Boris, terror attack, "Cripes!"
He’s not the first person to make this point (and I’m not saying we were either), but Paul Waugh puts it rather well on his Evening Standard blog.
George Psaradakis, the driver of the Number 31 bus that was bombed on 7/7, was on hand to introduce Ken. "Ken Livingstone gave London the leadership our city needed that day," he said, before receving a tearful hug from the Mayor.
Now, no one in the Ken camp is so crass as to want to make the events of 7/7 a centrepiece of his re-election campaign, but they do feel it encapsulates The Choice the capital faces on May 1.
The Mayor pointed out that just as the Olympic bid had needed years of detailed preparation to succeed, so the calm and efficient response to the terror attack had been long in the planning. […]
If another terror attack took place under Mayor Boris’s watch, what kind of speech could and would he give?
There are other good points in his post too, so give it a read.
It’s nice to see someone attempting balance at the Standard, which today continues its appalling, corrupt, biased coverage, penned by self-proclaimed "Boris Johnson supporter" Andrew Gilligan, which today sees him conjuring up more extremely tenuous links between Ken and some sort of fabricated corruption in ethnic minority communities.
Apparently, in one case, a Latin American newspaper in London has been running full-page ads from its own publisher encouraging its readers to vote for Ken. This is, we are assured by Mr. Gilligan, outrageous.
Can anyone think of any other newspapers, perhaps with bigger circulations and higher profiles, which have devoted page after page after page to attempting to influence the outcome of the Mayoral election? I’ll see if I can remember any such newspapers and perhaps offer a follow-up post later looking at their own corruption if so.