Boris Watch

What is it with this numerology of the ‘first hundred days’?  I don’t get it myself, all it does is encourage new leaders to take bad short term decisions, as we’ve seen.  Still, there we go – we do get this snippet from Matthew Taylor to bolster our case that a major Boris problem is giving people jobs because he subjectively thinks they ought to have one, rather than objectively because they’d be good for London:

But Johnson’s charm has led to difficulties . One official says Johnson keeps meeting people at parties and “with little more than a slap on the back and a proclamation that ‘Cripes, we could really use someone like you’, offers them a job.” Opponents argue this informal appointments process has led to a purge of women and ethnic minorities from the top jobs.

I don’t wholly go along with the ‘purge of women’ thing as being deliberate – I think it’s a side effect of the way Boris makes appointments and the narrow political sphere in which he operates.  I also suspect that, as with Nick Boles, he gives jobs to people who are recommended to him by people he already likes.  This hopefully explains Anthony Browne – the alternative that Boris shares Browne’s bonkers Mad Mel ideas is too awful to contemplate, and does go against a lot of the character of the Mayor as I understand it.

However, this is worth keeping an eye on:

Johnson’s supporters say his priorities were clear during the election campaign and have been reiterated since May 1. He wants to “tackle crime, deliver value for money and improve the quality of life for all Londoners”.

OK, so we’ve got pointless transport crime initiatives tackling fear of crime in an area where fear of crime is low and crime is low, we’ve got a proposed cut in the police budget, we’ve got deliberate undermining of the Met Police commissioner and an apparent desire to introduce ‘crime mapping’ without realising that a similar scheme already exists.  That’s tackling crime.

How about value for money?  We’ve got the £400k payoff to Porsche, the unknown vanity money pit of the New Routemaster, the ideologically-based handing back of £7m to the Venezuelan state oil company, we’ve got £50,000 for Patience Wheatcroft and her crew to tell us that Ken and Lee Jasper were entitled to run London, we’ve got £9.4m scraped from TfL’s budget to pay for the new police, we’ve got doubling of bus fares for people on income support, we’ve got the loss of income from the emissions based congestion charge, possibly the loss of income from the Westen Extension, we’ve got an unexplained doubling of the amount of money offered to private rail companies to do what their customers want and install Oyster readers and, of course, we’ve got the whole transition team budget thing.  Now, I’m sure the value for money thing is real (these are Conservatives, remember) so I’m making a prediction – Boris is going to shunt as much GLA spending as possible onto budgets that largely don’t involve the Mayoral precept.  This means TfL, the BTP and the Met police budgets.  Result: a reduction in the council tax for all Londoners and great headlines.  The only issue is that you’ve either got to get Alistair Darling to cough up, or, alternatively, cut existing projects to make room for the ones moved in, which looks like it’s begun with the BTP spending (which came partly out of a team that specialised in finding ways to help modal shift away from cars) and Parliament Square improvement scheme being dropped.

Finally, quality of life improvements.  Well, if you drive a car you’ll find Parliament Square just fine the way it is, and doubtless you’ll love being able to drive your 4×4 into London for £8 instead of £25.  If you think one of the country’s major tourist attractions shouldn’t be a traffic-filled eyesore, you’re out of luck, he’s canned it, along with the other public open spaces programmes.  Fed up with crappy Thames Water?  Tough, they’re going to be told to cut back on replacing water mains in favour of cars, so remember that when your street floods.  Seriously, if anything’s been announced that will improve quality of life in London, I’d love to see it.  Really.

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