Inimitable

Is there any other politician, in this country or in any other, who could come out with a line like this?

On Mr. Johnson's desk sits a tabloid cover mooting a possible June 4 poll. I point to it.

"Bring it on!" says Mr. Johnson, lighting up. "My message to Gordon Brown through the Wall Street Journal is: You great big quivering gelatinous invertebrate jelly of indecision, you marched your troops up to the top of the hill in October of [2007]. Show us that you've got enough guts to have an election June 4. Gordon: Man or Mouse?!"

At least someone’s still having fun.

O tempora! O mores!

I missed this in the summer.  I know there will be some who find the exuberance of Boris a bit much, but there's something rather magnificent in having as Mayor of London a man who can open an exhibition of the Emperor Hadrian in Latin.  Beats Tony Blair's French anyway.  Extra kudos for describing the Italian ambassador as the representative of the former colonial power, and for praising Hadrian's efforts to keep 'the Caledonians' in their proper place...

Classics in City Hall

Boris's first question time as mayor was, by all accounts, an absolute hoot. Poor old Ken Livingstone, sitting in the viewing gallery like Banquo at the feast, must be wondering how on earth Boris makes it all look so much fun. It's also good to see that he is being like the Roman ina n entirely non-Hefferite way.

Having described the proceedings as his first catechism (which has the archaic meaning of rigorous and persistent questioning, as well as its more common use as the teachings of the church), Boris proceeded to trot out his Virgilian gag, last seen when asked about BNP second preference votes, non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis (not such aid, nor such defenders does the time require). Watching from the balcony, Livingstone could at least have the comfort that uno avulso non deficit alter (When one is torn away another succeeds).

I have commented before on the continuing relevance of Roman politics to the modern day. It is clear that the time for classical allusions is not yet passed either. When looking on David Cameron's happy knack of spinning minimal policies into enormous poll leads, which of us has not thought, with Ovid, that materiem superabat opus (the workmanship surpassed the material).

In resisting the siren calls of the Orange bookers on the one hand and Simon Hughes on the other, Nick Clegg must surely have recalled Ovid's thoughts on the matter: medio tutissimus ibis (you will go most safely in the middle), although he should also bear in mind Virgil's warning that incidit in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charybdim (wishing to avoid Charybdis, he runs onto Scylla).

As for poor Gordon Brown, though we may feel that, in following Tony Blair, sequitur patrem, non passibus aequis (he follows his father, with unequal steps) he must surely cling to Aeneas's path and say to himself tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito (yield thou not to adversity, but press on the more bravely). Sadly, the rest of us are more likely to think of the raging Polyphemus, Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum (a horrible monster, misshapen, vast, whose only eye had been put out). Sorry.

Fantasies and delusions

Ha! A belated catch-up of the weekend's papers has left me rather bemused by this article by John Rentoul in the IoS. I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be high-farce burlesque, counter-history, prediction or what. The premise is that Cameron loses an election in 2012, after running a minority Government, because of the failures of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London. But it's so, well, odd. Look at the fatal "gaffes" that Boris is scheduled for:

But the real damage was done by the reintroduction of hunting for urban foxes in the Greater London area. After that, 74 per cent of people agreed that Tories were "toffs who think they are born to rule".

Eh?

He had reckoned without the declining but still strong instinct of discipline among Labour MPs. He had not anticipated the steel of David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, in wielding the knife. He was still kicking himself for buying the conventional wisdom that it would make the Labour Party look ridiculous if it changed its leader twice in one parliament. Of all people, he should have known how such assumptions about leadership contests are there to be overturned.

But he was proud of the way he had responded to the changed situation. He had kept his balance and prevented his party from talking itself into a downward spiral. Miliband had pulled the Government back from the depths and Chancellor Ruth Kelly's Budget had been a clever one that enabled Labour to go into the election with the narrowest of opinion-poll leads.

Chancellor Ruth Kelly? Stop, you're killing me! I mean, come on, it's a bit bloody much. Last week all these people were predicting that voting for Boris as Mayor would mean that there'd be anarchy on the streets by now. And now, even in John Rentoul's laboured work of mental masturbation, the worst thing he could is introduce urban fox hunts? I think it's time for all those who pledged to abandon London to call the Removals vans...

Simon Heffer - gah!

As regular readers (anyone...anyone...Bueller?) will know, I am not a fan of Simon Heffer. I think his sneering writing style unpleasant, his views predictable and often ridiculous - that John Redwood should be brought in as a more voter-friendly Shadow Chancellor than Osborne; that anyone who plays 20-20 cricket should be barred from Test matches etc - and his writing uninspiring. I'm sure this keeps him awake at nights.

Today's excrescence is about Heffer's old boss at the Spectator, Boris Johnson.

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.

The rest of the article is similar - it's more or less a hatchet job. A thought does occur to me though. Has Heffer ever publicly acknowledged that it was he who wrote the infamous Spectator editorial on Ken Bigley, for which Boris was humiliatingly dragged up to Liverpool to apologise? Not the act of a gentleman, what?

Incidentally, this is reported in the Guardian as Tory commentators turn on Johnson. Heffer is no more a Tory than Polly Toynbee these days. He advocates voting for UKIP, and opposes every aspect of the Conservative Party. And good riddance, frankly.

Just because a word sounds good

Doesn't mean it's the right word to use. Yesterday we were enlivened by a Polly Toynbee article decrying the 'effete' Boris Johnson - a word which means lacking in vigour, infertile and worn out. Given that Polly was extremely censorious a while back about Boris's vigorous womanising, and given that if one was asked which of Ken and Boris looked more tired, the answer would certainly be the pensioner it looks like an odd word. Moreover, it looks like a word that Polly thinks sounds good, but doesn't actually know the meaning of.

As with yesterday, as with today. It's Jonathon Freedland's turn to write an article puffing Livingstone as a political behemoth and denigrating Boris as useless. His word for the day is 'fop' as in It's Labour stalwart versus Tory fop - dress rehearsal for the really big one. Now, although fop sounds good - it even has sort of trace elements of class identification - it does have a specific meaning. That meaning is "A man who is preoccupied with and often vain about his clothes and manners" Which bit of that definition rings true about Boris Johnson? This is a man who is not merely dishevelled, but looks as though he has never in his life ever been remotely shevelled. Why use words if you don't know what they mean?

Incidentally

One of the last rallying points for the dwindling band of true believers in the Livingstone campaign is the idea that Boris would be a hopeless mayor. The example they use is who you would rather have as mayor if there were another terrorist attack on London, or as Charlie Brooker puts it:

If butterfingers Johnson gets in, it'll clearly be a laugh riot from beginning to end, like a series of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em in which Frank Spencer becomes mayor by mistake. Just picture him on live TV, appealing for calm after a terrorist bombing - the scope for chuckles is almost limitless.

Now obviously the political opinions of Charlie Brooker have no significance whatsoever, after all, as he says I'm genetically predisposed to hate the Tories. It's my default, hard-wired position. There's not much room for rational argument there. But this is an argument that's now used a lot: Livingstone was statesmanlike and magisterial, Boris would be a buffoon. Well, the second half of that statement is going to be a matter of opinion - I have no doubt that Boris would be thoroughly competent in that scenario. The first half still annoys me. I remember July 7 2005 rather well - my wife was getting the tube from Edgware Road to Liverpool Street, and was just past King's Cross when the bombs went off. It all felt a bit personal. And what was Livingstone's response?

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old.

Two things instantly grated on me: would it have been OK if it had been directed against the mighty and powerful? And why was an attack on London described as an attack (only) on the working class? Why could Livingstone not abandon his class dialectic even at such a time? Another question now occurs - if this is the benchmark Johnson is to be measured against, how on earth could he fail?

Just what the fuck is it with Steve Bell?

Steve Bell, as funny as a man dying of pancreatic cancer, has decidedly unsubtle views on politics and what's funny. George Bush, for example, was depicted as a chimp in, ooh, about 2000 and that has remained the joke in every single cartoon since. Ah ha.

Now Boris is depicted as Hitler. Complete with the hilarious accusation that he is proposing to gas both Jews and blacks - equal opportunities see?

Quite apart from the fantastic offensiveness of this cartoon - I mean really, what the fuck were the Guardian thinking? - who really looks at Boris Johnson and thinks 'you know who that tousle-haired posh Tory from Henley reminds me of? Adolf Hitler, that's who'? It's fatuous. Incidentally, is this the least recognisable caricature ever? Even Private Eye's Boris the Menace was obviously supposed to be Boris. Bell can't even get the hair right. Still, I suppose that the combination of the deeply unfunny with the viscerally offensive is what makes the Guardian what it is...

A fundamental Heffer error

The quite brilliant description by Danny Finkelstein of a "Fundamental Heffer error" as being where the author of such an error confuses what he wishes were the case, with what actually is the case has allowed me finally to understand Labour's tactics in the London Mayoral race. News from Guido that Boris Johnson is now the bookie's choice as favourite goes to confirm the polling that Boris is now in the box seat.

Yet Livingstone's, and Labour's, tactics have been bizarre in the extreme. First it was decided that he should be portrayed as a bigoted racist outlier on the hard Tory right, and a cosy arrangement was made with Compass to that effect. But the problem with this approach was that it was risible. It is possible to demonise a politician like, say, John Redwood or Norman Tebbit as being extremist and 'on the hard right' because, however unfair, it is plausible. Characterising Boris as an extremist just looked silly, and they were reduced to such absurdities as claiming that an opposition to the minimum wage renders him an extremist, or that his support for nuclear power makes him a Thatcherite. Livingstone and the left ran so hard on the 'Boris is a bigot' theme that they were left stranded upstream when its failure became apparent.

So they switched to plan B - OK, so Boris wasn't a dangerous racist who would introduce segregated schools (though Polly Toynbee was terrified about what Boris as Mayor might mean for the Tour de France) but he was a buffoon and a liar and a Bertie Wooster type ignoramus whose fundamental lack of seriousness would be a catastrophe for London anyway. Boris's reaction to Toynbee was suitably deflating: he texted a journalist saying She's got a crush on me... It's the only explanation. And I've always had a slight thing about her... He's gone a long way to rebut the buffoon jibe as well, with thought-out policies on transport and crime.

So Labour have been forced to change tack again, as they seemed to in the recent Labour conference, to get stuck into class warfare. Boris was condemned by the ridiculous Hazel Blears as a nasty rightwing elitist with odious views and criminal friends like Conrad Black. Pausing only to note that for any member of this Government to be casting aspersions about criminal friendships is a bit much, what with the sheer number of criminal investigations floating about, I would add that for it to be suggested that 'pitch defiles' in this mayoral election, when Livingstone's closest aide has resigned over claims that he channelled £100,000 of taxpayers’ money to projects run by a woman he bombarded with sexually charged e-mails is to be quite astonishingly hypocritical.

But for the reason for all this confusion we have to go back to our friend Simon Heffer. Labour persuaded themselves very early that there could be absolutely no way anyone could seriously consider voting for Boris. They themselves believed so absolutely that he was a right-wing caricature that they felt all they had to do was broadcast this widely for it to be accepted. The subsequent shambles has been because they still haven't accepted that merely wishing something were true is not enough to make it true.

The peculiar case of the contraband cigar case

It was an unusually bright day late in February, and I was sitting at my ease in the rooms I shared with Mr Sherlock Holmes. Although I was, as I have said, in a state of perfect contentment with the world, my companion was unquestionably restless. The criminal world had, it seemed, been conspiring against him in the manner of their outrages against society - it scarcely appealed either to Holmes's intellect nor to his sense of decorum to trail after the routine bludgeonings and shootings that now infested the East End, while the ritualised killings among recent arrivals from the Empire that had at first alerted Holmes's sense of the bizarre had paled through sheer repetition into a litany of deaths that even the dullards at Scotland Yard could be relied upon to handle.

As a result, Holmes was irritable and bored. His mood (and mine if it comes to that) had not been improved by the ruling that, as he used our rooms at Baker Street as his primary place of work, and indeed retained an employee in the form of the estimable Mrs Hudson, the ounce and a half of shag that he was wont to smoke in contemplation of a particularly tricky case now had to be consumed in considerable discomfort, while standing among the mud and fogs of Baker Street.

As he sat in his armchair, however, a sudden smile lit up his thin features and with a laugh he tossed a small object across the room to me.

"There, Watson," he said, "tell me what you make of that."

'That' seemed to refer to a small cigar case, of tooled leather, with space for perhaps three cigars. I said as much to Holmes, adding that it did not seem to me that there was anything further to deduce from such unpromising material.

"Not a bit of it, my dear Watson," said Holmes, with a stern look. "Why even from a cursory examination you must at least be able to describe its provenance?"

I confessed that, beyond the observation that it appeared to be well-made and reasonably expensive I could make nothing of it.

"But surely you have noticed the unique nature of the stitching, which together with the distinctive smell of the leather itself indisputably place its manufacture within 20 miles of the Fertile Crescent? No? These features really cannot be mistaken - you should read my monograph on the manufacture and curing of leather in Mesopotamia and Persia since Babylonian times."

I made a mental note to avail myself of such an opportunity at some point and made to hand the case back, but Holmes stopped me.

"But really, that is only the beginning. It is evident, even at first glance, that the original owner of this case lost it at a time of great personal misfortune - that much is evident from the slight scorching at the back of the case, and of the slightest traces of rubble which can be seen in the stitching - and that its current owner is a man of more than average size or strength, with ill-fitting clothes and unruly hair, probably a journalist, or possibly a politician."

He passed out this information with an air of a man remarking on mere commonplaces of the weather.

"But Holmes," I cried, "I do not see how any such conclusion can be drawn!"

"My dear Watson, you know my methods, it is merely a matter of applying them. That the owner is large is evident from the recent fingermarks that have been imprinted on the leather, that he is untidy in his dress can be seen by the fact that this case has evidently been sitting in a pocket with twine, poorly-printed pamphlets - from which one can also deduce that he is either a writer for the yellow press or a benighted politician - and the various coins, keys and so on that have produced the scratches on the surface. That he has an untidy mop of fair hair is easily deduced from the strands that have attached themselves even to his cigar case. For a man to have shed hair onto his cigars suggests an extravagant style indeed."

As ever, when explained by Holmes, the most outlandish deductions seemed clear as day, even trivial. Noticing my change of expression Holmes laughed.

"It is true that I ought not to explain my methods, for once the daylight seeps in, the magic seeps out. But the ownership of this case is no trivial thing, for I have been informed by my friends at Scotland Yard that this case is the key to unmasking and defeating the most dangerous man in London."

"Moriarty?" I said almost in a whisper, for the deeds of that man had turned much of London to ruinous decline over the past year. His involvement in American land deals alone had transformed the City of London into a wreck; his hand was sensed in the sensational collapse of a major banking institution that had done much to destroy public confidence in the conventional financial sector.

"No," said Holmes, "one still more dangerous than he. His existence is known to many, but his true nature shielded from all. Yet for those cognoscenti that do exist, only his first name needs to be spoken for instant recognition and fear to be shown. He stands upon the brink of destroying the hallowed institutions of London Town, and the instructions for his final exposure have come, I may say, from the very top."

Twenty minutes later we were in a Hansom cab, bowling along the A40 towards Henley...

(continued on page 94)

Next Mayor of London

There have been whisperings about Boris's lack of drive in recent weeks for the Mayoral elections. Hopefully, word of a new Boris biography will add a little pep to the affair.

Polly on Conservatism

Well, since I had my go at determining what it is to be a Conservative, I suppose it's only fair that Polly Toynbee should have a go as well. I think, however, she has misunderstood to a significant extent what precisely a Conservative is. The first thing she doesn't get is Boris Johnson.

Between now and next May, he [Boris] risks becoming David Cameron's nightmare shadow, a buffoonish parody of the Conservative leader: same generation, same school, same kind of charm - but all done in pantomime....He [Cameron] knows the centre ground of politics has shifted far in the last decade from anti-gay Section 28 and Boris Johnson calling black people "piccaninnies".

This is continuation of a depressingly tedious line of attack that Boris is i) a clown; and ii) a bigot. He is neither. What he is, and one of the reasons for his popularity is due to this, is a personification of a very old British stereotype. In World War II, it is said, the Americans would describe a situation as being 'serious, but not fatal'. The British would describe them as 'fatal, but not serious'. The urge to make a joke out of everything, even while remaining serious on the subject, is not buffoonish, nor is it lightweight. To underestimate Boris Johnson is an error - and one I suspect that the Labour Party and its emanations will regret. However, on from Boris.

No, what upset the party was his [Daid Willetts's] well-argued factual paper explaining precisely why grammar schools fail to promote social mobility. It confronted Conservatives with unpalatable truths about class and education. It demolished the comfortable view that poor children have the same chance at school as everyone else, if only their parents had "aspiration". They could not and would not face the fact that class and income predestine school results long before school, and that school itself drives deeper class divisions.

Willetts paid the price for telling inconvenient truths about social injustice that run to the heart of all social policy. It takes a few intellectual somersaults to accept his undeniable class analysis and yet stay a Conservative. (Time Willetts crossed the floor?)

Willetts's argument was, essentially, that a grammar school system does not help social mobility for the overwhelming majority of children. As such a Conservative Party should be looking for alternatives. The Tory activist opinion was that, for many of them, the grammar school had been their personal ticket into social mobility, and they didn't see why their children shouldn't have the same opportunity. Both a rearguing for social mobility coming about through the ability of the children, rather than by state diktat. They simply disagree on the best method to provide it. Contrast that with the Socialist idea that what is important is equality of outcome - that every child receives the same education, and you can see that Willetts is a very long way indeed from crossing the floor.

It matters not just to Conservatives, but for the politics of the country that Cameron is not dragged back by his something-of-the-night tendency. There are always genuine arguments to be had between right and left about the proper size of the state, how high taxes should be, the balance between punishment and prevention, the balance between nationalism and internationalism.

The thing is that Polly, having identified that there are conflicting arguments over the role the state should play, goes on to say that Cameron should, effectively, side with the Government. That's a rather odd position - there are two arguments, and both parties should articulate mine.

For the sake of progressive politics, the Conservatives need to move with the moving times and stay intimately concerned with the everyday running of schools, hospitals and social programmes, so that they too can see that money must be raised and spent, that the state must be strong, and that capitalism only works when it is robustly regulated for its own good

I hate the word 'progressive': it's dishonest and glib at the same time. And Toynbee's argument is merely that the Tories must not, under any circumstances, articulate any need for political change, still less any new ideas. But 'progressive' is not a Tory word. 'Radical', on the other hand, has been. What Cameron needs to do is not maintain the current orthodoxies on public finance, on the role of the state and on education. He needs to articulate change. He also needs not to listen to Polly Toynbee. No more caravans!

Guppy? Hedges?

Sorry for revisiting the London Mayoral theme - it's becoming something of a theme here - but that's partly because it's becoming so interesting. In an article in the Guardian Ken has an extended attempt at attacking Tories in general and Boris in particular, and it's the angle of attack that is so fascinating. In a classic 'play the man not the ball' Livingstone goes onto what he must think is a winner:

Boris Johnson, is in an extraordinary position. He has advocated a policy of the public individually intervening against yobs. But this contrast sharply with his own recorded behaviour. When approached by Darius Guppy, a person later convicted of fraud, to aid in the beating up of a journalist - Stuart Collier - Boris Johnson failed to report this to the police, discussed how badly the journalist would be beaten and agreed to supply his address. Can he explain how anyone who did this can present themselves as a candidate in favour of law and order in London?

But is this a wise line of attack? Boris does after all have a perfectly credible defence, as outlined by the man who actually made the recording that first brought this matter to light, and holds no particular torch for him:

I don't especially support Johnson, though I loathe Livingstone, but I'd like to see a fair contest. So let me just explain Johnson's role, as far as I can make it out from the tapes I made at the time.

He didn't know the heavies were planning to rip Guppy off. It must have seemed a serious plot. Guppy made it clear that he could try other means of finding the journalist's address. Johnson assured him he didn't have to - and did absolutely nothing at all to find it himself. I actually had that confirmed by Clive Goodman, the now disgraced formed News of the World royal correspondent who listened to the tape. Johnson said he would approach a specific third party. He specifically didn't. The only conclusion I can draw is that he was trying to make sure Guppy didn't manage to have the man attacked. Rather, he was stalling, waiting for Guppy's attention span to expire - a safe bet for those who knew him well.

Not entirely a clean bill of health, but neither an open and shut case of perversion of the course of justice either. And is Livingstone wise to bring up matters of character on violence and helping the police? The matter was dropped and no charges were eventually bought, but cast your mind back 5 years to the summer of 2002 and a birthday party...

When the front door was shut, said Mr Hedges, "Ken wanted to get back into the party. He was uncontrollable and went up to the door and was hammering on it. He was going ballistic and we were trying to calm him down and restrain him. We were grabbing on to his arms and trying to hold him. The last memory I have is of Ken’s arm lunging towards me."

Mr Hedges said that his next memory was coming to, briefly, in the ambulance and then again after he had an X-ray at the Whittington hospital.

Hedges later went further in his allegations: Livingstone was behaving like a drunken lout, physically abusing his pregnant partner, making me fall over a wall and then using the resources of the Greater London Authority to try to cover it up. I'm not entirely convinced that he's in the best position to be throwing stones on this one.

Compass responds

Since Boris Johnson announced that he was throwing his hat into the ring in the race to become London Mayor, I've commented a few times on the line of attack that the left has tried. It boils down to two, linked, arguments: one that Boris is a member of the 'Tory hard right', and two that he is a racist. The Compass charge sheet, which I looked at here, essentially followed the Livingstone tactic of reading Boris's back catalogue and pulling out quotations where they look like they fit the smear sheet.

Andrew Gilligan picked up on this, noting that the article cited to prove that Boris was an avid supporter of George W Bush was one that described the President as a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy; that the article cited to prove that Boris Johnson was a strong supporter of grammar schools was a 1997 piece in support of the Tory position (then, and now) of retaining existing grammar schools, rather than opening more, etc etc.

Compass have responded to this article in an almost impenetrably badly written piece here. There are really only two possibilities for most of their defences of their piece: they do not understand what Boris is saying in his articles; or they do understand and are deliberately misrepresenting it. Take their first 'slam dunk' argument: that Boris Johnson is (or as they now say 'was') a fanatical supporter of the Iraq war. To justify this they take two articles. In the first he notes that he was awe-struck by the extent of American military power in the war (and it's worth pointing out that Boris draws a distinction between the 'war' when Saddam Hussein's forces were defeated, and the insurgency that has followed). Nowhere in the article is there approval of the war stated - what there is, is respect for the military achievement.

To extract from this article the statement that Boris Johnson’s support for the war in Iraq was extreme – indeed to a point that even many supporters of the war might find distasteful in its treatment of issues such Iraqis themselves is extraordinary (apart from being ungrammatical).

Another area of dispute is whether Boris Johnson is a fanatical Thatcherite. Compass's logic here is again somewhat tendentious: Someone who considers Margaret Thatcher Britain’s’ greatest peace time prime minister’ is self-evidently a very strong Thatcherite. Quite apart from the use of 'fanatical' as a pejorative, the two positions cited by Compass are not co-terminous. Most people would consider Winston Churchill to be Britain's greatest wartime Prime Minister. Few Britains would consider themselves 'fanatical Churchillians' on such matters as price controls, or Indian policy. Boris may be a Thatcherite, but to prove it you need rather more than an article saying he thinks she was a great Prime Minister.

The Compass report and the associated City Hall creeps who infest websites and newspaper comments at the moment are mining a barren seam. They sound shrill, humourless and ridiculous. To believe, as they seem to, that Boris is unelectable because he describes a car as 'chick pulling' is so reminiscent of ghastly student JCRs that it can hardly help but send people over to the Johnson camp.

One final point. Compass has described Boris as extremely right-wing; a hardline right-winger; Norman Tebbit in a clowns uniform; and uses the phrase hardline right-wing almost reflexively to describe such policies as being pro-nuclear, or anti-Kyoto. But Boris is not, has never been, and never will be on the right of the Conservative Party. In 2001, as a newly elected MP, he supported Ken Clarke over Portillo and IDS. In 2005 he was such an early supporter of David Cameron that he wrote an article in the Spectator which started off by explaining just who exactly Cameron was. Johnson sits on the left of the Conservative Party - and that's so easy to back up that it's incredible that Compass thinks it can get away with claiming anything different.

Yet more Boris

So, the Compass Group, that leftist Labour group that agitated for the sacking of Tony Blair and for the reassertion of socialist values, have decided that they don't support Boris Johnson for Mayor of London. Well, chuh.

If those of us who hanker for a fairer, more equal and democratic world fail to draw attention to Johnson's views and re-mobilise London's progressive consensus, we could end up with the most right-wing Mayor of London in living memory.

I'd say that's a certainty if Boris is elected - after all Ken Livingstone is the first London Mayor, and Boris (and most of the UK population) are well to his right.

Londoners certainly cannot complain that they will not have a clear choice this time round. Boris is Thatcherite and proud of it; Ken Livingstone was once Thatcher's nemesis.

True, if by 'nemesis' you mean 'annoying irrelevance'.

He is an avid supporter of President Bush; he opposed the Kyoto treaty and the national minimum wage; he believes that trouble comes from "too zealous" attempts to tackle inequality; and he has called for the widespread sacking of public sector workers.

This might be overstating his support for Bush, unless by 'avid support' you can include saying The President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy. Otherwise this looks like the definition of a conservative. So the message is really: Don't vote for Boris - he's a Conservative. Say a left wing labour group.

In other news, dog bites man...

UPDATE: The Compass Report is here by the way. It's fatuous nonsense as might be expected. One point I did notice, however: Number of times Boris Johnson uses the word 'piccaninnies': 1. Number of times Compass uses it: 4 (including twice on the opening page). Mountains? Molehills?

Hattersley on...?

Roy Hattersley has nailed his colour to the mast in announcing who he prefers as candidate for London Mayor. See if you can guess who from the following reasons:

I still spend two or three days a week in London and do not look forward to the metropolis becoming one gigantic photo opportunity.

...since he seems to suffer from an incurable addiction to seeing his name in the newspapers - we could expect an unremitting avalanche of embarrassing publicity stunts.

Once a politician is bitten with the celebrity bug, the consequent infection is incurable.

I have to say, that if the above are good enough reasons not to support a candidate for London Mayor, Roy Hattersley will be looking down at the ballot paper with very few options.

Get Boris!

So, when I wrote that it looked suspicously as if Ken Livingstone was priming sock puppets and astro-turfers to plaster the blogs with bum-numbingly tedious screeds about how Boris Johnson was obviously a racist because he 'dismisses Chinese culture' others were clearly thinking the same way.

The problem is that the 'scandal' in question is so evidently trivial that becoming enormously outraged over it looks, well, odd. It just doesn't seem reasonable for rational adults to get steamed up over such inanities. A juicy little race row would suit Ken Livingstone down to the ground though - putting the focus on Boris and not on Qaradawi, or Jewish war criminals. Lets look out for the next focus though - we've now had the 'posh idiot' line, which I suspect will run and run, and the 'racist' line, which I suspect will grind to an embarassing death when everyone sees how ludicrous it is. What's the next Kendiktat? Well, I suspect Peter Norrie will be there to tell us.

Smearing for fun and profit

In an interview on the Today programme recently, Ken Livingstone said, in relation to the challenge from Boris Johnson, that he was going through all Boris's published articles for proof of his nasty, reactionary Tory ways. Ken said, ludicrously, that Boris was 'some way to the right of Norman Tebbit'. In the last few days, since the weekend, a flurry of articles and blog posts have come out decrying Boris for his 'racism'. Equally, on Iain Dale's site and many others, two or three commenters have flooded the comments with examples of Boris's racism.

All the examples come from two articles. One was written by Boris Johnson about Blair's messianic imperialist attitude to foreign affairs and included the following phrase:

It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness.

They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

It seems clear to me that this is nothing more than an a satirical view of Blair's attitude to Africa - his desire to be seen as some 19th century potentate. It certainly isn't racist. This an argument that doesn't really need any further exploration - it's nonsense.

What's interesting is the implication of it's sudden arrival onto the public scene. The article in question was written in 2002 - why is it causing a fuss now? Is it poosible that Ken Livingstone has got his mayoral team on research duty - trawling the Boris back catalogue for juicy out-of-context titbits to throw to useful idiots? If so, who's paying? Dizzy is always good at tracing such things - and Freeborn John noticed, when he wrote (with considerable inside track knowledge...) about the Darius Guppy and Boris Johnson affair, that someone in the GLA was downloading the transcripts from his site. There could be a really juicy little misuse of public funds story here...

More Hari Misrepresentation

After the kerfuffle over Johann Hair's gross misrepresentation of Nick Cohen's book, one might have thought that he would have trodden very carefully for a little while. Unfortunately, this has not proved to be the case. Today's article, written with wonderful taste and sympathy in the immediate aftermath of the foot and mouth outbreak in Surrey, combines Hari's by now familiar tactic of selective quotation and misleading conclusions to damn Boris Johnson as an anachronistic shootin'-and-huntin' rural toff who is unfit to run London. The piece, by the way is headlined Time to stop mollycoddling the countryside and to start nurturing our cities instead, which might seem a little odd in light of the fact that the countryside is anything but mollycoddled.

Anyway, lets look quickly at Hari's claim that this outbreak was leaked out of an American pharmaceutical lab. This certainty might surprise those who thought that results as to whether Merial or the Government-run Institute for Animal Health was responsible would not be out until Tuesday, and indeed those who thought that Merial was a 50/50 joint venture between the American Merck and the French Rhone Merieux. Mere facts are not, of course an impediment.

The main thrust of the article lies beyond such casual indifference to the facts.

But the lack of seriousness we apply to the interests of our cities may be about to suffer a much worse blow than this. Boris Johnson's candidacy to run our capital city cannot be dismissed as a joke.

The problem with Boris?

Boris is the voice of a romanticised rural England in constant clash with the reality of 21st-century London. This is a man who supports, and has taken part in, not just fox-hunting but stag-hunting. He writes excitedly: "I remember the guts streaming, and the stag turds spilling out on to the grass from within the ventral cavity. Then they cut out the heart." He goes on to add: "This hunting is best for the deer."

I have a brief confession to make: I can't find this article on the web. However, I am sufficiently sad that I remember reading it in Have I got views for you, and am absolutely sure that the thrust of the article was that he hated stag hunting, was made miserable by the death of the stag, and went away vowing never to do it again, while at the same time concluding that, since deer numbers fell catastrophically when the National Trust banned stag hunting, the best thing for the deer was that it continued. I'll post the relevant text as soon as I can lay hands on it, but by way of example the Amazon review of have I got views for you refers to his horror at the death of a stag. Hari misrepresents Boris's entire argument and does so by selective quotation. Nick Cohen might be feeling a bit deja vu at this point.

But of course, it's not enough to smear Boris as an enthusiastic stag-hunter. He muse be smeared, judiciously, as a racist. The word itself doesn't appear, Hari relying instead on innuendo, but in what other way can the following be interpreted?

This is a man who has, with echoes of Enoch Powell, described non-white children as "piccaninies", and written about the "watermelon smiles of black people". These atavistic mental images feed into his policies.

James Cleverly has written about this already, and I don't propose to do so again. Read what James has said, read the article in question and then ask yourself whether it is just possible that Boris might have been parodying the very racist style that he is being accused of. Also, precisely what policies is Hari talking about here? I'm not aware that he has announced any policies beyond trying to get rid of the bendy buses. What can he mean?

After the London police treated Stephen Lawrence's family with contempt and let his murderers walk free, it was essential for all London politicians to press the Met to reform itself to root out these attitudes. Boris did the opposite. He attacked "the PC brigade" for "punch[ing] a hole in the Metropolitan Police". He damned the sensible Macpherson reforms as "hysteria" and "a witch-hunt", even comparing them to the tyranny of Nicolae Ceausescu. If Boris was mayor, the pressure on the police applied by Ken Livingstone to treat all Londoners equally would be off.

I suppose it's otiose to suggest that Hari reads what Boris Johnson has said about the Macpherson report itself, but if he insists on quoting Johnson, he ought at least give the context. The comparison with Ceausescu was based on the Macpherson report's recommendation that one could be prosecuted for what you said in private - in a conversation with your wife in your kitchen. It was and is the most stunningly illiberal proposal and Macpherson later distanced himself from it. If this is the case for the prosecution, it's pretty bloody thin. But there's more, of course:

Boris has other beliefs that would be just as dire for London. This city is particularly vulnerable to global warming...The London mayor needs to be a voice on the global stage against this on-going disaster, as Ken Livingstone has been. Boris believes the opposite. When George Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, Boris cheered: "When Bush says no, he is doing what is right not just for America but for the world."

So if you are in opposition to the Kyoto Treaty - a piece of spectacularly useless verbiage that does nothing to address global climate emissions - you cannot be Mayor of London? Rubbish, and utter rubbish at that. Anything else?

London has great gashes of poverty between its glistening towers. The charity Médecins du Monde used to operate only in Third World countries - until it was so shocked by conditions here in East London that it felt obliged to open a clinic last year.

Here is this argument: London is desperately poor in parts; the Mayor of London has the power to do something about this; Livingstone has been Mayor for 7 years; therefore the Mayor who has presided over this squalor should be re-elected. Got that? Ultimately the entire article is tripe: all it is saying is that Hari doesn't like Boris Johnson, because he represents the countryside. Avoiding the classic I'm sorry I haven't a clue definition of countryside (in this case, 'the murder of Johann Hari') there is one further oddity in store.

London today is the first truly global city, internationalism made flesh-and-concrete. In my apartment block in East London, there are Russian exiles, Chinese students, a Ghanaian academic and a Colombian doctor - in the middle of a Bengali area.

There is space for everyone in today's London - people from every country, every culture. Except, apparently, shootin'-and-huntin' rural toffs from England. So, an article that runs the gamut from misinformation to misrepresentation, via a sideline in suggestive racial smears. Nice work for the Independent I suppose.

Just what is it?

Further to my post of a few days ago, and Mr Eugenides' observation here, here's a comment, in its entirety, from a Comment is Free thread about whether Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone should be mayor of London.

Aside from George Galloway who is soon to retire Livingstone and Jenny Tonge is the only politician in the UK not in league with and propped up by the zionists (tellingly both he and Galloway work outside the 3 main parties).

To lose him to another zionist such as Boris Johnston would be the deathknell of a vibrant diverse democracry.

It's the combination of illiteracy, ignorance and spiteful racism that make it so identifiably a CiF comment. When I tried to register as a commenter I was rejected on the grounds that my chosen moniker (which I think was either partyreptile or Timj) was likely to inflame hatred. Words rather fail me.