Afternoon:
10°c
TO THE National Gallery to see the Titian for which we must amass a duke's ransom by Christmas - so reads my diary. The too-common hazards of the journey I did not record for posterity - a mid-morning train on the District line from Wimbledon so delayed and crowded that we were sardines before we reached East Putney, with a further delay outside Earls Court extending our discomfort to an hour.
And leaving the gallery, what then? Twenty minutes waiting for that most rare of buses, the 9 to Kensington, delayed by the cursed legacy of Livingstone. The point of voting for Boris was that he restore to efficiency the Underground we have, before embarking on grandiose new plans, restore to Trafalgar Square its old charms as an historic open space, and restore the innocent pleasure of feeding pigeons there. The great square was once a place of peacefully remembered history, occasionally disturbed by expressions of moral conscience. There we used to breathe the air of free speech and liberty and call governments to order with a finer sense of right and wrong than any party hack. There my generation gathered to protest against fascism, nuclear war and weaponry, Chilean torture and South African apartheid, Chinese oppression in Tibet and Mrs Thatcher's poll tax - then even politicians, heady with its atmosphere, could be inspired to speak against their party whips.
It has been such a place since 1848, when the Chartists used it to demand universal male suffrage and secret ballots, and far more than Parliament it has been the birthplace of our democracy. But what is it now? It is Tate Modern's outstation for "the best of contemporary art", and worse, a circus for anything that some fool in the Mayor's parlour decides is an occasion to be celebrated with the blaring of what can never be called music, Big Brother commentaries, vast television screens and all their intrusive apparatus.
By these abuses, vile, vulgar and irrelevant, pedestrians are prevented from walking freely in this place of freedom, roughly policed by men who are not policemen. Traffic is stalled from Kingsway to Piccadilly and from the many palaces of Westminster to the ugly stews of Oxford Street; on a working weekday the cost to London and Londoners far too dear. Has Boris the slightest inkling of the effects that these junkets have on all who work within a long mile of Trafalgar Square? Is he ever a passenger on a bus that should traverse the square but is locked in stationary traffic a mile north of the British Museum, beyond Aldwych, in Northumberland Avenue or within spitting distance of Hyde Park Corner? These are the realities of Livingstone's buying votes with circuses, and Boris should by now have banished them.
