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I remain convinced that the sublime instincts of the British people will cause them to make a decisive break with the past and vote for change. In fact, my money is still on a Tory majority of 40 seats or more
It seems I just can’t get away from him at the moment. They have the 24-hour news running in my outer office, and every time I come out for a breather – there he is. He’s churning the airwaves with his Polyfilla sound bites, all of them perfectly balanced, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand feats of meaningless mutual contradiction.
With his purple ties, his neat grey suits and his air of youthful earnestness he’s like some cut-price edition of David Cameron hastily knocked off by a Shanghai sweatshop to satisfy unexpected market demand. I open the papers to find him consulted daily, like some oracle, about every problem from the Taliban to babies crying in the night – and in both cases, incidentally, he adopts the classic Lib Dem position of simultaneously favouring intervention and leaving well alone.
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It is not often that fate hands you what appears to be a total moral and political victory. But this one looked like a slam dunk. As some of the world’s most self-important people descended last week on the World Economic Forum in Davos, I was delighted to find myself on the same plane as Peter Mandelson, President of the Board of Trade, deputy prime minister and Lord High Everything Else.
I was thrilled, that is, because my colleague and I were travelling steerage, in keeping with the new spartan regime at City Hall. Mandy and his entourage, of course, were flying sharp end; and as we struggled on down the aisle they subjected us to a certain amount of jocular raillery. They would send us some food, they scoffed, and perhaps a glass of champagne.
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I prophesy that in 10 years’ time the UK census will show more adherents of Eywa than there are of Jedi
Dear oh dear – as if there weren’t enough reasons for feeling low. Here we are in the middle of January with the Labour Party still in power, taxes about to go through the roof, the weather still miserable – and across the world people have apparently discovered a new and bizarre reason for being down in the dumps. It’s this film called Avatar, which I went to see at the weekend and which I would say delivers virtually everything a film-goer could possibly desire.
Just as the 3D, sci-fi epic teeters on the brink of becoming the biggest-grossing film of all time, some people are complaining of a terrible side-effect. It’s making them depressed, they say. It’s turning them as blue as the funny, helmet-nosed aliens that have enchanted us all.
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Singer-songwriter and political activist says he is ‘no longer prepared to fund the excessive bonuses of RBS investment bankers’. Read the story here.
Boris quote on the tax on bank bonuses: “The Government is doing nothing more than fast-tracking the departure of this talent pool out of Britain”.
Here, with a satirical twist, is Dungeekin with his take on the situation – check him out @dungeekin
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Kenneth Branagh
It must have been a week ago that the BBC weather forecast got it more than usually wrong. You remember that night when they said there were going to be blizzards in London? They said it was going to be a white-out. The Almighty was going to Tipp-Ex us off the map, they said.
So, at round about 10pm on Sunday, when the snowstorm had not materialised, I was getting a bit fretful. I switched on the BBC in the hope of finding the news and I was indeed confronted by a blasted landscape – frozen, desolate and rimed with white.
It turned out to be the face of Kenneth Branagh, alternating imperceptibly between horror and depression as he played the role of Kurt Wallander, the Swedish supersleuth. After about 10 minutes I confess I was completely gripped by the mystery. I don’t mean I wanted to know who the baddie was, or why he was importing human organs from Africa. I didn’t really care why the shawl-wearing debt-relief activist had been blown up in her Volvo.
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You think it’s bad out there, eh? You think the roads are hell? Well, all I can say is, just you wait until the thaw. Just wait until the water bursts from those pipes and suddenly the roads will be sprouting orange cones like the crocuses of spring.
No sooner has the snow retreated and the ground defrosted than the landscape will once again be full of men with hi-vis jackets and pneumatic drills, following the ancient British procedure. First they cordon off a stretch of the road. Then they dig a hole. Then they brew a nice cup of tea and contemplate the hole. Then they simply vanish, like the Mayans, leaving the rest of us to wonder what they meant by these baffling excavations, and leaving thousands of road-users to queue in a mounting frenzy of frustration.
I don’t mean just the water companies. I mean the gas, the electricity, the broadband suppliers and all the other umpteen bodies with unlimited rights to dig holes in the public highway and plunge the system into chaos.
We have become one of the most roadwork-afflicted nations in the world, and it is a source of serious economic inefficiency. These endless craters are eroding our air quality with the fumes of stalled traffic. Roadworks are not only driving motorists nuts: they are bad for bus passengers, too, and they are a drain on the finances of public transport, since the delays mean we have to lay on more buses to be sure of a decent service.
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Boris, in Morocco, finds the police ready to shake hands and embrace a road-rager: “First the cop spoke kindly to the taxi driver, and then leant forward closely and kissed him on the crown of the head. Then the 19-yr-old road rager made a short speech to the taxi driver, bowed and kissed him on the cheek. Then there was general shaking of hands and embracing by everyone except possibly the road-rager’s female passenger. And that – believe me – was it.”
Uh-oh, I thought, this is where it all goes wrong. The car in front of us screeched to a halt and the driver door slammed. Towards us he stalked, face pale, eyes blazing like coals, hands twitching from the sleeves of his Dolce and Gabbana blouson.
His oiled black hair stood up in shark teeth tufts from his trembling head. With his beaked nose and sulky mouth he had the air of a young medieval sultan who had just discovered a Frankish knight in bed with his wife.
As he flung wide our car door I half expected him to jerk some jewelled dagger from his white designer jeans. In the instant before he physically attacked our driver I remembered the cheery predictions of the guide book.
Morocco, chirped the guide, has very little crime. You may be offered all sorts of things at outrageous prices, but no one, said the guide book, will offer you violence.
In the course of two days strolling around the pink-walled city of Marrakesh, I found that this optimism was well-founded. Everybody smiled. Nobody so much as jostled us. No one even raised his voice, except the muezzin. Yes, I thought, he must run a pretty tight ship, this King Mohammed VI.
Which made it all the more surprising to see this eruption of rage, here on our last night, in the dust and darkness of the ring road. The young man, of about 19, shouted at our driver to come out of the car and then aimed a kung fu kick at his head.
As the guidebook had prophesied, however, the police were almost immediately on the scene.
Police arrived in a van proclaiming them to belong to the Surete Nationale. Out stepped a balding plainclothesman in a leather jacket, with a hint of Mukhabarat menace. Both sides began babbling their cases, the taxi driver complaining of assault, the kids protesting that the taxi had cut them up.
The policeman clapped his hands for hush. His brown eyes bored intelligently into mine. Tell me what happened, he said. The chap had indeed kicked at the taxi driver, I attested, though whether he had connected I could not really say.
Suddenly the policeman clapped his hands again and barked a flurry of Arabic at all present. That’s it, I thought: we are all going to be hauled off to the blooming station for an orgy of tedium. Then things got very odd indeed.
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Guido is like Santa Claus, or so he claims. See his very funny video with top ten political moments here
And further satire from our resident friend Dungeekin here
Inspired by Dungeekin is a brilliant ’cheery Christmas Song’ by Man Widdicombe here or with the lyrics here
Guest Blog by raincoaster - presenting a challenge
“The view is more beautiful now that it is mine.” Ran
Hendrik Gets His Chair by AHA Media
I can be challenging. Boris knows it, Melissa knows it, the nation of Albania knows it, I know it, you know it (well you know now, don’t you?). So I’d like to put this inherent challengenosity (a raincoasterism) of mine to good use and dare your city to match or beat my city in something that really matters. Read on, if you think your humble burb has what it takes:
We all know this blog belongs to the Mayor of London (although detached it is still his in spirit), and before that was based out of the cosmopolitan megalopolis of Henley, but for a moment I’d like to divert your attention to my own town, indeed my own neighborhood. I’d like to introduce you to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. (More photos of Hendrik on his revolving chair here)
Queen of Hastings Street
With an average life expectancy in the mid-forties (thanks to disease, addiction, and the interlocking social and physical problems arising from substandard- or no housing), the DTES (Downtown Eastside) has been an archetypal skid row since the days in the last century when lumber was, in fact, skidded in the mud down the street on its way to the sawmill because wagons were for the rich folk.
Now, after more than a century of struggling with the issue, I’m proud to say that Vancouver has eliminated homelessness.
Image by Peter Davies, From the Hope in Shadows collection, COPYRIGHT: Pivot Legal Society, 2009
Yes, Homelessness is Over! Watch this amazing news story
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With the right finance, Britain can lead the world to a greener future, says Boris Johnson.
By the time you read these words I will be airborne to Copenhagen. Why, you may ask, am I going to the climate change summit? Is it really worth discharging yet more greenhouse gases into the upper air?
As for the validity of the summit itself, I believe that it is of crucial importance for the world. We have a real chance to agree new targets for reducing CO2 emissions – and to bring in countries such as China and India which were, insanely, omitted from the Kyoto protocol. We also have a chance to do something about the politics of global warming, which are in danger of going seriously wrong. We won’t win this argument with the public, we won’t get people to change their lives, we won’t succeed in cutting CO2 if we continue to rely on a diet of unremitting gloom. It is time for a change in the psychological approach.
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