Boris johnson

The Tory leadership could be talking like Boris soon

So Boris is attacking the 50p tax rate again – and rightly so.  In his Telegraph column today, the Mayor of London repeats the lines he pushed in April: that the measure will drive business talent away from our shores, that it will damage London’s competitiveness, and that it could actually lose money for the Exchequer.  It all comes to a punchy conclusion: “What Gordon Brown wants to do is therefore economically illiterate.” I imagine a few commentators will see that last line as a veiled attack on the Tory leadership, given that they’re committed to the tax rate too.  But, as Tim Montgomerie says over at ConservativeHome, and going

What can the Tories learn from Boris’s fare dilemma?

Oh dear.  Boris has just had to announce a bunch of inflation-busting fare increases for public transport in London.  From January, the congestion charge will be up by 25 percent, Oyster card fares will have 20p added to them, 7-day bus passes will cost just under £3 more – and so on, and so on.  To be fair, we shouldn’t be too surprised at these kinds of hikes.  This is a recession, after all, and City Hall are currently struggling to deal with the black hole in the transport budget left over from the Livingstone days.  Boris himself sets out a persuasive defence of the measures in today’s Evening Standard.

St George’s Day: A Perfect Celebration of Inferiority

The ersatz English pride expressed by the entirely bogus St George’s Day celebrations is deeply creepy. I hate it. Wandering through London this week and bumping into people wrapped in red and white flags or dressed as knights has made me feel deeply embarrassed to be English. And how can Boris Johnson be so so daft as to embrace this nonsense. He surely can’t mean it. But it did make me wonder about the true scope of the London mayor’s ambitions for himself and Britain-England, coinciding as it did with his admission that has not ruled out a run for Downing Street (presumably after he has beaten David Cameron at

Boris Just Doesn’t Get It

When I began making my film about Ken Livingstone last year it became clear pretty quickly that there were serious issues around the accountability of the Mayor of London. To his credit this was something that Ken always realised. When challenged about the fact that he ran London as his personal fiefdom, Ken agreed, because he understood that was this was pricedsly the structure of the office of Mayor established when the institution was set up. Quite early on in the Boris campaign, the Tory candidate was asked about issues of accountability and he admitted that he didn’t understand what the fuss was about. His advisers soon pointed out that