Says Pippa Crerar in her Evening Standard blog today,

“Raised eyebrows at City Hall this week after Boris disappeared off on a family sailing holiday. In his acceptance speech at City Hall, the new Mayor promised to “work flat out” for all Londoners. But here he is, just three weeks into the job, enjoying the sunshine off the coast of Turkey in his patterned swimming trunks.”

Only a few weeks ago, Ms Crerar (who, I am reliably informed, wrote occasionally for The Guardian and The Mirror) complained that Boris Johnson, having promised to be open about the cost of his advisers, took three weeks to publish details.  I recall vaguely that Ken Livingstone took eight years to disclose precisely nothing.  Oh well.

Of course, holidays are for wimps, though I suspect that that is not Ms Crerar’s objection.  Presumably Mayor Livingstone was entitled to a holiday because he did not promise to work “flat out” or at all (though being a “man of the people” he would never have taken one on a boat and certainly not abroad).

According to the Mayor’s spokesman,

“It’s half term this week, he's got four children and he’s been on the road campaigning since last autumn.”

Retorts Ms Crerar,

“But will this defence persuade those who are concerned that while Boris worked flat out to get elected, he might not do the same for the people of London?”

Well no, it won’t persuade anyone who will never have anything good to say about Mayor Johnson, but for those of us who recognise a real political “misdemeanour” when we see one, it does.

“Labour has been marching through the institutions for 11 years. With the exception of the armed forces, it has not allowed one state body to stay in the hands of natural conservatives. The Church of England, the BBC, the judiciary, the senior Civil Service, the trusts, agencies and quangos all have a pinkish hue. Even chief constables sound like Harriet Harman.”

Nick Cohen

So, here we have a clue as to how to fix it, do we not?

“….these very same people who happily accuse their opponents of being “toffs” are also the ones who are scrupulous about political correctness and the nomenclature of race, creed, colour and disability.

The prejudice of ascribing character and ability to class is so obvious it barely needs arguing; yet even Polly Toynbee in The Guardian will effortlessly refer to “toffs” as if her own privileged background and education had been whitewashed. She would never dream, though, of referring to didicoys or Paddies or yids.”

AA Gill

“The great pity is that the clowns in top hats standing in the way of opportunity for all are from the Labour Party.”

Michael Gove

The language of egalitarianism justifying the maintenance of class barriers

Says Eamonn Butler in The Times today, about the latest TV licence advertisement,

“It's time we citizens stood up against this state-sponsored intimidation, particularly now that anti-terror legislation is being used to spy on whether our dogs are fouling the pavement and that we're closing our wheelie-bin properly. And it's time we told our unelected officials that we don't much like “our town, our street, our home” being in their database - given their ability to lose it in the mail or leave it on laptops that they forget in the pub.”

It is more than fair comment to say that in recent years government has sought to criminalise an ever greater number of rule breaking activities and impose increasingly draconian penalties for “crimes” which though seen by the majority of the public as being worthy of some punishment are still considered by that same public as relatively  minor.  There is too much stick and not enough carrot.

“What makes Gordon Brown so popular with newspapers and voters? This may seem a strange question to ask when the Prime Minister has just suffered the worst local election defeat since the early 1980s and faced the most humiliating headlines since the collapse of John Major's economic policy on Black Wednesday. But considering just how disastrously Mr Brown's Government has lately been performing, the real surprise about this week's U-turn on taxes has been the mildness of the media and public response….”

 

“…Yet far from demanding Mr Brown's immediate resignation or predicting the inevitable demise of his Government, the media have mostly treated this week's U-turn as the moment when the Prime Minister's fortunes could start to recover.”

 

Anatole Kaletsky

Yes, I thought that curious, too.

In seeking to defend his colleague and mentor Gordon Brown yesterday, Ed Balls explained,

“You have had sporting stars who have been heroes and then become villains... and then built their way back”.

One such hero who comes to mind committed no more heinous a crime than kick an Argentinian opponent.  Mr Brown’s equivalent act was to jump into the stands and start kicking his supporters.

Those who win by tactical voting, lose by tactical voting.  That was one of the lessons of the local elections which took place on 1^st May 2008.  The means seen by those of a Leftist persuasion as an effective method of denying electoral success to the Conservatives, has been found to be a two-edged sword.

In the London mayoral elections, the proportional representation-a-type voting system chosen by New Labour was supposed to have given the alliance of the centre/centre-left a permanent in-built majority, but the assumption that such an alliance would always “do” for the Conservatives has been demolished.

One of the material miscalculations by the Left was an ingrained belief that the electorate was largely liberal-left and tribal.  It is not.  In essence it is liberal-conservative with a fairly flexible attitude to group loyalty.  The mood of the electorate shifts with the times and with the circumstances. Thus, if it perceives a government, any government, is tired, corrupt, incompetent or no longer fit for office for what ever reason, eventually it will confound any voting system or any tactical alliance designed to maintain the status quo.

The general sentiment that evicted the Conservatives from power in 1997 was first and foremost anti-government, not anti-Conservative, even though that defeat was turned into a rout by the “anyone but a Tory” Labour and Liberal Democrat alliance.  Times have changed and Labour will reap what it sowed.

William Rees-Mogg

Sauce for the Labour Gander is not sauce for the Tory Goose