From the comments on my previous post it sounds like tonight’s BBC London footage [relevant clip starts 43 seconds in] hadn’t aired before and therefore came as just as much of a shock to everyone else as it did to me and Mrs. Stop Boris (who picked her jaw up off the floor in time to suggest that someone should set Boris Watch as Boris’s web browser home page so that he can find out what he has been doing!).
So just to reiterate what I think is as significant a story as the Olympic memorandum one which has been today’s main focus:
By the time the axing of the Rise festival’s anti-racism message had hit the media firmly enough for a journalist to have been dispatched to question him about it, Boris had not even heard that the axing was occurring, nor that it was supposed to have been ordered by him – indeed he didn’t really seem to have heard of the Rise festival at all.
This is 100% concrete proof that Boris is not some ‘visionary’ who is doing the job he was elected to do, i.e. issuing instructions to his staff to get things done. This footage clearly shows that, on this issue at the very least, he is indeed the ‘empty vessel’ Mayor he was accused of being at Question Time yesterday, with no idea of what is being done in his name by unelected right-wing cronies.
So who should the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook direct his heartfelt appreciation to now? Will we ever be told who is really pulling Boris’s strings?
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What was that yersterday at Mayoral Questions about a vaccum at the centre of power which Boris so stringently denied?
Two exposures of ignorance in twenty-four hours…
And to think – the Conservatives thought that he’d be a PR winner.
Ben
The line will be: “Oh, but that’s dear old Bozza for you, he forgets these things. Yet is sharp as a tack, of course, razor sharp. It’s not his job to know what’s going on, just to keep you Londoners happy while we try out a few ideas, because remember? BOZZA IS A LEGERNDLOLLOLOL. And be grateful you’ve got him because otherwise you’d have that dirty Red Ken, and he’s not a LEGERND, no, not at all. Dirty Trot, dirty, dirty Trot, remember how bad he was…”
And I worry it’s still early enough that some will swallow it…
A month and a bit in, a so called million vote mandate and we still don’t know who’s really fucking running London???
Leon: that’s about the size of it, yes. Infuriating, isn’t it?
Yep, I feel an angry post over at Pickled Politics coming on.
“A month and a bit in, a so called million vote mandate and we still don’t know who’s really… running London” is what really concerns me. In fact, it underlies pretty much everything at the Boris Mayoralty. It’s plain the man is out of his depth with London, plain that the plethora of Deputy Mayors are necessary to fill the void left by their Great Chief, and plain now that what was hinted at during the election period (Boris going to delegate to a ‘vast’ array of talent) is precisely this: Boris is the front man for…?
Which may explain why his oh-so-learned historical references are to Classical Greece and Rome rather than France c. 1600 and L’Eminence Grise (‘a person who exercises power or influence withouit holding an official position’ – OED, 11th ed., revised 2006). Unless the ‘vast array of talent’ is flock of headless chickens at Conservative Central Office? Surely not!
And this is a real concern, in that what London needs is a Mayor who knows and understands the wider city and can place and sustain it in the wider context of global capitals. What we are getting, it seems, is local borough particularism speaking through a bumbling, ill-briefed mouthpiece.