Sandra would’ve approved: Eddie Mair fillets Boris Johnson, showing the real Boris hiding behind his carefully nurtured image of the goodnatured buffoon.
Boris Blunders
QotD: conservatism in bus form – the new fake Routemaster
Alex on Boris Johnson’s new buses:
In conclusion, this is modern conservatism, implemented in hardware, with your taxes. The obsession with PR, spin, and guff in general? Check. The heel-grinding contempt for the poor? Check. The pride in technical and scientific ignorance? Doublecheck. The low, ugly, spiteful obsession with getting one over on political enemies? (It’s of a piece with behaviour like this.) Check.
Read the whole post, it’s the best you’ll read today. The whole sordid anti-bendy buses jihad Boris and his cronies went for means that nobody in the UK can ever make fun of the American rightwing for being incredulous cretins ever again. It’s as daft and vicious an episode as everything they came up with.
“Wearing a loud shirt in a build-up area”
At the Liberal Conspiracy, Laurie Penny reports on the police’s telepathic powers in action as she comes across one of Boris mobile metal detector units:
‘But hang on. The lights are flashing red for every other person. Why aren’t you stopping all those people?’
‘Well…’ indulgent little police-officer smile turns into get-rid-of-this-member-of-the-public grin ‘look, we just use our judgement – say, if someone like your good self set off the buzzers, well,’ looks me up and down ‘you’re clearly not the sort of person to be carrying a knife, are you?’
‘So what sort of people would you stop and search, then?’
‘Well, you watch the news.’
It seems constable Savage is alive and well.
Oi Boris! What do you think about Bush coming to London?
(Image courtesy of Chicken Yoghurt.)
Blimey! Boris Blunders Again
The first thing Boris announced after becoming mayor was that booze would no longer be tolerated on London transport, to the general puzzlement and irration of most Londoners. In sofar as there were problems with alcohol on the Tube it was drunks, not drink that caused them, people going home from pubs or clubs, not getting tanked up on the Underground. Nevertheless from June the first booze would be verboten on the Tube, so from today the decent honest working Londoner should be spared the embarassement of sharing his train with drunken louts.
The plod wasn’t happy:
Another blunder, Boris?