‘Let’s melt down the railings to make bicycles’

Mary Wakefield

22 April 2009

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Boris Johnson talks to Mary Wakefield about being Mayor, playing God and beating David Cameron (at ping-pong)

Have you always had natural authority?

The sad truth is that my children would find that question satirical. Though I did play God, aged 10, in a play about the Flood.  

How do you think being Mayor has changed your character?  

It’s a bit like having your first child again — a sudden sense of overwhelming responsibility.

You’ve said that the most important political issue facing  Britain is that too many children leave school without the basics of  reading, writing and maths. How do you plan to fix this?  

Synthetic phonics; multiplication tables by heart; more male teachers; academic competition; a grand smashing of Playstations and making them all learn two poems a term.

What do you think about the idea of making all state schools independent  charities with almost no regulation?  

Sounds groovy. But the answer, as everybody knows but dare not admit, is to allow state schools the freedom once again to select on the basis of academic merit. Everything else is just blah. Look at what is happening to social mobility. Look at the way the fee-paying schools are lengthening their lead. The whole thing is outrageous, and to cap it all we are now letting Martin McGuinness — who spent decades trying to blow us up — get away with abolishing the grammar schools in Northern Ireland. What a disaster, and what putrid hypocrisy on the part of the entire British ruling class, who either use private tutors to give their kids the edge, or else send them to private school.

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Thucydides

April 23rd, 2009 3:03pm Report this comment

Links to Pericles's speech:

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/PERICLES.HTM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles'_Funeral_Oration

robert

April 23rd, 2009 8:13pm Report this comment

Boris talks a great campaign, but when events intrude - as the 1-day snowstorm earlier this year - he caves in to the health and safety lobby at the first push. Pericles? Not exactly.

Forlornehope

April 28th, 2009 12:09pm Report this comment

Nice to get some optimism from a politician for a change.

GK

May 5th, 2009 3:27pm Report this comment

Athens was like America, open generous, democratic — and Sparta was like the Soviet Union — nasty, closed, militaristic, totalitarian.

That is one way to view it. The Athenians dominated the Delian league and massacred the Melians
that defied them during the Peloponnesian war and great Pericles order the amputation of the thumb of all men of Aegina for the same reason, then sold them for slaves and colonised these islands.