Mikeuk

Split the anti Red Ken vote and keep out the scurf-ridden moronic Old Etonian Turk who wants to flood our green and pleasant land with his smelly compatriots.

Trash the witless arsehole and aim a dagger at the black heart of the Eton Skidmark.

The Bear

LOL!

I take it you didn't attend a Public School then?

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Signature removed because it wound me up every time I read it!

ranter

I ,up untill quite recently was prepared to vote for Boris for no other reason than to get red ken out. After much soul searching I will now be following my consience and will be putting my X next to Gerard Batten,with no second choice.

Mikeuk

Yes I did, and it had a better academic record than Eton.

The Bear

"The Bear" sits and thinks about Bell Curves.

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Signature removed because it wound me up every time I read it!

mkpdavies

Good work. If the rest of the country took your position, we would be sorted.

I would use my second vote too. Even though I don't support them, the fact their candidate has pulled out = none of the above in my book, so I would give it to the EDP.

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Labour, Blue Labour, Lib Dems

eublues

Heffer attacks Boris in today's Telegraph
Why treat the London election as a joke? - Telegraph
Why treat the London election as a joke?
By Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 11:01pm BST 29/04/2008


There was a compelling BBC television drama series - and I apologise if it is early in the day for an oxymoron - broadcast recently called The Curse of Comedy.

Its four episodes dealt with the dysfunctional lives of five entertainers: Tony Hancock, Hughie Green, Frankie Howerd and the two principals of Steptoe and Son, Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett. A fifth episode should be in the making, dealing with tomorrow's election for the post of Mayor of London.

I don't live in London, so don't have a vote. I am glad. Those lucky enough to live elsewhere should, though, join me in deploring the circus that comes to a halt tomorrow. Many of us work in London. Many more visit it regularly. It is our capital city, and showcase to the world. What happens to it matters to us all.

The present incumbent, Ken Livingstone, has, however, transcended comedy. He has done little to address London's core problems in his eight years in office, during which he has spent a sum of money equivalent to the gross domestic product of some developed nations.

Much has been wasted on his friends and on the cult of his personality. London remains a place where young people all too easily find themselves on the wrong end of a knife, where public transport doesn't work, and where the roads are clogged.

Add to this the deeply unsavoury nature of one or two of the Mayor's advisers, and the ease with which he drops apparently anti-semitic remarks, and one can easily conclude we are not dealing with a good man.

I doubt that anyone with the cast of mind and intelligence to read this paper might consider voting for him, so let us move on to Brian Paddick, the Lib Dem contender.

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Given he has for nearly 30 years done a proper job - he was a senior policeman in London - he would seem serious, and one whose qualification for seriousness equips him to handle one of the gravest problems facing London.

A few weeks ago, however, he said he would put a congestion charge of £10 a day on anyone from outside Greater London who drove a car within its boundaries.

If he had taken no consideration of the economic damage this would wreak, and the effect on the collapsing public transport system, then he is reckless. If he did, and still didn't get it, then he is a fool. Either way, forget him.

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. It is perhaps a kindness to some of you, who remember his genial outings on this page over many years, to advise that those of a sensitive disposition, who harbour affection for the Conservative candidate, might do better to switch off now.

Mr Johnson is not a politician. He is an act. The same stricture could fairly be applied to Mr Livingstone. Mr Johnson's act is, though, more finely wrought.

He is serving a very useful purpose for his party. It was decided, presumably by one of the advertising men who now control the Conservatives, that the only way to beat an act was with another, even better one. They certainly went to the right man.

I want to dismiss a prejudice about Mr Johnson, and I do so as one who has known him for the past 20 years. It is that he is a buffoon. He isn't.

The act is calculated and it has required serious application and timing of the sort of which only a clever man is capable. For some of us the joke has worn not thin, but out. Yet many less cynical than I am find it appealing. It conceals two things: a blinding lack of attention to detail, and (though this might seem to sit ill with the first point) a ruthless ambition.

Mr Johnson is the most ambitious person I have ever met. That ought to be a commendation for high office, since ambitious people normally understand they will go further only by doing their present job well. Mr Johnson's scattergun approach to life will not allow this.

In his superb biography of him, my colleague Andrew Gimson outlines the practice that has allowed Mr Johnson to get so far in life: he has used his charm, to which only a few more seasoned hands are immune, to enlist at every stage what Mr Gimson calls "stooges" to help him advance.

There were stooges when Mr Johnson was en route to be president of the Oxford Union. He has had stooges all through journalism, who did significant parts of his various jobs for him, usually with little thanks or reward. And now there are stooges in politics.

If Mr Johnson became Mayor tomorrow, he would be the front man for nameless others who would run London. That may well be better than more of Mr Livingstone. It would not be what people think they are voting for.

I agree with Mr Livingstone on one thing, which is that running London is not a comic spectacle (though it is a pity that he didn't see fit to live up to that precept more often).

What is there in Mr Johnson's past to suggest that his mayoralty would be anything but that? Where is the evidence of his adroitness in administration, his sense of responsibility, his ethic of public service?

As Mr Gimson makes clear, one of Mr Johnson's failings is a belief that the public is there to serve him, not vice versa. He has given much pleasure to millions over the years, but will that cause the Underground to work better, the Metropolitan Police to catch more criminals, or business to thrive in London? Or would a Johnson mayoralty be yet one more chapter in an epic of charlatanry - perhaps, since it is so serious a job with potentially no hiding place, the last chapter?

Mr Johnson will regard the job as a stepping stone to a Cameron cabinet (I have always expected Mr Johnson, in great old age, will befriend the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, covering all bets about a better place in Paradise).

Oddly enough, given how acute he is, that won't persuade him to do it properly. The guiding theme of his life is the charm of doing nothing properly. His sins themselves are charming in that they are the sort of failings that upset the Edwardians, and few others since.

He is pushy, he is thoughtless, he is indiscreet about his private life. None of this matters much to anyone these days, which is why he has gone so far in spite of them, and tomorrow may go further still.

Lynton Crosby, the Australian public relations genius who has kept Mr Johnson out of trouble during his campaign, returns home after it.

Then what? Who will guide the unguided missile? Who will support the figurehead? Who will ensure he turns up on time, or at all? How will they be accountable? Once, a man became mayor of Hartlepool dressed in a gorilla suit. Is what the main parties offer Londoners tomorrow any better? Or is London just a bit of a laugh?

No, it isn't. Both Labour and the Tories insult hard-pressed, overtaxed residents of London by failing to give them serious, strong-minded candidates to vote for tomorrow.

Having always taken Stanley Baldwin's strictures about the prerogative of the harlot very much to heart, I do not presume to advise you on which of these preposterous figures to support.

I would observe, though, that a massive abstention might just persuade the parties next time that London and its greatness deserve better than the Ken and Boris show.

Mikeuk

Where the Scurf King is concerned one should drop the prefix 'oxy' from 'oxymoron'.

A splendid condemnation of the candidate for Istanbul North. Heffer is to be congratulated.