Boris Watch

The knives have been rather abruptly unsheathed at City Hall…
CITY Hall staff today told of a “climate of fear” as up to 120 positions were cut as a result of Boris Johnson’s restructuring plans.
This chimes with the nervous sentiments expressed by Anthony Browne in an article for Canada’s Globe and Mail…
“We worry about how deep [...]

Boris Johnson today faced calls to replace David Ross as his representative on the London Olympics organising committee after the multimillionaire businessman quit Carphone Warehouse following an admission that he had used a large slice of his personal holding in the company to guarantee personal loans.
Despite heavy coverage of the story, the Mayor has yet [...]

From The Times
“Sir Ian Blair is expected to announce his resignation as Metropolitan Police Commissioner this afternoon.
Sources told The Times that the pressures of recent months had forced Sir Ian, who became commissioner in February 2005, to consider his position.
He is understood to be standing down before Boris Johnson, the new Tory Mayor of London, [...]

Anthony Browne has written a piece for the Independent arguing that illegal immigrants residing in the UK should be granted amnesty. I’m certainly not going to argue with that, but I would be interested to know why – considering his long and consistent writings against immigration – he has changed his mind.
In 2003 he was [...]

Boris has announced cuts at City Hall, threatening to dispose of around 100 jobs in an effort to save £7.5 million by the end of 2009. This restructuring appears to be dependent upon the GLA becoming “more coherent, focused and [capable of delivering] better value“, and will include the freezing of vacanct positions as well [...]

Paul Waugh at his Evening Standard blog:
“Insiders claim that Mr Boles was closely involved in the appointment of each of the three figures who have been forced to quit – former Deputy Mayor Ray Lewis, former deputy chief of staff James McGrath and now Tim Parker. I’m told that a power struggle with Sir Simon [...]

I’ve been flicking through the increasingly infamous new Policy Exchange report – ‘Cities Unlimited’ – and, despite fairly extraordinary ambitions, much of it seems a little thin. The denunciations of the “beyond revival” northern cities have caused the bulk of the backlash, but with regards to London the authors fancy an urban expansion of at [...]

The Tory Troll, fresh from his summer travels, quotes a source as saying that:
“The rumour that the MPA is to be relocated is still circulating. Although how they intend to find desk space for another 100 people in City Hall is beyond me – unless this means 100 redundancies of City hall based staff.”
This rumour [...]

A few days ago, Dave Hill spotted this in Mayor’s report to the Assembly for 10th September.
“Agreed the award of and entry into a contract with Egon Zehnder for search and selection services to assist with the recruitment of 2-3 senior appointments within the Mayor’s Office (agreeing an exemption to the Authority’s contracts code of [...]

It seems that Boris’s sense of humour has returned.
Rosie Boycott – who runs an organic farm in Somerset and “writes regularly about the importance of food in improving health” – has promised a “radical rethink” in order to challenge “aspects of our current food system which are damaging our environment through wasteful practices and producing [...]