Boris Watch

Well, sort of.  One of the annoying things about the post-election period was that no one apart from, basically, a few blogs (you know who you are) seemed that bothered about actually examining Boris in action.  You’d have thought the Labour Party might have had an interest – they have a good record in government to defend in London (which can hardly be said nationally, with the Heathrow Third Runway at the forefront of local minds) and obviously should have ambitions to win back from a very low ebb at the local and Mayoral elections in 2012.  Also, the timing of the Mayoral election gave them a priceless year or two to show the public Conservatism in action before the General Election, particularly with Policy Exchange so prominent in national Conservative circles while making such a mess of the first four months in London before the grown-ups took over.  I felt that was an opportunity missed at the time to show that the Conservatives really didn’t have a workable plan and were heavily reliant on spin and favourable press coverage.  Mind you, that might have been a bit near the knuckle for old 1997 New Labour hands…

Anyway, that’s changing a bit now – Simon Fletcher, one of Livingstone’s key aides/cronies/whatever (just remember where he came from, it’s hardly a state secret) has already written about political blogging on CiF, provoking a memorable extra-popcorn-please comments debate with Andrew Gilligan and Dave Hill, comprehensively won by the latter.  Simon’s now got a place on the LabourList website, which is fairly obviously a semi-official attempt to do this web thing that the Tories and Obama seemed to like, but the importance of which has eluded the top-down old-school Labour hierarchy.  We’ll give it a fairly guarded welcome, not least because if Livingstone and co. are allowed in it’s a bit more than just a spin-doctors controlfest and might actually be worth the admission fee.  A lot depends on the attitude to dissent and comments – Labour have a tragically crap record at listening to reason, of course, and accepting that this nannying on-message shit puts intelligent, thinking people right off should be rule number one of them trying to do co-operative grass roots campaigning.  Can a leopard change its spots while learning new tricks, though?

I’ll ask him when I see him   Meanwhile, I found this highly amusing.  Even the Evening Boris managed to write a balanced article (from Pippa Crerar, of course), complete with pointed comment from Mark Lee about the gap between Boris’s public words and private deeds.

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