Boris Johnson - Next Mayor Of London

[Beach Hut]

Well the exit polls and all the current news is saying Boris has won.

Well done the blonde buffoon, should be an entertaining 4 years for Londoners

 

[Lord Bracknell]

I'm waiting until the votes are counted.

Only two constituencies have declared (and only first preference votes have so far been counted). Ken is well ahead at the moment.

City & East:-
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 94,921 50.61%
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 49,666 26.48%

North East:-
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 96,402 48.60%
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 57,394 28.94%

And Labour have captured an Assembly seat (Brent & Harrow) previously held by the Tories.

 

[Skaville]

Boris Johnson Mayor of London. What a ridiculous state of affairs - another clear signal that UK politics is becoming more like US politics where personality and fame is more important than political ideals, morals, intelligence and policies. I have no idea how anyone could vote for that utter goon. God help London.

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Bexley & Bromley goes for BJ:-
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 122,052 60.08%
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 40,670 20.02%

Total votes so far:-
Ken Livingstone 231,993
Boris Johnson 229,112

 

[Beach Hut]

I'm waiting until the votes are counted.

Good point, ask Neil Kinnock

 

[Skaville]

Here he comes, Prince Phillip in a blonde wig, ready to f*** up the capital. Just what's needed for the Olympics

 

[Beach Hut]

Think a change is needed although I would add not much substance to what Boris intends to do.

 

[clapham_gull]

Think a change is needed although I would add not much substance to what Boris intends to do.

Neither would he

 

[Tooting Gull]

I probably have a higher opinion of Boris than some on here - but only as an editor and writer. MP was a stretch, mayor is a bad joke.

 

[Superseagull]

What have you Londoners gone and done? I predict a summer of tube & bus strikes as Boris tries to wind up the very militant transport unions with some of his wacky ideas and ill thought comments.

 

[Skaville]

Okay, I won. So what now...

 

[Skaville]

The Boris Johnson Controversies

Stuart Collier
Johnson became embroiled in controversy in 1995[31] after a recording of a telephone conversation made in 1990 became public knowledge. On the tape Johnson is heard agreeing to supply the address of the News of the World journalist Stuart Collier in order for his former schoolmate Darius Guppy to have Collier beaten up for knowing too much about Guppy's failed insurance fraud.[32] Johnson asked how badly Collier was to be beaten up, and Guppy replies "He will probably have a couple of black eyes and a... cracked rib or something like that". This part of the conversation ended with Johnson agreeing to supply the address[3]. Despite the call from Guppy, Johnson did not alert the police and the incident only became public knowledge when the conversations was summarised in the Daily Mail. Collier was not attacked.[33] Johnson retained his job at the Telegraph but was reprimanded by its editor Max Hastings,[3] who received a copy of the recording several years before it found its way to the Daily Mail.


'Theft' of Cigar Case
Boris Johnson has been investigated by the police for the 'theft', in 2003, of a cigar case belonging to Tariq Aziz, an associate of Saddam Hussein, which Johnson had found in the rubble of Aziz's house in Baghdad. At the time, Johnson wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph, stating he had taken the cigar case and would return it to its owner upon request.[34] Despite this admission in 2003, Johnson received no indication from the police that he was being investigated for theft until 2008, leading supporters of Johnson to express suspicion that the investigation coincided with his candidacy for the position of London Mayor. "This is a monumental waste of time," said Johnson.[35]


Drug use
In a April 2008 Marie Claire interview with Janet Street-Porter, Johnson admitted that while at Oxford University he had used cocaine, and earlier while at Eton had used "dope",[36]


Johnson's journalism and writing
Johnson's career as a journalist and editor of The Spectator has led to a number of controversies. Some were immediate while others were seized by opponents during his campaign for Mayor of London.


Comments on gay partnerships
The mayoral candidate says in Friends, Voters, Countrymen (2001) that "if gay marriage was OK - and I was uncertain on the issue - then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog."[37]


People of Liverpool
On 16 October 2004, The Spectator carried an unsigned editorial[38] comment criticising a perceived trend to mawkish sentimentality by the public. Using British hostage Kenneth Bigley as an example, the editorial claimed the inhabitants of Bigley's home city of Liverpool were wallowing in a "vicarious victimhood"; that many Liverpudlians had a "deeply unattractive psyche"; and that they refused to accept responsibility for "drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground" during the Hillsborough disaster, a contention at odds with the findings of the Taylor Report. The editorial closed with: "In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder."

Although Johnson had not written the piece (journalist Simon Heffer later said he "had a hand" in it), he accepted responsibility for its publication.[39] The Conservative leader at the time, Michael Howard, condemned the editorial, saying "I think what was said in The Spectator was nonsense from beginning to end", and sent Johnson on a tour of contrition to the city.[40] There, in numerous interviews and public appearances, Johnson defended the editorial's thesis (that the deaths of figures such as Bigley and Diana, Princess of Wales, were over-sentimentalised); but he apologised for the article's wording and for using Liverpool and Bigley's death as examples, saying "I think the article was too trenchantly expressed but we were trying to make a point about sentimentality". Johnson then appeared on a BBC Radio Merseyside phone-in show, in which Paul Bigley (brother of the murdered hostage) told Johnson: "You are a self-centred pompous twit – get out of public life." Michael Howard resisted calls to dismiss Johnson over the Bigley affair, but dismissed him the next month over the Wyatt revelations. It was about this time that sections of the press started referring to Johnson as "Bozza", (in the mode of "Gazza", "Prezza" and other figures whose activities are widely reported). At a football match between Liverpool and Bolton Wanderers, the Bolton fans started chanting Boris Johnson, there's only one Boris Johnson in an attempt to agitate the Liverpool fans.


Islam and Muslims
Johnson wrote the following about Islam in his Spectator column in 2005:

"It is time to reassert British values…That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem. To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture — to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques — it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions. The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? "When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass?"[41]

He has also written "Whatever you say about the Russians, they have no qualms when it comes to abusing human rights, if that means cracking down on Islam."[42]


Papua New Guinea
Johnson's journalism and public speaking is much given to overblown metaphor, and a 2006 column likening Tory leadership disputes to "Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing" was criticised in Papua New Guinea. The nation's High Commissioner invited him to visit the country and see for himself, while remarking that his comments might mean he was refused a visa.[43] Johnson suggested he would add Papua New Guinea to his global apology itinerary, and said he was sure the people there "lived lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity like the rest of us". His defence was conclusive: "My remarks were inspired by a Time Life book I have which does indeed show relatively recent photos of Papua New Guinean tribes engaged in warfare, and I'm fairly certain that cannibalism was involved."


Jamie Oliver
Johnson was criticised at the 2006 Conservative party conference for his comments regarding the campaign for healthier school dinners headed by celebrity TV chef Jamie Oliver. He stated, "I say let people eat what they like. Why shouldn't they push pies through the railings? I would ban sweets from school – but this pressure to bring in healthy food is too much."[44] Earlier at the conference, David Cameron, the Tory party leader, had lauded Oliver's campaign as an example of "social responsibility in action".[45] Johnson has since described Oliver as a "national saint"[44] and a "messiah".[46]


Portsmouth
In April 2007 Johnson was called upon to resign by the MPs for the city of Portsmouth after claiming in a column for GQ that the city was "one of the most depressed towns in Southern England, a place that is arguably too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs".[47]


Race
Two days after Boris Johnson's candidacy for Mayor of London took a six point poll lead over Ken Livingstone in a YouGov survey published by the Daily Telegraph [48], Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, said that he would 'destroy London's unity', adding that 'once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community'.

She was referring especially to the occasion on which Johnson, as a journalist in 1999, accused the Macpherson Inquiry, which reported on police racism following the Lawrence murder, of 'hysteria', adding that the "recommendation that the law might be changed so as to allow prosecution for racist language or behaviour 'other than in a public place'" was akin to "Ceausescu's Romania".[49]

The Conservative London Assembly candidate for Bexley and Bromley and former Conservative candidate for mayor of Lewisham, James Cleverly, another prominent black Londoner, rejected Doreen Lawrence's criticisms, saying, 'The comments that Doreen Lawrence made about Boris Johnson yesterday are deeply unfair. She implies an attitude towards the Macpherson report which is just not borne out by the facts, her words are clearly designed to taint Boris with a whiff of racism and to claim that "there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community" is ridiculous.' [50]

In a piece in the Evening Standard on 6 August 2007, the journalist Andrew Gilligan responded to the allegations saying how 'outrageous – indeed Orwellian – it is to attack a man as a destroyer of racial harmony, one of the most serious charges you can lay, simply on the basis that he refuses to sign up for every dot and comma of a report of which she approves. While condemning the "grotesque failures" in the Lawrence case which "may well have originated in racism," Boris was far from the only person to oppose that particular Macpherson recommendation. Labour MPs opposed it, too. So did the Government, clearly, because they didn’t implement it.'

These remarks were followed by criticism from two black Labour London MPs, Diane Abbott and Dawn Butler, who criticised a column written by Johnson in 2002, saying he had used "most offensive language of the colonial past", showing "that the Tory party is riddled with racial prejudice".[51]

In the article in question, written to satirise the Prime Minister's visit to Congo, [52] Johnson mocked "Supertone" (Tony Blair) for his brief visits to world trouble spots, bringing peace to the world while the UK deteriorated; Blair would arrive as "the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief", just as "it is said the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies".

Johnson's campaign team rejected suggestions that their candidate might be prejudiced, insisting that he "loathes racism in all its forms". However, journalist Rod Liddle has come forward and said that Johnson used the word "piccaninnies" in private to refer to black Africans.[53] Greater London analyst and director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, Dr. Tony Travers, has written that "There is no way to dress up expressions such as "piccaninnies'" and "watermelon smiles" to take them within a million miles of acceptable." Travers downplayed comments once made by the Labour candidate to a Jewish reporter that he was "just like a concentration camp guard" as being "unwise". [54]

At an Evening Standard debate on January 21, 2008, Johnson apologised for these remarks, while insisting that they were taken out of context:

I do feel very sad that people have been so offended by these words and I'm sorry that I've caused this offence. But if you look at the article as written they really do not bear the construction that you're putting on them. I feel very strongly that this is something which is simply not in my heart. I'm absolutely 100 per cent anti-racist, I despise and loathe racism".[55]

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Brent & Harrow:-
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 65,862 41.55%
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 61,825 39.00%

Havering & Redbridge:-
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 87,302 51.93%
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 45,915 27.31%

Totals so far:-
Boris Johnson 378,239
Ken Livingstone 343,770

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Greenwich & Lewisham:-
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 63,043 42.18%
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 51,151 34.22%

Running total:-
Boris Johnson 429,390
Ken Livingstone 406,813

 

[Rowdey]

What have you Londoners gone and done? I predict a summer of tube & bus strikes as Boris tries to wind up the very militant transport unions with some of his wacky ideas and ill thought comments.

Well put - If it happens, then we will be the laughing stock of GB and Europe..

Is it 4 years for a term ? that means he'll over see the Olympics too then..

God help us..

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Enfield & Haringey:-
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 66,683 41.17%
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 60,239 37.19%

Running total:-
Boris Johnson 489,629
Ken Livingstone 473,496

 

[Lord Bracknell]

South West:-
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 90,061 46.93%
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 57,938 30.19%

Running total:-
Boris Johnson 579,690
Ken Livingstone 531,434

 

[Lord Bracknell]

West Central:-
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 91,515 54.83% 0 0
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 47,705 28.58%

Running total:-
Boris Johnson 671,205
Ken Livingstone 579,139

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Good to see the BNP doing so badly. Less than 4 per cent, so far.

 

[Beach Hut]

West Central:-
Boris Johnson Conservative Party 91,515 54.83% 0 0
Ken Livingstone The Labour Party 47,705 28.58%

Running total:-
Boris Johnson 671,205
Ken Livingstone 579,139

Good old Boris, hopefully the red flag will finally be taken down over Londinium