Blah Blah Flowers

Does Andrew Gilligan use false identities in online squabbles over his articles in the Evening Standard that praise Boris Johnson and his policies while trashing Ken Livingstone and all he did as mayor? Enquiring minds would like to know what Andrew Gilligan thinks. If you think you might be Andrew Gilligan, or you know someone who is Andrew Gilligan, please get in touch with specially trained staff at Bloggerheads.

Labels: Andrew Gilligan, Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, London, London Mayor, Red Ken Livingstone

Is Team Blonde Buffoon dialling back expectations on the return of the Routemaster?

The Mayor's plans for a new generation Routemaster may not happen, his new transport boss admitted today. Kulveer Ranger, Boris Johnson's director of transport policy, said that a design competition would be launched - but if no bid was good enough they would look again at the pledge.

This will be good news, the last thing we need is the huge unnecessary expense of replacing a fleet of perfectly adequate buses with much less accessible designs in the name of conservative (rather than Conservative) nostalgia. However, seeing as he insisted on making such a big point of this policy during this campaign that we can have some justifiable giggles that New Conservatism has overtaken New Labour for breaking campaign promises once in power.

Though hopefully it's impossible to mistake me for a supporter of the Blair/Brown party I have been feeling lately how I assume Tories felt in those last few months before May the 1st 1997. Baring some massive disaster that gives him the chance to look commanding and reassuring Gordon Brown now looks like a dead Prime Minister walking, certainly all the friends of Blair lining up to put the boot in aren't helping.

I'm of the generation that grew up knowing no different than a Conservative government and the likelihood of that returning strikes more cold dread into my heart than the liberty-cancelling, ID Card supporting Labour party. At the moment David Cameron doesn't quite have that air of Blair in 1996 of just waiting to assume the Premiership that everyone knew would soon be his but it can't be much longer in coming. The tragedy for the country is that Boris becoming mayor proves that no-one who voted for him were concerned with his policies, I've yet to speak to or here from anyone that voted for what he said he would do, they either voted Ken out or because they thought the mayorship could be run by a part-time gameshow host. The lesson Cameron is free to draw for this is that he doesn't need to make pretences of creeping leftwards, he's likely to be voted in if the Conservative party manifesto was 'compulsory euthanasia of all Conservative party members and Daily Mail readers' and the prospect of Oliver Letwin getting gay with Michael Gove televised nightly. It'll also mean that they'll have a manifesto promise to scrap ID Cards then keep them when they get in, much as the Labour Party felt that a Freedom of Information act was a necessity right up until the point they had the power to bring it in.

Some of my friends hope that Prime Minister 'Dave' will inspire a fresh wave of activism, such as those against Clause 28. I'm less hopeful, though I take comfort in the fact it'll better to have my face ground into the dirt by the boot of a Conservative that calls themselves a Conservative rather than a Tory that calls themself Labour.

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, Conservatives, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour, London, London Mayor

I Didn't Vote For Boris.

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, London Mayor

[via Lozette]

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, humour, London, London Mayor

Christ on a bike London, what were you thinking? Were you thinking? Great, wonderful, well done. The best we can hope for is that Boris changes nothing, the worst is that he buggers the entire thing up.

Now we can't laugh at the Americans for electing a moron.

Conservative Party leader David Cameron praised Mr Johnson for a "serious and energetic campaign" and said his party was "winning the battle of ideas".

Exactly what ideas are those Davey? Of the few plans that Boris saw fit to tell us before the election they've all been exposed as shit . We can hope that Boris makes such a pigs ear of things that it sinks New Conservatism where it stands, but the problem is that when, not if, Johnson falls, he'll be taking London with him.

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, David Cameron, disasters, London, London Mayor, stupidity

These two articles pretty much highlights why residents of London should not vote for Boris Johnson today. The Guardian explain why a vote for Johnson is a bad idea (there's more detail here or here) while even the rabidly anti-Ken Daily Mail can only manage "Yes, I know Ken has been very good for London and Boris has no obvious qualifications for the job, but he's my mate".

Look, if Boris gets in we don't get to laugh at the United States for electing Shrubya any more! This is a serious issue!

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, London, London Mayor, media, Red Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone yesterday offered to give his Tory rival a job and train him as a future mayoral candidate, in an extraordinary last-minute bid for Tory votes.

Oh for fuck's sake. It doesn't matter that Boris would be unlikely to take up such an offer, it's that Ken made it. What on earth for? Does he seriously think there are Tory voters out there saying "you know, I'd like to vote for Livingstone but the only problem is that that would mean Johnson would lose", or would think "Hmmm, Livingstone in 2008, Johnson in 2012, yep, sounds fair to me"?

That's the problem when you're faced with a choice between the lesser of two evils, at the end of the day they are both still arseholes.

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, London, London Mayor, Red Ken Livingstone

Please feel free to ignore the last fifteen seconds (unless you're the sort of arse who would vote for the BNP or UKIP)

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, London, London Mayor, YouTube

(I wrote this yesterday but, through some strange twist of fate, it didn't get posted until today. No, I don't understand why either. Personally I blame The Master. Or the Bad Wolf)

I am, as you know, incredibly well-balanced and supernaturally slow-to-anger. But today's Evening Standard is just taking the piss, wining and dining it, then leaving it in a strange part of town where the buses don't run and the taxi-drivers are all rapists (apparently).

The Evening Standard is known to be 'Fair and Balanced', in the same way that Fox News is 'fair and balanced', namely massively right-wing, xenophobic, borderline racist and making a living by making sure it's readers know all four thousand ways they are currently fucked and how they will die tomorrow with the house they live in not even worth the value of a bag of Birds Eye peas. As befits a newspaper it has taken an aggressively partisan side in the London Mayoral elections with an almost daily barrage of front-page headlines about how Ken Livingstone's campaign is being run entirely by members of Al Qaeda (I wish I were exaggerating and, to be honest, I am, but not by as much as you might think) and that Boris Johnson is a brilliant incisive thinker not seen since the death of William Gladstone, which is a surprise to anyone who's actually ever heard him talk as he's always seemed to be a berk that can't even follow an autocue.

It's no real surprise, Livingstone and Associated Newspapers have a long hatred of one another, which led to Livingstone's stupid comparison of a Jewish Standard reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Well done Ken. But even so, the Standard surpasses itself today. 'Mayor Talks of Boris Win', 'I'll start work on my book says Livingstone', 'He gives Tory rival advice on what to do first', 'Fears of poor turnout among Labour voters'. I'm not a Labour supporter, though I'll admit that by temperament I'm probably closer to them than I am to the Tories or Cameron's New Tories. But this sort of thing, making it look as though Livingstone has or is ready to throw in the towel is highly prejudicial. The Standard have fluctuated on a daily basis between whole-hearted support of the blonde-haired fop and just thinking he's great, they were the only ones to have an official poll that somehow gave Boris a double digit lead over Livingstone when all other polls had them either neck-and-neck or within a few percentage points.

Andrew Gilligan, who we all remember from the Hutton Report into the death of Doctor David Kelly was described as unreliable and had to leave the BBC has written almost daily essays for the Standard on the evilness of Ken and the wonderfulness of Saint Boris. Presumably he doesn't see it as a conflict of interest that, after leaving Aunty, he got snapped up by Boris Johnson to work for the Standard. Today he sees fit to launch a broadside against Ken on the grounds the mayor cannot be trusted and lacks credibility. Again Gilligan doesn't bother to mention that perhaps he is expertly placed to spot this because he has been judged to be lacking both in the past.

So today I filled in my postal vote. To my annoyance I found myself forced to give my first vote to Ken, not because he's the best candidate but because he's the best out of the two horse race he's in with Boris. The political disengagement in this country seems so complete that most Boris fans don't seem to pay much attention to the numerous hustings that their hero didn't manage to make it to or the fact that when he did turn up they might wish he hadn't. He'll have another opportunity to put his foot in it on Question Time tonight, a show which few people bother to watch. Ken supported Sir Ian Blair over the Mets shooting of an unnarmed, non-violent Brazilian that they couldn't be bothered to check wasn't an Asian suicide-bomber, he supports the intense disruption that bringing the glorified school sports day of the Olympics to this city, despite the fact that the money to pay for it is being taken from the pockets of Londoners like myself. Yet he is still better than Boris Johnson, who has never managed to run anything, who has a habit of thoughtlessly abusing whole sections of the community, who wants to spend millions of pounds replacing one bus fleet with another that will be less able to be used by parts of the community and who otherwise doesn't seem able to talk in any great detail about why he wants to be mayor or what he'll do should he get it. He's kept at arms length by the Cameron cabinet because they know that if the Conservative Party wants to look credible they can't have Boris bumbling around in the background and who they must really be hoping doesn't become the mayor because he'd end up being exhibit A in why people shouldn't vote Tory at the next General Election.

What's worrying is that there seems to be e general feeling of not voting for Labour because of things like the Iraq War. As someone who was anti-war it's galling for me to say that Boris shouldn't ride into the mayorship because of discontent over a war that Livingstone didn't support. It would be the last laugh of Tony Blair if he has a situation where the entire country turns on his party once he leaves and all the institutions he created turn blue.

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, Labour, London, London Mayor, Red Ken Livingstone

[via Stop Boris]

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, Conservatives, London, London Mayor, Red Ken Livingstone, YouTube