Boris Watch

Dave Hill’s been keeping an eye on the escalating cost of the Borismaster vanity bus project including this latest robot-post (he’s in Ireland) which has attracted a certain amount of well informed comment about amortisation and discount rates.
Meanwhile, I’ve been catching up on those pesky boring TfL PDFs that occasionally contain nuggets of interest and [...]

Today’s Times informs us that the Mayor is planning a £15m, 400ft structure resembling a cross between a pylon and a totem pole, to be erected in the Olympic Park.  I read about it four days ago in the October 2009 Mayor’s Decisions but I find that that particular Mayoral decision document: http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/mayor-decisions/docs/20091021-md443-visitor-attraction-signed.pdf  has now [...]

News has reached me of a new exhibition entitled Chasing Mirrors at the National Portrait Gallery. A short interview [PDF] with the artist Faisal Abdu’allah ends with the following exchange:
If you were to create a portrait of the city of London, would it be an
amalgamation of the collected memories of all of the cities that [...]

Boris’s big sop to Bexley Council was the canning of the Thames Gateway Bridge, possibly (with the Greenwich Waterfront Transit) the most advanced project scrapped in the big bonfire over the last two years:
Mr Johnson’s official spokesman said: “What we want to do is stop pretending the tooth fairy will come. Some of the plans [...]

As reported by Hélène Mulholland, it emerged at today’s meeting of the GLA Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee that Munira Mirza could be installed as Chair of Arts Council London.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. At today’s meeting, Munira was claiming that the lead-in for her June 2009 Story Of London “festival” wasn’t long [...]

Peter Hendy and Boris appeared before the Transport Committee yesterday (conveniently just *before* the publication of the TfL Business Plan, which considering it was announced via an appalling attempt to bury bad news in this blatant bit of TfL press office spin is presumably going to be seriously damaging to London).  Helen, Martin, John Bull [...]

Boris didn’t need to commission Doug Oakervee to analyse the whole thing, the House of Commons has just produced a perfectly good overall survey of the evidence here [PDF]:
In 1958, Mr Richard Harris MP (Con, Heston and Isleworth), noting that aircraft noise was “now becoming intolerable for about a million people in South-West Middlesex”, asked [...]

Via Ross Lydall’s blog (worth subscribing to the RSS, I reckon, otherwise you miss things like this and the highly interesting shenanigans at the LFEPA):
But it came to pass that the national Politics Show (which is followed by the London opt-out) when it broadcasts at Sunday lunchtime was offered an exclusive about “Boris island”, the [...]

The latest issue of the London Transport Museum Friends’ Newsletter has just arrived via my non-striking postie and it features a reader’s letter concerning Boris’s fantasy Routemaster which deserves reproducing in full:
“A New Bus For London

It is hard to understand Boris Johnson’s aversion to articulated buses, and his enthusiasm for open platform vehicles. (A New [...]

The lack of razzmatazz continues this morning, with only the following to be found:
New Statesman article here
Labour’s Murad Qureshi quoted here

Bankers bashing ‘fickle’ Boris here and here and bashing the airport here
‘Bird strike hazard’ here
Boris’s decision to set up an estuary working group
PDF here.  Notable for having some quite august figures on it;

Sir David King [...]