Full marks, Boris

Boris’s first move as Mayor of London is a seriously good one. He has appointed Ray Lewis as a deputy mayor with responsibility for tackling youth violence. The Telegraph describes Lewis as ‘inspirational’; I can certainly endorse that. I wrote here in 2005 about his Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, which takes gifted young black boys who are already well on track for a life of crime, drugs and mayhem and turns them into high-achieving solid citizens. He does so by giving these boys a combination of military-style discipline and profound belief in their potential, and by holding their (overwhelmingly single) mothers to account for their own inadequate parenting. He is tough, loving, uncompromising, charismatic and achieves astounding success in turning round some of the most difficult boys around. But because he identifies the slop and sentimentality in the schools and youth justice circles as the problem, he has been scorned, vilified and ostracised by the usual suspects as ‘authoritarian’. Thus the tragedy of our times. The fact that Boris has plucked him out of this obscurity and given him the task of spreading his insights over the whole of London is the best news I’ve heard for some time.