Boris Watch

The best advertised, best attended event Boris Johnson has set up since he’s been Mayor was the Last Orders on the Underground tube drinking party, and he set that one up by accident.
Perhaps a lesson there on how to advertise and how to pick events that people actually want to go to?

Over here.

It’s getting to be a habit, this re-announcing of existing policy as brand-new-Boris-manifesto-rah stuff, accompanying by drooling troglodytes in the Standard comments.
Today’s story is Boris visiting what the Standard describes as an ‘Oxford track’ to run an uneducated eye over the new ‘S-stock’ sub-surface Underground trains, due to start being delivered for the Metropolitan Line [...]

Bear with me on this one.  Dave Hill’s memory hole retrieval of the transport manifesto [PDF] allows us to check the wording of the no strike agreement:
I will look to reduce the disruption caused by strikes on the Tube by negotiating a no-strike deal, in good faith, with the Tube unions.
That’s ‘unions’, plural.  So, if [...]

Boris has a web page up about the strike, this time on london.gov.uk, which is more political than TfL.  He duly starts with a rant at the RMT:
“It is utterly demented of the RMT leadership to proceed with this strike when two thirds of their members did not vote for it and when real progress [...]

Boris, obviously stung by criticism over Snowday, has decided to go all pro-active ahead of the 48 hour Tube strike:
The Mayor and Transport for London (TfL) have unveiled a raft of extra services as part of a major effort to help Londoners and commuters get around the Capital, if a planned 48-hour Tube strike goes [...]

We’ve been wondering who’d replace the sadly departing Tim O’Toole.  It’s a chap called Richard Parry.  What do we know about him?  Not a lot.  He’s not on the TFC’s list (see comments) of runners and riders from 3.3.2009, that’s for sure.  All I can glean is that it’s an internal appointment, him having been [...]

Normally when a senior member of Boris’s team leaves, we respond with a mixture of ‘haha’ and ‘phew’.  Today we respond with ‘oh shit’.  Tim O’Toole, MD of London Underground and one of the best transport managers in the country, has decided his future lies away from leading the Underground through the next few decidedly [...]

As I predicted after the May elections, RMT leader Bob Crow is directly challenging Boris. More than 700 cleaners employed by four sub-contractors are striking, demanding that hourly rates are raising £5.50 to £7.20.
The TfL claim that they “have already reassured all interested parties, notably the trade unions, that we are taking this commitment forward,” [...]

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 [...]