White mischief

Boris Johnson’s enemies are hoping for a final snow-down

London woke to snow and people wondered whether this time Boris Johnson would show true grit. His enemies reckon there’s no business like snow business for catching him out. They trust he will be found wanting, as he was by the unexpected snowfall in February 2009, when the city ground to a halt. Many people treasure the belief that the Mayor of London is fundamentally incompetent, and are disconcerted to find that sometimes whole months go by without any real evidence that the Tories have, in the words of the immortal Polly Toynbee, ‘put up a clown to run a great global city’.

The snow reached Scotland and the north of England first. On Monday, when it had already been freezing in London for several days but snow was not yet falling, I contacted City Hall to ask: ‘Is London ready for the snow?’ Back came the gung-ho reply: ‘You bet,’ together with a reassuring picture of the 27,000-tonne London Strategic Salt Reserve, at Cortina Drive, Thames Avenue, Dagenham. All sorts of preparations had been put in place, including huge reserves of salt, and Transport for London issued an assurance that with ‘our fleet of 38 gritters and ten gritting quad bikes’, it was going to keep the key roads open, including, crucially, the access roads to bus stations.

On Monday night, when I cycled home, the streets of central London were already strewn with grit. By Tuesday morning the first snow was falling, but the buses were still running. My eight-year-old daughter, who catches a bus at 8.15 each morning, said the service was the same as normal. It is true that this snow did not present a supreme challenge, for much of it melted the moment it touched the ground.