Buck up, Boris!

Why isn’t the mayor making mincemeat of Ken?

Politicians do love their five-point plans, ten-point plans, 12-point plans, don’t they? Most of the points are usually Polyfilla, the political equivalents of ‘Your call is important to us,’ but at least there’s a nice round number involved. Last week, however, with characteristic originality, Boris Johnson unveiled British politics’ first-ever nine-point plan.

Unkind critics sniped that it was a ten-point plan with one point missing. Even for better-disposed observers, such as myself, Boris’s Nine Commandments — intended as the foundation of his re-election campaign — leave something to be desired.

Until recently, the Groundhog rematch between Johnson and his defeated 2008 opponent, Ken Livingstone, looked like ending in an equally Groundhog result. But since the New Year, Boris’s big lead has vanished: with eight weeks to go, all the polls so far in 2012 have put the two essentially neck-and-neck. Low murmurs have started, including in No. 10, that Boris’s campaign is ‘underwhelming’, that it lacks a simple ‘retail offer’ for voters, that people don’t know what Johnson has achieved in the job.

The nine-point plan, consciously or unconsciously, both acknowledges and exemplifies these problems. Point three, for instance, promises to ‘create 200,000 new jobs over the next four years’. But point four is ‘making our streets and homes safer with 1,000 more police on the beat’, something Boris has accomplished in his current mayoral term. It is trying to do two things at once: educate us in the great man’s achievements, and set out his agenda for the future. The risk, though, is that it simply confuses people.

The other risk is that the agenda for the future is not, so far, particularly action-packed. As well as the job creation, specific policy pledges comprise cutting waste, freezing the council tax, reducing Tube delays and planting some trees.