Category: London Page 8 of 12

A number of people, including m’colleague, have pointed to the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, and suggested it’s a bad thing, and that we who live in London should hang down our heads in shame.

As I think I’ve said before, I’m registered to vote, but find none of the candidates credible or worthy of my vote, and there’s no ‘None Of The Above’ option on the ballot paper for me to express that dissatisfaction; indeed, if you spoil your voting paper, not only do you slow the count down for people who have voted, but your spoiled paper is discounted from the final ‘adjusted’ figures as if it was never there. So, consider me disenfranchised.

And please don’t give me any of that ‘if you don’t vote you can’t complain’ piffle – I consider myself eminently placed to complain both about the system which excludes me, and the calibre of the candidates. As a vegetarian of many years standing, I compare it to a restaurant which doesn’t offer a veggie option. Am I allowed to say I think that restaurant’s limited in its offerings? I think that only the most rabid of carnivores would say no.

I think it was very much an election of personalities, with Londoners deciding that they’d rather see how the possibly racist candidate fared in office, as opposed to the present incumbent with his apparent tendency to compare people to nazis. Well, when I say ‘Londoners’, I mean less than half of those registered to vote, as the turnout was just under 50%. Hardly what you’d call a mandate.

Of course, the people who stand to lose the most from Johnson’s election to power are also those who are currently most happy about it – and by that, of course, I mean the Evening Standard newspaper. Even to my politically uninterested eye, they’ve been blatantly anti-Livingstone all the way (and yesterday’s front cover relegated the news that 20,000 people may be dead in Burma in favour of a large picture of Boris cycling to work), so they’re currently very pleased to have their candidate in office. But the way they’ve pimped him so shamelessly and built up expectations of enormous change sweeping through London has to be hopelessly unrealistic. Boris will, like all politicians, make mistakes and suffer setbacks to his plans and all the usual stuff which is wheeled out whenever election pledges aren’t met, and I think the staff of the Evening Standard are likely to have something of a rude awakening.

Being the gullible dupe I am, of course, I’ve been taken in completely by their support and outrageous claims for Johnson, and firmly believe that there is nothing at all which will stand in Boris’s way. So by the time the Olympics come to London in 2012, I expect the city to be paved with crushed diamonds, the toilets to flush champagne, and for the skyline to have been transformed into something out of the Jetsons.

I mean, it’s not as if politicians and/or the media have ever lied to me before, is it ?