London: Mayor & More

Dan Ritterband, Marketing Director

This slipped past me completely at the time. Was there an announcement? Anyway, Mayor Johnson's election campaign manager has, since 1st July, formally been his Director of Marketing - number three on this list - and being paid the top adviser whack of £124,364 a year. That's 24 grand more than transport director Kulveer Ranger and 40 grand more than culture director Munira Mirza. I'm sure Dan is worth every penny: needs them, in fact, if he's to maintain the very impressive sartorial standards he sets himself during the campaign. But wasn't Boris the man who was going to cut back on extravagant GLA spending on promotional flim-flam? And since when was marketing more important than transport and culture? I wouldn't ask, but that's the sort of nasty man I am.

Boris's Shambles

Hello again. Here's Philip Stephen from yesterday's FT:

"It is all a bit of a shambles. Such is the take of one senior member of David Cameron’s Conservative party on Boris Johnson’s City Hall...The spate of high-profile resignations from Mr Johnson’s mayoral team during his brief spell in office scarcely amounts to a great crisis. Albeit bruised by the credit squeeze in global financial markets, Britain’s capital seems to be getting on with its business. It has another four years to get the Olympics right. For all that, the revolving door of senior advisers in City Hall has pointed up the absence of any obvious mayoral strategy and sounded a warning nationally for the Tories."

I'd be a bit more generous - there may be a political strategy in there somewhere. But I agree that it is far from obvious. More obvious still is the lack of an organisational structure to make it clearer, let alone effective. The good news for Tories is that Parker's departure ought to help. Don't ask me to tell you who's been telling me that.

At Guardian Comment: Mayor Johnson's Disarray

Hello. Yes, Spain was lovely thanks. Here's my first effort for the Guardian since my return. I'll be blogging here only sporadically for the next few days but getting back into serious action next week.

The Blond and the silly season were made for each other, I suppose, and their mating during this August has satisfied all implicated parties. As the scheduled Death of Gord tragedy ran out of plot (for the time being) newspapers’ summer craving for much political intrigue about nothing has been gratified by speculation that Mayor Johnson has designs on deposing David Cameron and becoming the giggliest prime minister in British history.

In a Telegraph column Johnson argued that Team GB’s successes in Beijing cast doubt on the view that society is “broken” and our youth devoid of moral purpose and backbone. This was read as a challenge to Cameronian orthodoxy and when subsequently Johnson used the Heseltine formula – professing himself unable to foresee circumstances under which he would seek to replace his leader - to deny having a covetous eye on Dave’s job, the frogs of speculation hopped still more madly in their box.

Johnson’s other contribution to the filling of holiday season column space came with the Olympic hand-over proceedings. Humorous diversion had been widely anticipated and Johnson duly obliged, struggling rather plumply to unfurl the ringed banner he was required to wave six times and later delivering a notably unbuttoned speech in which he pointed out that the sport of table tennis, at which the Chinese have long excelled, was a British invention.

This historical winding-up was not received with universal amusement by Johnson’s hosts. But it got up my nose for a different reason. I witnessed it for the first time shortly before 3.30 on Monday morning, having just returned from my holiday (on a camp site near Barcelona, since you ask). During my time away I’d seen only snippets of Olympic action, largely avoided newspapers and kept my mobile switched off for days on end. Only on Friday morning, 48 hours after the event, did I discover text messages telling me the dramatic news that Tim Parker, Johnson’s First Deputy and chief executive, had resigned.

This was a huge London story and still is. Not only was Parker the third of Johnson’s senior aides to resign since he took office, he was the mayor’s most powerful lieutenant. As Parker himself put it, his job had been to “run the place” on the mayor’s behalf, a brief which was intended to include chairing the board of Transport for London whose budget accounts for more than half the annual total of £11 billion the mayoralty controls. China might be another country and the Olympics another issue but given the circumstances back home a display a comedy jingoism about “ping-pong” looked flippant at best.

Now that Parker has stepped down the already fragile (not to mention still incomplete) structure of Johnson’s administration appears in disarray. The most detailed account so far suggests that Parker lost a power struggle with another of Johnson’s deputies, Sir Simon Milton. Unlike Parker and Johnson, Milton has experience of running London local government and plenty of it. If it is true that Sir Simon was so appalled by what he found on the eight floor of City Hall after four months of Johnson’s regime that he threatened to resign unless Parker stepped aside, it is grave indictment. The implications have not been lost on his media cheerleaders who have responded to the Parker crisis by reverting to tired red scare rhetoric against his (famously business-friendly) predecessor, their now standard default tactic when obliged to admit that their boy has screwed up.

Now what? In a thoroughly evasive press release, Johnson accepted that the political character of major TfL decisions make it necessary for him to chair the board (as Ken Livingstone had done) and that he could only delegate so many powers. This might be his first public admission that what his friend Charles Moore once described as his “Merry England” view of life is not suitable for a modern political machine; that running London might require a bit more than simply handing out top jobs to a few clever chaps and leaving them to get on with it; that there is a difference between light touch leadership and abdicating responsibility.

My conclusion about May’s mayoral election campaign was that in some areas (not least transport) Livingstone had better policies and where there wasn’t much to choose between the two candidates his experience made him the safer bet. This doesn’t mean I wish disaster on Johnson. He’s done the whole country a service by moving youth disaffection and safety on the streets up the political agenda. His cultural ambitions for London could produce valuable results and his approach to providing affordable housing – whatever that exactly means – may yet enhance the capital’s social as well as its property development.

But 21st century London is not Merry England and it’s certainly not the Merry Spectator. It’s a complex society of over seven million people, many of them frightened and poor. Mayor Johnson has made them several large promises. How long will it be before the million who voted for him conclude that he’s failing to take honouring them seriously?

Mayor Johnson & Those Severance Payments

In my posts - here and here - on the the severance payments to Ken Livingstone's former advisers I've addressed only the Evening Standard's selective and malicious reporting. Other than to point out that the payments appear to be legal and approved by the Assembly, I've not offered an opinion on the rights or wrongs of the rules in question. Northamptonshire Tory councillor Tony Sharpe is better informed than I. He also holds views on the matter that won't surprise you. This one, though, is of particular interest:

"Boris Johnson must make clear that his own political advisers will only receive contract payments until the next Mayoral election or their contract ends - whichever comes first - and that not a penny of public money will be liable for payment to pension funds or other benefits at the date of the next election."

There's been nothing yet from the mayor's office to suggest that this will be his approach - a point certain obsessive Ken-haters might bear in mind.

Mayor Johnson's Government Model

Tony Travers:

"[A]fter the comings and goings of its senior staff, the question must be asked: how will Team Boris impose its will on the capital? The Mayor is in his 13th week of power, with 195 to go. He is still in his honeymoon period; no one can have expected him to be 100 per cent effective from day one. But the issue of his developing style of government is more serious than any hiccups caused by resignations."

Now read on.

Anthony Browne Fan Club: Pt 4, Boris Johnson

I'm making a poor job of balancing blogging and childcare today, so in lieu of anything new here's my piece on Browne for Cif which went live on Friday.

Who wrote this?

“London is a great metropolitan and multicultural city. I remain committed to ensuring that all aspects of our culture are celebrated - from Eid and Diwali, through to St Georges Day.”

It was London mayor Boris Johnson, replying to a recent question by a member of the London Assembly: the excitable one in the brown suit (scroll right down to No. 1594 pdf) And here’s Mayor Johnson again, this time in correspondence with the website LondonSays:

"I have consistently made it clear that I believe a key part of London’s success is its cosmopolitan character, and we should always be a city that welcomes new people.”

Now, who wrote this?

“Britain’s self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it’s all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over ‘the other’, but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London’s internationalism — in other words, that there is little British left about it."

Some scary far right fruitcake? A pub know-all who hasn’t stopped to test his own prejudices? After all, with the exception of a few over-literal hard leftists, even those who suspect our waging war on Iraq may have contributed to our becoming a target for terrorism don’t believe this means 7/7 was “all our fault”, while the assertion that the government and BBC “recoil at the merest hint of British culture,” is, of course, completely silly, as it was when written just three years ago.

Anthony Browne Fan Club: Pt 3, The Impressive Richard Barnbrook

Liberal Conspiracy has launch an appeal for Anthony Browne goodies. A Boris Watcher has found this:

"I have not exactly been backward in coming forward to criticise some of the Mayor's rather exotic appointments but in the case of Anthony Browne's swift transfer to City Hall as head of policy I cannot help but think that this is at least a step in the right direction. Obviously there are people within the BNP that I would like to see there instead, but all things in good time...

Should you wish to furnish yourselves with more of the thoughts and ideas of a man that is both feared and despised by the politically correct fantasists and other assorted anti-British vermin that currently take their living from our torment you can do so by ordering ‘The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain'."

Let's savour that soaring rhetoric again, shall we?

"Anti-British vermin that currently take their living from our torment."

Should that be "make" their living? And can the Brownsuit Boy never stop talking about himself?

Tim Parker's Register Of Interests: What Happened?

Hmmm. It doesn't look updated to me. It's not even a different kind of "none".

UPDATE, 20.48: Thank you, reader Rob! It's on the Register page but there's no link there from the Deputies page. Tomorrow maybe? Here's the interesting stuff:

"I have an indirect interest in one Freehold Property in the Authorities area through my investment in the Mountgrange Real Estate Opportunity Fund L.P, a private equity real estate vehicle. My interest in the fund is currently 0.52%, the fund operates on a discretionary basis over which I have no control. My current interest is £67,594. Further details can be obtained from:

Sally Doyle-Linden
Chief Financial Officer
Mountgrange Investment Management LLP
6 Cork Street
London
W1S 3NX

Pathé Films Archive

Partners Capital LLP. Partners Capital manage my financial interests"

Ooh, it's another world, isn't it?

Not The Anthony Browne Fan Club

Hackney Labour Councillor Luke Akehurst:

"Do Hackney's Tory Councillors, eight out of nine of whom are from minority faith and ethnic communities, know about the views of their London Mayor's Policy Director about the model of community harmony represented by our borough? The appointment of someone who has such a disparaging take on the benefits of immigration and multiculturalism to the position of Policy Director to the Mayor of a city that has benefited from and been characterised by mass immigration and multiculturalism is a very odd move and will add to the unease London's BME communities already feel about Boris."

Now read on.

Ian Clement's Register Of Interests

It's up and it's fairly unexciting!