Boris Watch

While Boris tanked up and talking rubbish is, let’s face it, far less offensive than the gay-hating fundamentalists outside, there is a serious side that Homovision reference in their piece on Boris’s speech:

A dishevelled suit, Worzel Gummidge hair, boozed-up, rambling and (often) mis-quoted quotes do make Boris the great entertainer. But, in a year when homophobic attacks in London have been rising and when hate-crimes are getting increasingly ferocious in their character (COME BACK SOON FOR A MORE INFO), a bumbling speech by a clown-like politician is not what we, as a gay community, need right now.

Let’s see what’s going on with Boris’s handy Crime Maps.  Oh, they don’t show homophobic crimes, although you can filter by other types now, which is welcome.  OK, let’s go with the pre-Boris Crime Maps then, which do.

First the good news (rolling 12 month average):

• Kingston : -65%
• Hillingdon : -28.6%
• Wandsworth : -16.7%

Now the BNP voting areas:

• Bexley : +200%
• Barking & Dagenham : +142.9%
• Havering +25%

Some other shockers:

• Enfield : +100%
• Barnet : +133.3%
• Brent : +153.8%

Clearly something odd is happening here - most crimes don’t see fluctuations like that, although there is a low base to be considered here.  There’s something of an inner/outer city split, but not conclusive - Brent is hardly typical outer London yet Hillingdon has nothing to be ashamed of.  Of course, the worst borough is Westminster, which I suspect is due to the conjunction of obvious gay bars and boozed up young men looking for a fight.  Westminster has nearly 1 in 10 attacks by itself as a result of this.

However, once you look back at recent history it’s not clear that this is anything out of the ordinary - a Mayoral Answer from 2007 gives us:

• 2000-01 : 1223
• 2001-02  : 1231
• 2002-03 : 1057
• 2003-04 : 1202
• 2004-05 : 1301
• 2005-06 : 1231
• 2006-07 : 1184 (from elsewhere)

Plus the two most recent rolling windows:

• May 07 - May 08 : 1005
• May 08 - May 09 : 1149

Particularly given the innate unreliability of crime figures plus the under-reporting, it’s not clear from this whether the trend is up, down or fluctuating.  I’d pay more attention to gay groups on this, with due adjustment for bias and anecdote.

However, we can probably safely say that this spiked article from a few years back blaming (who else) Ken Livingstone for pandering to them gays and thus rousing the fury of the mob, is as big a load of bollocks as the rest of their stuff.  I look forward to them blaming Boris’s pink stetson for the current rise.  Idiots.

Tags:   crime · gay · homophobiaNo Comments.

I’ve often wondered, what with the Bullingdon stuff and the bizarre behaviour, if Boris occasionally partakes of the occasional drink.  The latest manifestation of his usual Public Speech Mark One at this week’s Pride Reception (subtitle: Leftie Poofs Keep Out) rather adds support to this view, as the comments thread makes clear.

Now I quite like an occasional drink, Churchill drank like a fish and Hitler was teetotal, but when Boris benefits from and contributes to alkie smears (one of my mates even voted for Boris because Ken was a ‘drunken communist’), immediately bans drinking on the Tube and buses but then pops up in an apparently intoxicated state at a Mayoral function, one does wonder again whether it’s one rule for the elite and the rest of us proles can bugger off.

Video here.

Tags:   booze · gay · prideNo Comments.

A few more things from the Routermater trainwreck to add to the pile:

1. There’s now a requirement to cover up the gap at the back.  This is known to the sane majority of transport observers as a ‘door’.  Nearly 100% of buses have them already, I understand.
2. Apparently the conductor is now not a conductor, as there are no tickets to sell, but is basically going to be employed to stop people falling out of the door.

I was looking at one of our new Enviro400s the other day and it’s a remarkably attractive, modern, curvy design, evidently built very much with London in mind, since it’s currently the best seller to London operators.  Nice, wide door too.  Isn’t that a ‘New Bus For London’ right there, then?

However, on my first trip on the new bus, the smart interior was slightly spoiled by this:

which would appear to be an empty can of Tyskie Polish Lager.  Bus booze ban still going well then.

Oh, and the pointless 507 debendification is apparently scheduled for the 25th July, but whether it’ll be in dribs and drabs (there’s a lot of slowness in bus deliveries, and I haven’t seen any indication of new Mercedes 12m Citaros being delivered yet) or one magic swoop is as yet unclear.  521 is now down as the 29th August.

Finally, KPMG are apparently [PDF] the people running the ‘independent’ bus service review, after their success in spotting a £100m gap in the LDA accounts somehow missed by Boris’s Forensic Audit Panel while they were trying to dig up dirt on Lee Jasper.  This is reporting into car naked streets loving TfL supremo Daniel Moylan and coupled with the Routemaster update above means Boris’s promise of ‘conductors not consultants’ can safely be consigned to the memory hole, too.  KPMG are doing very nicely out of Boris, actually - classic bit of disaster capitalism, making money advising business how to get through the recession.  Nice work if you can get it.

Tags:   bendy · bus · kpmg · Routemaster1 Comment

Over here.

Tags:   cooling · PR · s-stock · spin · tube · undergroundNo Comments.

Following the GLA grilling of Sir Simon Milton and Martin Clarke (the GLA finance chief, inherited from the previous regime) on Martin ‘Mayorwatch’ Hoscik’s Twitter feed:

Milton says Chief of  Staff is not his official role although the Mayor sometimes calls him it.

Milton says he signs off Mayoral decisions before the reach the Mayor and helps in the recruitment of otyher Mayoral advisors.

Makes it clear he isn’t the line manager for other Mayoral advisors. Clarke says “no-one” has been exempted form the GLAs rules on expenses.

Clarke says Clement requested the card, he was given it as the equiv post holder under Ken held one.

Being questioned by LibDem Mike Tuffrey he confirms no other person in the Mayor’s team holds a card.

Clarke: In April, May and June the expenses were signed off by the Mayor himself.

Tuffrey asks why the Mayor isn’t present  to answer why he signed off the expenses.

Faces of Tory AMs on the Committee show they know how serious this issue, and Clarke’s last answer, is.

The Committee is now talking about adjourning tosummon the Mayor to a future meeting.

They will question Clarke today, but it sseems Milton is unable to answer anything of importance.

So there we have it, at some point this year Boris decided to start signing off people’s expenses himself, which begs two questions: first, why did this change happen and second, is Boris qualified to do it, given that the first anomalies were discovered in November?  We’ll see when the list of expenses incurred since April has been analysed by teams of crack crowdsourcing zeitgeisty people and stuck up somewhere.

What’s clear is that this issue is now dragging the Mayor in, amid increasingly desperate shouts of ‘Lee Jasper’ and ‘Look, it shows Boris is decisive’.  As Boris said in an interview at the State of London shindig, he didn’t want to ‘intrude on private grief’ over the MPs expenses, but it looks very much like private grief is intruding on him.

Update: Boris apparently became aware of the misuse on the 1st June, about seven months or so later than his team.  Boris apparently wasn’t aware Clement even had a card.

Tags:   credit card · expenses · gla · ian clement · scandal · tuffrey7 Comments

It’s getting to be a habit, this re-announcing of existing policy as brand-new-Boris-manifesto-rah stuff, accompanying by drooling troglodytes in the Standard comments.

Today’s story is Boris visiting what the Standard describes as an ‘Oxford track’ to run an uneducated eye over the new ‘S-stock’ sub-surface Underground trains, due to start being delivered for the Metropolitan Line in 2010.

So, we get the usual Mayor Rabbit:

He said: “For thousands of clammy Tube passengers some relief is finally in sight. We have now begun testing the first of 191 super cool and spacious new trains.”

[Read more →]

Tags:   air-conditioning · cooling · s-stock · spin · tube5 Comments

Oh, Google Cache, I love you so.  Boris gets the airbrush out:

We are at war with Bexley Council.  We have always been at war with Bexley Council.

Tags:   deputy mayor · ian clement · pyongyang · stalinistNo Comments.

Usually, the adage goes, dodgy Labour politicians get done in by money and crap Tory ones by sex.  Under Boris’s brave new not-sure-what-it-is-yet politics, the Tories have started trying to combine money and sex at the same time, and predictably failing.  Ian Clement has gone, number three in the list of Deputy Mayors, leaving only the hard core of Kit Malthouse, Sir Simon Milton and Richard Barnes flying the flag for Team Boris May 2008 Edition.

In fact, the sordid details of what Clement did or did not put on credit cards and whom he was or wasn’t pushing Chicken Korma and subsequently himself into aren’t of much interest - the world’s full of aging men in positions of power and dim, naive women who somehow think that that’s an attractive combination.  No, what interests me are the role Clement and the Bexley Machine played in Boris’s election campaign, the savage cutting loose that happened in the days before Boris and his PR gang buried the bad news under Wimbledon and the Speaker and how his departure affects the plan to move power from the centre to the Tory boroughs, which was essentially Clement’s job - he was the man to give the Boroughs a Voice, although in the end he appears merely to have given them lunch, and in some cases not even that.  Bad form.

Remember, if you will, that last March we posited that a year in power was making the likes of Sir Simon appreciate rather more the establishment of power on the 8th floor of City Hall, and thus less inclined to see it eroded?  Well, Clement was obviously London Council’s creature, a snarling outer-London beast who sees the centre as the enemy and is from a very different Tory Party to the one Boris or for that matter Sir Simon belongs to.  The BNP got 12.4% in Bexley last month, which to my mind indicates that it’s not really London (along with Barking & Dagenham, Havering and of course Bromley).  It’s not too hard to start drawing conclusions there and judging that the embarrassment caused to Boris (avoidance of which is Rule #1 in the public relations obsessed world of City Hall, plus the inadvertent involvement of half the Tory borough bigwigs in providing top cover to Clement’s clandestine meetings have actually succeeded in strengthening Sir Simon Milton.  Again.  It’s funny how he is the only one to emerge from these scandals with enhanced status and without a stain on his character.  A sharp operator, as we’ve said before.

Finally, a note on the journalism - this story should mark the end of Gilligan’s reputation as the top reporter of London political affairs.  Already leaving the Standard for the Telegraph, he misses out on breaking a story with all the spicy tabloid titillations of illicit sex plus the very of-the-moment involvement of expenses.  Worse still, the story is kicked off by his hated rival Dave Hill at the Guardian, booted up the field by the horrible jumped up little blogger Adam Bienkov and finally when the Standard gets round to it, put into the back of the net by Paul Waugh.  Gilligan somehow gets his name second in the byline and by today he’s switched place with Paul at the top of this article, but it’s hard to believe he had much to do with the text, since it doesn’t attack Ken Livingstone once (and besides, it reads like Paul Waugh’s stuff, i.e. proper journalism).  Lest one forget, while proper investigative journalists were doing man’s work sifting through receipts, Andy was having another go at us while trying to explain why he works for the Iranian government funded TV station Press TV.  Bye, mate.

Meanwhile, before rocking up at the Telegraph smiling and fresh faced, he might like to look at this from the paper in 2004.  Hatchet job, but the nocturnal habits ring very familiar bells.

Tags:   bexley · embarrassment · expenses · ian clement · resignation2 Comments

Look, I know we’ve had our disagreements with Andrew - and it’s beyond the remit of the site - but, hey, he’s got a damn good article here on the Iranian…

It may not matter all that much: although some blogs are rather important, the vast majority are not.

In London, various blogs obsessively attack the Mayor.

After a year of their work, according to the polls, he was 10 points more popular than before they started.

You’re, er — bitching about us halfway through an article on Iran? Yep, we’re the obsessive ones.

Tags: 7 Comments

Glad to see that Jeremy Smyles is still going:

(I, on the other hand, have been contemplating calling it a day while my cloak’s intact. Goodbye, if so.)

Tags:   anonymity · cartoon · expensesNo Comments.