Afternoon:
10°c
The Mayoral election is meant to make politics exciting, not insufferable. But how is any intelligent Londoner meant to cast their vote?
Give it to Ken Livingstone? A man who has had unaccountable power for far too long, who presides over a bureaucracy against which there are far too many accusations of corruption and who broke the worthwhile Left-wing taboo against doing deals with the far Right when he embraced the Muslim Brotherhood?
Boris Johnson, then? For someone from my background there's the small problem that he's a Tory. I accept that many readers won't see that as a problem, so I'll move to a larger difficulty: he's a useless Tory.
I didn't realise how difficult he was finding the transition from entertainer to statesman until I shared a platform with him at a Standard debate last week and a member of the audience asked about his policy proposals.
For no reason whatsoever he started going on about the smoking ban. It should be left to the boroughs to decide whether or not we could smoke in London pubs, not central government, he declared with a beam, adding, "There you are, that's just one idea off the top of my head."
It sounded as if he was expecting a laugh, but the audience just stared at him - because as Mayor of London he wouldn't have the power to revoke a ban imposed by Parliament. Why then was he talking about it?
We live in a mocking country, and no one is as mocked as politicians. Appear too often on Have I Got News For You and you can think that they're doing a job that anyone could manage. They speak in soundbites and refuse to answer questions. What a bunch of fools!
But the politicians who succeed don't make policy off the top of their heads. They don't offer a commitment until they've checked every angle and thought through every objection.
By contrast, Johnson is embarrassingly easy to trip up. You just stick your foot out and wait for the thud. On the night I saw him, he expounded on his plans to put CCTV cameras on every bus. I pointed out that people who were frightened of travelling at night didn't want cameras but the return of conductors.
Now there may be many good reasons why they can't be hired. Perhaps it's a poorly paid, dangerous job that no one wants to do.
I don't know, but Boris just sat there nonplussed.
Livingstone's past it and so far Johnson hasn't shown he's got it. Dear God, am I going to have to join the posturing prevaricators who care so little about how they are governed that they vote for the Lib-Dems?
