Sadly the hypocrisy of picking and choosing manifesto committments to keep is something that the Mayor has managed to evade time and time again. He fillibusts (sp?) his way through questioning by offering unnecessarily elongated and irrelevant responses, draining his questioners’ allocated time.

It also doesn’t help that the Conservative group on the Assembly spend a good proportion of their time making obnoxious semi-audible in-jokes, accompanied by appropriately smarmy co-ordinated laughter. Not only distracting, but often drowns out the opposition speaker, meaning that thanks to their theatrics and contempt for scrutiny, often important points are lost in the melee.

Then again, should we be surprised?

Dear Sunny.

“This is despite the fact he campaigned for Mayor on the issue of crime, saying he would take charge and make policing his top priority.”

He has. He got rid of a Labour party- political place-man and put a real Copper in charge. Job done. It’s called effective management. Boris has plenty of other areas of Ken’s socialist utopia to roll back before 2012..

He got rid of a Labour party- political place-man and put a real Copper in charge. Job done

oh you mean he got rid of the police-man he didn’t like? Yes, nothing politically motivated about that. How that means ‘job done’ is beyond me.

Sunny,

I think you’ll find the police are answerable to elected representatives. Ian Blair failed to understand this rather key point, and therefore was removed.

Of course, you could argue the police outrank elected representatives if you wish.

And if Mr Johnson has judged his time is better applied not chairing the MPA, he may have his reasons. I doubt that chairing committees is the best use of anyone’s time myself. Perhaps the key issue here (unansewered as far as I could see) is who will be the chair now?

4 – Kit Malthouse, currently the deputy chair.

5.

Ah yes – it helps to read the source story. So Boris Johnson has resigned the chair to his deputy mayor for policing. Who will answer to him anyway.

Or to put it another way, he has taken a step back, but through his deputy still has control of the chair of the MPA. I do think this looks like another storm in a teacup. The Mayor of London has a lot of responsibilities, and has to prioritise. We can argue whether this is a wise choice or not, but bluntly Mr Johnson has to justify it to the voters at the next election, not to us here and now.

Although Chris Grayling may well be put out, but then again he probably forgot to ask Mr Johnson before his silly statement, so it is his own fault. I would have thought that by now Mr Grayling might have noticed Mr Johnson’s tendency to do his own thing (a good thing in an elected mayor surely – we wouldn’t want them just following party lines?).

“So Boris Johnson has resigned the chair to his deputy mayor for policing. Who will answer to him anyway.”

…after saying the job was too important for anyone but the Mayor to do it. It’s a u-turn and a broken manifesto commitment whichever way you slice it. If you paid for a ticket to the Opera and found out the leading tenor couldn’t be bothered that night and stuck the work experience kid on, you’d be asking for you money back.

Tom,

Bad example. It is normal for any live performance to have an understudy if the lead is unavailable, and not expected that people will complain unless the understudy is actually useless.

It may well be a broken manifesto promise, but only if the promise was to sit as chair – if one of his deputies (appointed by Mr Johnson and answerable to him) is chair it is still in his office and his purview. If you have the wording of the manifesto around we can sort this one out – the quote from Ms Jones in the Times, Guardian and above does not suggest the manifesto was that specific though. I would advise Labour and Liberal Democrats not to trumpet the phrase broken manifesto promise though (perhaps why the person quoted in this case was a Green?).

8

“It is important for the Mayor to take a public lead, so I will chair the
Metropolitan Police Authority. I will take personal responsibility. No offence
will be too trivial to demand my attention. No challenge will be so big that I
shrug my shoulders and pass the buck.

The fundamental problem with policing in London is that there is a lack of
strong leadership, and our police force is hamstrung by political targets and
excessive form-filling. This has resulted in a city we no longer feel safe in, and
extra officers we do not see.
…
I believe the solution lies in taking responsibility and providing strong
leadership to enable the police to do their jobs.”

(from Mayor’s Crime Manifesto – http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2009/04/27/crime_manifesto_complete_final_final.pdf)

To be fair Kit Malthouse has provided staunch enough leadership thus far, so its no massive change.

Hate to break it to you Watchman but live performance and running London are two very, very different things.

The excuses people will make, Tom puts it best at 7.

Well I think you can tell the scale of the turnaround by the comments made by Mr Malthouse himself.

To the effect of “well he did keep his manifesto pledge, he did sit on the MPA, it’s just that now he is no longer doing so”

I wonder if Gordon Brown announced that “I did keep to my election pledges, I did remove Tory boom and bust (which is what he actually said) – it’s just that I replaced it with Labour boom and bust” – whether this would be as acceptable as Mr Malthouses observations.

He seems to be indicating that manifesto pledges are not for the term, but as long as they are reached at some point during the term then it won’t be a broken promise. I wonder if they’ll try this with the tube fares – no rise in tube fares (oh did I not mention it was only for the first week of office??)

Daniel,

“Hate to break it to you Watchman but live performance and running London are two very, very different things.”

What, even with the entertaining Mr Johnson running London? Admittedly most live performances are scripted, but even so (we can even guess at the genre – will it be a comedy, a tradgedy or even a farce?).

Don’t do art a bad name by dragging that tit in.

I wonder if Gordon Brown announced that “I did keep to my election pledges, I did remove Tory boom and bust (which is what he actually said)

It isn’t you know. He said that he’d abolished, or put an end to, or that there would be no return to boom and bust in almost every budget speech he ever gave.

Example – Budget 2006:

“As I have said before mister deputy speaker: no return to boom and bust.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/mar/22/budget2006.budget

It was, in fact, quite remarkable that Brown claimed only to have proclaimed an end to Tory boom and bust. Not only is this obviously, demonstrably, utterly untrue; but it is also laughably irrelevant. A silly, pointless lie.

As a non-Londoner, I have a different perspective on words and events.

Johnson promised to make crime a priority: he got rid of Ian Blair and chaired the police authority during the initial reform stages. Subject to how well those reforms work, he ticked that box in the list of manifesto promises.

He has appointed a Conservative elected member as MPA chair, who will be accountable to him. Nobody, so far, has produced a quote that he would chair the MPA for the duration of Mayoral office, so delegation at this time is reasonable. If the appointee is useless and Johnson fails to act, he’d lose the tick in the box.

Johnson never promised that being mayor would be his sole occupation, and the question of whether or not he should write for the Telegraph is only relevant if/when he demonstrates that his outside activities are a distraction from being Mayor. Delegation of an optional part of the job proves nothing. No box to tick.

Personally, I like the idea that elected politicians contribute to the press. I want to read what they allegedly think (accepting that many pieces will be written by staff members), rather than statements that are reported and intermediated by journalists and aides.

I am much less impressed by the alleged fee that the Telegraph pay Johnson. He can barely control his ability to be centre stage and likes to write; if he didn’t have a contract, he’d be chipping in articles for Comment is Free or wherever at £50 a time. The Telegraph editorial team were very generous or very foolish.

Consider Johnson’s journalism as a hobby rather than an occupation, in spite of the money. If you created a ban on professional writing for the London Mayor, he’d find another pastime instead.

@14 Tim J quoting Gordon Brown: “As I have said before mister deputy speaker: no return to boom and bust.”

My money would be on the argument that the original author of the expression used the words “Tory boom and bust”. The argument is stronger, because it associates the Conservative party with the negative concept.

So that what was what Brown was supposed to say. But given the number of times the expression was used, contraction by speaker or recorder was inevitable.

In hind sight, given that the expression can be easily misquoted or misreported, it was a mistake. It should have been “Tory boom and Tory bust”.

In hind sight, given that the expression can be easily misquoted or misreported, it was a mistake. It should have been “Tory boom and Tory bust”.

But that’s just silly. By definition, if Labour are in power there will be no Tory boom and bust. Brown was claiming to have put an end to the business cycle of boom and bust (note also how often he claimed to have put an end to ‘stop/go economics’). If that is reduced to a bizarre, meaningless claim to have stopped busts under the Tories then Brown is even more of a fathead than I supposed him to be.

Fortunately for him, he said ‘an end to boom and bust’ so many times in those terms that he is absolved of gibbering lunacy. Still guilty of imbecilic hubris of course, but there we are.

Charlieman:

Well as a Londoner, I can tell you that having him as your mayor puts his whims and fancies into sharp relief.

Daniel Hoffmann Gill,

You are not a Londoner.

You were born and raised in Nottingham. Is anything you say true?