Hold the front page: Boris Johnson more right-wing than Steve Norris

“Boris Johnson is by far the most right wing candidate ever to be presented by a major party for Mayor of London.”

This is how the Compass dossier on Boris starts. But the sentence is actually fairly meaningless as there have only been two elections for Mayor of London and the Tories fielded the same candidate in both of them. So what the Compass report is actually saying is that Boris is more right-wing than Steve Norris; that hardly marks one out as the political love child of Ann Coulter and Genghis Khan. You could equally happily say that “Ken Livingstone is by far the most left wing candidate ever to be presented by a major party for Mayor of London.” Indeed, that is far more of an achievement as it puts him to the left of Frank Dobson who is considerably more left-wing than Norris is right-wing.