From capering to caped crusader

22 April 2009

Matthew Parris says Mayor Johnson must now focus obsessively on fixing London’s transport system

My advice to Boris is to gather in a more systematic way the reputation for being in politics to stand up for the individual against the madnesses and meannesses of the big political and bureaucratic guns. And the area in which I think he must take this campaign urgently is transport. Public transport is a daily misery for literally millions of Londoners. The city has a magnificent transport infrastructure but it’s under huge pressure, fraying at the seams, and (especially on the Underground) running things pretty close to the edge. The national press virtually ignores it as a ‘London story’, while London’s daily Evening Standard has (curiously) only ever been fitfully interested.

But transport is a huge part of millions of Londoners’ lives, and so often an unhappy one. The Evening Standard’s transport editor ought to have been elevated by his paper into A-list status: one of the city’s top ten media figures; a known face raging daily against the indignities commuters suffer; following stories systematically; mounting undercover snoops; demanding investigations; uncovering organisational and financial scandals.

The Mayor of London should fill the void. He should act like a campaigning transport journalist. He should be unafraid to embarrass even his own Transport for London team. London commuters should imagine him as the kind of politician they might find themselves sitting beside on a severely delayed tube train — and pour out their woes; the kind of Mayor we might see peeping through the holes in the hoarding that hides the escalator repairs that aren’t in fact happening; the politician we might encounter under a bus shelter with a stopwatch, checking whether official service frequency is borne out by the reality. From capering to caped crusader: that’s the transition which, after a year in office, Boris now needs to make.