing about welfare in the Daily Mail.

“Similarly, perhaps the current rise of the Conservatives is a sign that the British people are fed up with being treated like adults and fancy the freedom and lack of responsibility of childhood again?”

Rather turns the argument on its head, usually the anti-statists accuse the big-statists of treating people like children by denying them freedom of choice etc.

Bozo has set london buses back 20 years they were frequent and reliable. Now I walk a mile to ensure I get my train. Bozo changed the bus timetables from specific time to between 10-15 mins so buses are stopped mid journey with an announcement that “this bus is being held here to regulate the service”. Or they arrive in bunches just like the good old days. I know it’s not much but it has really changed my routine that I had for 2 years and I can’t see who benefits. Can anyone give me a good reason? Now I have to buy a scooter.