London: Mayor & More

Poorly Blogger Takes To Bed

I have a throat like sandpaper, a terrifying temperature and a thumping headache. You may not be hearing from me again today. Oh, but I'll be thinking of you...

At Guardian Politics: Boris, Trees & Buses

This went live yesterday afternoon:

Two weeks into his mayoralty no one can accuse Boris Johnson of lying around in bed all day. He's appointed a panel of mostly fellow Tories to audit GLA and London Development Agency spending, anointed a bunch of deputies and directors and banned boozing on the tube. He's also announced that he'll be chairing Transport for London, at least for the time being, as well as the Metropolitan Police Authority, the latter a task to which the previous incumbent devoted three days a week. Add to these Johnson's (for the present) continuing duties as MP for Henley and his forthcoming resumption of his weekly column for the Telegraph - for which he was paid an astonishing £250,000 a year prior to taking a break from it to fight the campaign - and we might conclude that though the new London Mayor is rich he isn't idle with it.

Stephen Norris Gets Two Jobs. Or Even Three?

MayorWatch was on the case with this with this one yesterday, reporting that the former Tory mayoral contender had been asked by Johnson to sit on the boards of both TfL and the LDA in order to "co-ordinate their work". The latest is he's likely to chair Crossrail too. Now read on.

Kate Hoey Gets a Job

Hands up who saw this one coming.

Remember The "21st Century Routemaster"?

From the Evening Boris:

"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. He added that although Mr Johnson is very keen to bring in a new-style bus in place of bendy buses, they would not press ahead with the idea for the sake of it...

Mr Ranger said: 'It's almost a fact to say Londoners are not happy with bendy buses. We want to develop a bus that is safe, reliable and has that extra bit of style and panache. The Routemaster was, and indeed still is, an icon and we need something that has the same iconic status.' But in a departure from Mr Johnson's policies, Mr Ranger said the new design would not necessarily be 'hop-on, hop-off' with a conductor, as on the old Routemasters.

He said: 'Whether or not we have a conductor depends on the design of the bus. We want people to be creative. Our brief is very flexible. Anything is possible. We'll set some sort of ball-park figure but we can't say how much it will cost at this time. Let's see what comes back. The plan is to have them on the roads by the end of his first term but we're not doing this just for the hell of it. If we find there are initially no suitable bids we will review [the policy].'"

Why am I not surprised? Now read on.

More On Munira Mirza

News of her appointment is now on the GLA site. Her formal title is Director of Policy, Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries and we are told that she, "Will lead on the construction and implementation of policy for Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries on behalf of the Mayor and represent the Mayor in engaging with stakeholders to ensure his manifesto commitments are met." But what were those manifesto commitments? I remember a promise during the Sky/LBC debate to retain the big festivals, but I can't find anything written down here.

Boris Johnson's Mum's Subway ASB

Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones:

"Has Boris Johnson's mother embarrassed him? Charlotte Johnson Wahl is a painter who, until she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, worked in New York; she is now back in the city over which her son has established his classically educated imperium. It has come to our attention that one of her brightly coloured, sort-of-expressionist canvases appears somewhat tolerant of the kind of antisocial behaviour on which the new mayor of London has cracked down in one of his first official acts. It portrays young people riding the New York subway in a nicely dynamic composition that looks down the tubular carriage towards a remote vanishing point...."

"Look at the travellers on the train. It seems to be late at night, and revellers are headed home, their heads lolling slumbrously. In other words, these young New Yorkers are drunk and drugged-up - exactly the kind of behaviour the mayor has set out to tackle by banning drinking on public transport. But they look happy enough in their antisocial daze...This painting is not an apocalyptic warning of the perils of public drinking. It is not a suburbanite's nightmare of the metropolis. On the contrary, it is an affectionate image of city life by an artist who definitely goes against Tory moral cliche."

I quite like it. Perhaps I'll buy one. Now read on.

Boris & Butties

Paul Waugh:

"He [Boris] may have overreached himself today when he told Nick Ferrari on LBC that he had...decided to cut Ken's sandwich run, implying that the old regime had gorged themselves on ciabattas and bloomers at the taxpayers' expense...Unfortunately, I'm told that [this] suffers from the slight problem of not being true. Ken never had sandwiches delivered to his eighth floor eyrie at City Hall. He always ate in the basement cafe with his staff. But sarnies were indeed specially bought in when Boris took over last weekend - because it was a bank holiday the cafe was not open. So it turns out that the only extravagant spending of taxpayers' cash on a nosh-up has taken place under our new Mayor. Of course, Boris himself wouldn't have known this when he went on the radio - would he?"

Another question for Guto when he gets in touch...

Munira Mirza: What Are "Freedom" & "Quality"?

What do we know about Mayor Johnson's newly-appointed culture director? (Or should that be "adviser"? And is there a difference?). Well, we know she worked for the right-of-centre Policy Exchange think tank, co-authoring the report Living Apart Together, about young Muslims and multiculturalism (whatever that means, and so on) published last January which found that for most Muslims in Britain, "religion is not a barrier to integration and is very often perfectly reconciled with being - and feeling - British."

We also know that she, herself a Muslim, believes the press must be free to ridicule Islam because "Press freedom is the foundation of a free society." And she tells today's Standard that, "I've argued for a much less instrumentalist politicised approach, freeing up the arts and enabling them to deliver high-quality projects."

What might this mean? Well, Mirza wrote in the - rather wearingly contrarian - libertarian Right Spiked Online that, "The troubled artistic search for truth is dismissed as ‘a bit dodgy’ and state-funded artists are happily recruited to produce propaganda for the latest war against social exclusion." The same argument was deployed in support of the New Generation Manifesto - of which I am a signatory - on the grounds that "diversity policies...encourage people to see everything through the prism of racial difference."

But hold on a minute. What if one group's freedom inhibits the freedom of another? What if "diversity policies" aren't actually the primary cause of narrow racial and religious identities, but historic patterns of social exclusion driven by prejudice are? What if "freeing up" the arts fosters not the "troubled search for truth" but dull conventionality? And who decides what "quality" is? Can it be measured objectively, or will even the freedom-loving Munira Mirza's judgements be subjective and political? These and other obvious questions may or may not be answered sooner or later.

Met's "War On Knife Crime"

From the Telegraph:

"There have been 14 teenage deaths in the capital this year and [Jimmy Mizen's] was the fifth fatal stabbing in London since Mr Johnson became mayor less than a fortnight ago, pledging a zero-tolerance policy to knife crime in the capital. He has called for an urgent response from police.

Officers launched Operation Blunt 2, targeting 10 London boroughs and using controversial powers under Section 60 of the Public Order Act to designate areas where anyone can be stopped and searched, in what they said would be 'in your face policing'.

Under Section 60 officers do not need reasonable suspicion to search someone. There will be 10 search teams each consisting of up to 15 officers who can be deployed anywhere in the city. The Metropolitan Police have just taken delivery of 100 extra walk-through knife detectors and 200 extra search wands which will be used in the campaign."

Well, put yourself in Mayor Johnson's shoes. What would you be doing? I suppose I'd be encouraging something much like this. Yet it still smacks of a need to be seen to be Doing Something. And at root, teenage knife crime is not a policing problem and so cannot be solved by policing alone. Johnson knows this - or appeared to know it during the campaign. Yet his mayoralty will be judged against his promises, especially those on youth crime. How long will it be before Londoners start wondering if those promises are being kept?