Boris johnson

Finally the Conservatives could have a decent and recognisable candidate for Mayor of London. Zac Goldsmith has told the Standard that he wants to put himself forward for the Tory nomination – after a string of senior Conservatives tried to persuade him to do it. So far those interested were either known only within the Tory hierarchy, or keen not to mention that they were Conservatives. Goldsmith has a similar independent brand as Boris Johnson: he has rebelled enough times in the last Parliament to suggest that he would be someone prepared to stand up to the Tory leadership in Westminster to get a good deal for London, which is

Sol Campbell has thrown his hat into the ring to represent the Conservative Party in the 2016 London mayoral election. The official announcement comes after the former England footballer voiced his interest in the position earlier this year when he was rumoured to be lined up as a parliamentary candidate for Kensington. This means the Tories now have three candidates who have announced they will stand to be the party’s candidate for Mayor of London, with Ivan Massow Stephen Greenhalgh already having declared. While both Massow and Campbell lack a background in politics, it is expected that more candidates will announce in the coming weeks ahead of the Conservative Way Forward hustings taking place next month. Speaking

Given that Zac Goldsmith once likened the possibility of himself running for City Hall to ‘a suicide mission‘, it comes as little surprise that not everyone in the Tory camp is ecstatic about the Richmond Park MP’s rumoured London mayoral bid. Mr S understands that there are concerns that after Labour increased its control of the capital in the general election, the Old Etonian, who is currently the odds-on favourite to be the Conservative candidate, may be viewed as too posh to appeal to the more diverse London boroughs. As a result, Steerpike hears that there is growing support in the Conservative camp for Syed Kamall to go for the top job. As the working-class

George Galloway’s announcement on Twitter this afternoon that he is standing for London Mayor hasn’t surprised many, given he suggested he would do so before he even lost his seat as Respect MP for Bradford West. But it is still significant because it means that there will now be a fierce left-wing force splitting the Labour vote in London, even though the party does have an impressive line-up of big names bidding for the candidacy. One thing is clear: Galloway won’t make the campaign any more boring. He is a magnificent orator, and easily recognisable, too, which helps in any contest, but especially in a London fight that follows Boris

Boris has finally spoken. Intervening on his Tory colleague Cheryl Gillan, who was complaining about a lack of funding for rural public services and transport, the new MP for Uxbridge said ‘Will she not agree that in fact her constituents get a superb service from Transport for London?’ He thanked the government for its continued investment in London transport. Boris will continue to work as Mayor and focus on these duties. But it will be interesting to see what non-London interventions he makes before stepping down in 2016.

With Ivan Massow currently vying to be the next Mayor of London, the businessman released a campaign video this week explaining who he is and why he is running. In the video, he claimed that he was an unlikely candidate for mayor given that he is gay, dyslexic and an ex-alcoholic. While he’s putting it all out there, Mr S thinks it might be worth mentioning that Massow also boasts an impressive collection of erotic art. Joan Collins recently mentioned it when recounting to The Spectator a meal she attended at Massow’s home to celebrate her Damehood: ‘That evening our future mayoral hopeful Ivan Massow threw a grand kitchen supper in his house where,

All this talk from Labour and the Liberal Democrats about who will be their next party leader appears to have got to the Tory camp. Although the dust is yet to settle following David Cameron’s surprise Conservative majority in the election, Mensch couldn’t help but offer her prediction for who the next Tory Prime Minister will be, when asked over Twitter. The former Cameron Cutie says that the man for the job next time around is not odds-on favourite Boris Johnson, but instead George Osborne: She claims that Bojo’s chance has come and gone: Of course, whether Boris would agree with Mensch’s statement is another issue entirely.

David Cameron has reappointed several of the most senior members of the government. George Osborne stays as Chancellor, Theresa May remains Home Secretary, Philip Hammond Foreign Secretary and Michael Fallon Defence Secretary. Indeed, the only change is Osborne taking over William Hague’s old First Secretary of State title. This is formal recognition that Osborne will, in effect, be the deputy Prime Minister of this Tory majority government. We are told to expect the rest of the reshuffle on Monday. There’ll be particular interest in who Cameron chooses to be his chief whip, a role that takes on particular importance with this small majority. There’s also the question of what Cameron

In today’s election special podcast, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss David Cameron’s election rally with Boris Johnson in Hendon and whether the Mayor of London has been underused during the campaign. We also look at how David Cameron has proven, yet again, to be the essay crisis Prime Minister — showing his passion just in time for polling day. Plus, we discuss how Ed Miliband has surpassed all expectations during the campaign. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

On the Andrew Marr show this morning, Ed Miliband fended off questions about any post-election deal with the Scottish National Party. He had two lines of defence. First, he said he wasn’t going to pre-empt the election result and that he was fighting to win the election everywhere including Scotland. Second, he was adamant that ‘I’m not doing deals with the Scottish National Party’. But there was no explanation of how he would pilot legislation through the Commons without their support. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on audioBoom When it came to the economy, Miliband refused to admit that the last Labour government spent too much,

One of the main risks of wheeling Boris out this week was that he was never just going to be asked about this election in interviews. The Mayor and candidate for Uxbridge ended up saying ‘in the dim and distant future, it would be a wonderful thing to be thought to be in a position to be considered for such an honour’ when asked about becoming Tory leader. He knows as well as anyone else that the way this campaign is going, that this ‘wonderful thing’ might get underway within a month, or indeed in the more distant future. His allies in Parliament have been very careful to refrain from

The Tories’s not-so-secret weapon has finally been deployed. Boris Johnson hit the campaign trail with David Cameron today, solving a jigsaw puzzle, painting with some children (above) and exuding a bonhomie missing from the campaign so far. But the dangers of letting Boris loose were also seen in an interview on Sky News. When asked, multiple times, by Kay Burley if he would like to succeed Cameron as Tory leader, Boris edged a scintilla closer to saying ‘yes’. At first, the Mayor of London deflected: ‘By 2020, I hope I will still be alive and still in Parliament but kaleidoscope of politics will have changed and rotated. There will be

I have been wondering why nobody so far in this election seems to have made any mention of what most people recognise to be the biggest security problem facing this country. But then I discovered that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, last week appeared at the Al Falah Islamic Education Centre in West London. He used the opportunity to express, er, ‘concern about the level of Islamophobia in the capital’ and to insist that ‘an alternative word needs to be found to describe extremists who claim to act in the name of Islam’. According to the Evening Standard: ‘Mr Johnson, whose great-grandfather was a Muslim, added that a “problem in

Are the Tories throwing dead cats into the election debate? This question only makes sense if you recall Boris Johnson’s 2013 description of a strategy deployed by an ‘Australian friend’ of his: ‘To understand what has happened in Europe in the last week, we must borrow from the rich and fruity vocabulary of Australian political analysis. Let us suppose you are losing an argument. The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as “throwing a dead cat on the table,