Boris Watch

(I’ve been writing this in dribs and drabs this afternoon and Tom’s beaten me to the thrust of it, with more panache of course, so feel free to skip over this one for his post instead…)
Listeners to this lunchtime’s World at One on BBC Radio 4 were treated to Boris attempting to coin a new [...]

Seth reminds us of Boris’s promise that motorcyclists would be allowed to use Bus Lanes in London.
At the time a “delighted” Brian Coleman declared that the promise “highlight[ed] a key difference between Boris Johnson and the previous Mayor“, but few developments have been forthcoming.
It’s possible that Boris has been influenced by Jenny Jones’s petition, which [...]

Speaking on tonight’s Any Questions?, on which Ken Livingstone was also a guest, Sir Simon Milton, Boris’s knife-wielding Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning, said without the slightest equivocation that Boris has said he will continue with half-price bus fares for Londoners on income support.
Unfortunately no-one challenged this statement, but given that Income Support claimants [...]

The penultimate instalment of this week’s Boris-based If… cartoon strip from the Guardian. Today’s is called Hail Margaret!

© Steve Bell 2008
Boris changing his views based on what his Tory puppeteers tell him to believe? Surely not.

The mainstream media can be pretty sickening at times. Boris might originally have sneaked out the doubling of bus fares for London’s poorest on a Bank Holiday Sunday, but the news that he was definitely not going to find ‘alternative’ ways to keep their fares discounted came out on a perfectly ordinary weekday, today.
How did [...]

A disappointingly under-briefed Andrew Marr interviewed Boris this morning on his BBC One show, overlooking the Income Support claimants’ bus fare-doubling, the reneging on various campaign promises, and many other controversies.
However, he did raise with him the near-half-million pounds spent on his transition team of ‘consultants’. This money is raining down on the people that [...]

Tonight’s appearance on BBC London was interesting – perhaps more interesting than I currently have time to do justice to. If any fellow Boris-watchers want to see what they missed, I recommend watching the interview on the BBC web site.
The overwhelming thing that came across to me was that he hasn’t updated his interview technique [...]

How many times during the campaign did we have to listen to Boris lecturing us on how Ken had once said "only some sort of ghastly, dehumanised moron would get rid of the Routemaster", then done so himself; and how Boris Johnson, knight in shining armour, would be riding to the rescue with a new [...]