Tuesday 5 May 2009

A Year Is A Long Time In Politics, Isn't It Boris?

Boris.

H’mm. Boris.

Boris, Boris, Boris, Boris, Boris.

Oh, Boris.

Boris, isn’t it strange how whenever I type your name I can hear Art Garfunkel whisper in my ear ‘hello, darkness, my old friend’? Why do you imagine that is?

Don’t worry, chum, I don’t really expect you to reply. This is, after all, a rhetorical letter, but perhaps now I’ve got your attention could I please raise a few other points?

It has (as you know) been a year since you were handed the keys to the giant glass testicle on the Southbank, with its picturesque views over Tower Bridge. It has been a whole year since you crowed triumphantly over the slaying of Red Ken. I must confess that I made some pretty rude statements about you last May, but they were (I hope you can appreciate) said in moments of anger, moments when I was writing with my heart, rather than my head.

Still, a year, eh? Do you not think now would be a good time to assess your progress so far?

No, I didn’t think you would, but tough luck I’m going to anyway.

Or that was the plan. Despite the fact that you’ve felt like a continuously shrill, particularly posh alarm clock every morning on the London news with some half-baked opinion, a briefish scrounge of the web doesn’t actually offer up much in the way of achievements. The only things I can find for definite are the banning of alcohol on public transport (and as you know, we’ve been there before, you and I) and the fulfilment of the election promise to increase police presence at zone two and further out overland train stations. Not that I’ve seen a single one at Brockley, Honor Oak Park, New Cross Gate or New Cross, but let’s pretend that’s because they’re so fiendishly disguised in their florescent jackets and give you the benefit of the doubt, shall we?

Unfortunately, you’ve not done so well on other issues of law and order. You practically hounded Sir Ian Blair out of office with continual public denouncements of how the inquiry into the de Menzies’ shooting was handled. Yes, it was shocking that armed police could accidentally gun down an innocent man, but shouldn’t you have been working on ways to improve the system using experienced officers rather than bullying someone until they gave up and went home? Besides, Boris, for the week or so after the 2005 bombings the tube was thick with sweat and tension, the city felt poised on the edge of itself. I remember. I was here, riding the Northern and Victoria Lines every day. You (I’m guessing) were pissing about in Henley-on-Thames or already on holiday somewhere.

But even with a handpicked man in charge of the police you still seem to have generally buggered it up, don’t you? I can appreciate the dilemma. Your chum Dave and his cronies are about to get a visit from the modern equivalent of the Sweeney do you or don’t you give him a call and tip him off? It’s a toughie, isn’t it? I appreciate that the raid should probably never have taken place, but was it really your place to intervene? Not really, now was it?

Oh, of course.

I’m sorry, you can’t remember whether you did or not, can you? How convenient.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ll remember this – after all it’s been all over the news in recent weeks. It is, of course, your man Paul Stevenson’s handling of the G20 protest marches. Now, this isn’t really the place to discuss the pros and cons of kettleing as a form of controlling protestors nor does it do either of us any credit to harp on about the disgusting use of excessive force from officers not displaying proper identification badges which resulted in the death of an innocent man (now, hold on, I’ve heard that phrase before), no, what I’m particularly interested in is your lack of engagement on the issue. Red Ken was all over the news, as was the other bloke, you know the Lib Dem chap, Brian what’s his name? But you, Boris, waited three whole weeks before making a statement. What were doing? Cleaning the testicle’s windows?

Anyway, I’ll come back to this in a moment. I’ve got a bit more to get through so I better crack on. Now, let’s see... Well, you managed to piss the Chinese off by having one hand in your pocket and your jacket undone when you accepted the Olympic flag. Now I know scruffiness is a point of style for you, but even I’d of made an effort under those circumstances, before standing like blonde twonk flapping the flag around whilst David Beckham hoofed footballs off the top of routemaster and Leona Lewis warbled something pointless. But you know what really knarked me about the Olympic hand-over – your whole ‘ping-pong’s coming home’ spiel where you claimed it’s really called Whiff-Whaff or Piffle-Wiffle or some-such and is a traditional British sport. Worse, even, you tried to make it appear a moment of spontaneity, when in fact you were recycling an old Telegraph column where you slagged off the Chinese in a more general sense.

Indeed, probably the only other sixteen people to have ever heard of whiff-whaff before were those who’d read that column in 2002 (I think) and even they, probably, didn’t believe you.

What else?

Given that you built what seemed like fifty-percent of your election campaign around a critique of Red Ken’s alleged cronyism and the possibility of illegal activities by key Mayoral staff it seems completely unfair to remind you that you’ve had to sack several of your own team already, including Ray Lewis your Deputy Mayor who left embroiled in whiffs of financial and sexual scandal. It just isn’t fair, is it?

You’ve been claiming to champion green issues, but what the one hand does the other undoes. For example, you encourage the use of bikes, but drastically slash funding for cycle lanes potentially increasing the number of bike-related accidents. You’re in the process of cancelling the Western Extension of the congestion charge zone, which will see an increase in traffic in Earl’s Court, Kensington, Notting Hill and Chelsea during the week, and are in process of phasing out the bendy-buses for half-designed new routemasters which are (by the very nature that they take less passengers and require longer times for boarding and disembarking) going to help increase congestion and pollution.

Oh, and on the environment, this one’s my favourite. Come on, even you must see the hypocritical and it’d-be-funny-if-it-wasn’t-so-gut-wrenchingly-disingenuous side to this one? The airports. In West London you’re joining in with the anti-Heathrow expansion protestors (and to a lesser extent in Standstead, but residents of Bishops Stortfod can’t vote in the London elections so you’re not so bothered). You’re out there being seen to care about residents subjected to a constant influx of humongous planes, but in East London you’re proposing we build a whole new airport. On the Thames no less! A floating god-damn airport – it’s so bonkers I want it to exist, but the fact is it’ll have the same environmental impact as an extension to Heathrow with the added benefit of destroying the habit of dozens of bird species and probably repolluting the river to boot.

Marvellous.

I have to ask, dear Boris, given the above what, aside from winning votes, do you actually believe in?

H’mm?

Don’t worry. It was another rhetorical question. You see, I think I already know the answer.

I used to think it was your right-wing views, odious personality and gabble-mouthed idiocy that posed the biggest threat to us, but now I think there might be a more fundamental flaw with you. A while ago you gave an interview to the Guardian for the Q&A page in the Saturday magazine where you quoted the song you’d most like to hear played at your funeral as the Rolling Stone’s You Can’t Always Get What You Need.

Perhaps Mick can remind us how it goes?

‘YouCan’t. AlwaysGet. WhatYouWaaaaant. YouCan’t. AlwaysGet. WhatYouWaaaant. ButIfYouTrySometimes, thenyoumightjustfiiiiind, you get wwwhaat you neeeeeed, whoa yeah.’

I can’t shake the feeling that you named this with more than a smirk of irony. I mean, if you were to ever not get what you waaaaant, then you tend to act like a perpetually spoilt toddler and rant and rave, chucking papers around the place and letting your already unruly hair look like a corgi with rabies. I mean, do I need to give the example of the childish storming out from the so-called snow-gate enquiry into how the hell the whole city managed to grind to a halt for the best part of week when the first inclement weather on your watch dropped by for a cup of tea? I would have thought that the panel was not only due your respect, but probably asked some reasonable enough questions.

Just ones you didn’t want to answer that day, eh?

Increasingly over the past twelve months I’m being forced into the opinion that your sole reasoning for having a political life is because (if I can paraphrase another band with Stone in the name) you wanna be adored.

Which is a shame, because when I thought you had hate-filled, pious, wealthy-inclusive principles then I may have disagreed with you, but at least you appeared to have principles. Now, I suspect you’re but a shell of a politician sitting in the glass testicle’s big office, at the big desk, in the big comfy leather chair, spinning around aimlessly in the morning sunlight waiting for a minion to bring you the latest popularity charts. Look, you’re still ahead Red Ken. Well done. You’ve won the prize. I suppose it’s some sort of blessing in disguise that you’re not actually doing much with it. It is fortunate, after all, that this Mayoral tenancy currently has ‘the sooooouuuund of siiiilence’ about it. I mean, who knows how screwed we’d all be if you woke up one morning and thought vaguely about doing stuff other than trying to make yourself feel popular?



Written regretfully in a hurry - quoted sources and references to follow.

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