Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Boris is the kind of Tory I’d vote for: which means he can win

Rod Liddle urges his friend to stand for Mayor of London and demonstrate <br />what modern Conservatism can do — if you let it

Rod Liddle urges his friend to stand for Mayor of London and demonstrate
what modern Conservatism can do — if you let it

I’ve voted Conservative only once in my life — during elections to the London School of Economics students’ union 23 years ago, when the Tory manifesto pledged to spend all of the union money on buying a racehorse, rather than giving it to the bloody miners, or Robert Mugabe, or Pol Pot, as Labour wished to do. A lot of my fellow lefties voted similarly, sick to the back teeth of the posturing, grand-standing, attitudinalising antics of these awful little gobby public schoolboys from Tunbridge Wells and Berkhamsted in their interminable Che Guevara berets and Coal Not Dole! badges. This sort of middle-class Leninist radical chic was well past its sell-by date even in 1984 and joyously lampooned by both Rik Mayall in The Young Ones and ‘Student Grant’ in Viz at the time. And yet, bizarrely, all these years later we find that a sort of warped, less amenable, version of Student Grant is still Mayor of London; the old History Man moustache may have disappeared along with the Comrade Mugabe safari suit and those pointless newts, but the infantile leftist posturing, the colossal arrogance and the incompetence remains.

I have yet to meet anyone in London who voted for Ken Livingstone — but then most of my London friends are from the (largely white) working class. Why on earth would they vote for him? And yet he is still in power, slowly grinding the traffic in the capital to a complete standstill, charging four quid for a single ticket on the Tube, imposing a St Patrick’s Day ‘Semtex ’n’ transubstantiation’ parade on us all, inviting Muslim clerics who wish we would all die to address the nation, and prone to divesting himself of gobbets of pure, unrefined anti-Semitism whenever his policies are questioned.

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