Posts in the ‘Personal life’ category

Why we must stop Boris at the polls today

Thursday, 1 May 2008, 1.26 by Mr. Stop Boris

The Tory Troll earlier posted a summing-up at the end of a 50-post campaign against Boris, which has been one of the best-researched and most strident on the web.

Here at the Stop Boris campaign, we have also been blogging for some time now, as a way of spreading the word about why we need to vote against Boris Johnson today.

Our campaign started in July last year, when it was first announced that Boris Johnson was going to put himself forward for the Conservative Mayoral candidacy. While most people dismissed him as a joke, it was clear to us that in modern politics, in a personality-driven campaign, there was a very real threat that Boris could be elected.

The Stop Boris group on Facebook was set up, and its Posted Items and Wall remained the focus of the campaign until March this year, when the idea of stepping things up with campaign posters first dawned.

Somewhere to host the posters was needed, and before we knew it we’d had the StopBoris.org domain and a nice chunk of web space donated to us, so it seemed rude not to set up a web site too.

Mrs. Stop Boris suggested she should create an accompanying application for Facebook users, which she did with aplomb, and tonight sees its user base on the verge of hitting 1,000.

A static web site proved, within just a few days of launch, inadequate for tracking a fast-moving campaign, rich in developments and arguments against Boris, so that’s where the Stop Boris blog came in, and it’s on researching and writing for this I’ve spent nearly every free moment for the past six weeks.

So I’m now able to look back over the 183 posts prior to this one that I’ve written on this blog, and bring you a summary of the compelling case against electing the woefully unsuitable Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, divided into 15 headings which seemed vaguely appropriate at the time…

Some links to posts are in bold/larger type, indicating some sort of relative importance in their subject area. I don’t pretend it’s been done in a scientific way, though.

The people who know Boris know he’s completely inappropriate to be Mayor

Of course, only those who aren’t desperate to get him elected are admitting it publicly. Even plenty of people who are in or support his own party are worried about the damage he’ll do to the Conservative brand if he becomes the most powerful Tory politician in Britain.

He holds offensive views that make him unsuitable to lead a diverse city

For years he filled his writing with outrageous statements, many of which he has refused to apologise for. Even when he has said sorry for things, it’s been a grudging apology riddled with caveats. Issues include homophobia and pandering to racists. No wonder the BNP have called on their voters to give him their second preferences.

His flagship policy is a complete and utter mess

The main policy associated with Boris for many months was his plan to replace bendy-buses with a "new Routemaster". It’s been discredited on so many grounds it’s extraordinary he’s still persisting with it.

He is by far the weakest candidate on tackling crime; his Mayoralty will see more deaths

He’s the only main candidate with no pledged target on cutting crime (he just whips up fear about it without being able to tackle it), and his Freudian slip shows this is because he knows his planned budget cuts will mean they can’t cut crime at all.

And while crime may well rise under Boris, so will pedestrian deaths on the roads as he reverse the progress that has been made in making London more pedestrian-friendly over the past few years.

He is atrocious on the environment

There’s a general consensus among environmentalists that Boris, a climate change denier and anti-Kyoto campaigner, would be a disaster on green issues the world over.

His entire campaign has been fake and micromanaged by Lynton Crosby, and he has never focused on the issues

He just knows a few focus-group tested lines but has no substance behind any of the sentences he’s learnt and certainly has no concrete policies to back them up. When asked about his own policies he instead turns everything into a tenuously linked and generally unfounded attack against Ken Livingstone.

Most of his policies are the stuff of cloud cuckoo land

He promises a no-strike deal with the RMT union. The RMT say they would never, ever, ever sign such a deal. It’s almost certain that they will go on strike if he tries to impose one, in fact. And that’s just one of his policies: the majority of the others are also fanciful. Or just rubbish.

He can’t be taken seriously

He’s built his entire career on being a buffoon, an idiot, a fool, a clown. He simply can’t be taken seriously. Imagine him trying to address the city after a terrorist attack? "How many are dead? Oh, cripes!"

He simply isn’t up to the job

He has a track record of incompetence, gaffes, sackings and not being able to take anything seriously or dedicate himself to anything for a prolonged period of time. And he’s barely managed to find anyone who’s willing to join his administration so who knows who’d end up doing any of the real work?

He only entered into this contest for a bit of self-publicity – he never actually wanted the job, but now he’s in too deep…

People have been underestimating his chances

Many anti-Boris people think he’s just a joke and there’s no serious chance of him getting the job. These people are complacent and might not get out and vote. They need to be alerted to the danger urgently and dragged to the polling stations! :)

He claims to support ‘zero tolerance’ but has broken the law a number of times himself

Evidently he thinks the law only applies to the little people, not VIPs like himself.

His campaign is riddled with outright dishonesty

His campaign team have been paying people to comment on blogs such as ours and The Tory Troll’s, pretending to be normal members of the public. Fortunately we exposed them and they then left us largely in peace.

Aside from that, the team have also been spreading various lies and half-truths to scare people into voting for Boris, who has let a number of lies slip himself.

His media cronies have run half his campaign for him

Certain nasty parts of the media have made no attempt at balanced coverage of this election, instead doing everything they can to discredit the current Mayor and promote Boris, despite there being no case for doing so. Just about all the newspaper leaders endorsing Boris failed to give a single positive reason to vote for him.

The Evening Standard’s own journalistic team even tore Boris’s manifesto to shreds while managing to pick only modest holes in Ken’s, yet their billboards and pages have teemed with anti-Ken, pro-Boris propaganda for months.

He doesn’t care about ordinary Londoners

He has no real roots here and is completely out of touch with the concerns and lives of everyday Londoners.

Campaign videos

Sometimes 25 pictures a second are worth 25,000 words a second, or something.

Campaign posters

They still hold true, seven weeks on from creating them.

How to stop Boris

So, all that said, here’s how to vote most effectively to stop Boris.

Good luck, Boris-stoppers.

This election is going to be extremely close. We need to get Boris-stoppers and Boris-sceptics to the polling stations in their millions.

Do whatever you can to encourage people to vote today and we can stop Boris.

A grassroots campaign taking on the might of the Standard and the Sun. Are you up for the fight? Let’s do it.

Posted in Blog, Blogs, Buses, Campaign, Channel 4, Conservatives, Crime, Cycling, Daily Mail, Diversity, Driving, Environment, Ethnic minorities, Evening Standard, Facebook, Gaffophobia, Getting an easy ride, Homosexuality, Housing, Incompetence, Lies, London Lite, Lynton Crosby, Manipulation, Media, Other candidates, Party Election Broadcasts, Personal life, Policies, Posters, Radio, Recycling, Satire, Stop Boris, Team, Telegraph, The Times, Transport, Underground, Voting, Web site, YouTube | 5 Comments »

A bit of class

Wednesday, 30 April 2008, 19.51 by Mr. Stop Boris

Martin O’Neill, writing for the New Statesman, reckons "our society is still disfigured by problems of social class".

It’s quite possibly true, although probably not the level of debate to win over swing voters to our cause at this late stage, so let’s concentrate on the facts instead.

You might prefer to click through to the article than to read such a huge quotation in small red type, but I couldn’t work out which bits to delete from any of paragraphs 2–7 so I’ve had to just put them all here!

The facts about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson are well-known, and should be more than sufficient to stop him being a plausible candidate for any kind of elected office in a mature democracy. He is a man who has lost a number of jobs for lying: he was sacked from The Times for making up a quotation from his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas, and lost his front-bench role, under Michael Howard, for lying about his four-year extra-marital affair with his fellow toff journalist, Petronella Wyatt. (For men like Johnson, with friends in high places, serial sackings are no bar to advancement.)

As well as being a famous liar, Johnson has skirted the borders of criminality when it has suited his interests or those of his foul, larcenous and over-privileged friends. In 1990 he agreed to give the home address of journalist Stuart Collier to Darius Guppy, a narcissistic Old Etonian convicted fraudster, who wanted to have Collier beaten up in revenge for some perceived slight. On being asked how badly Collier would be beaten up, Guppy informed Johnson that it would involve “a couple of black eyes, a cracked rib … or something like that”.

It is beyond satire that the man campaigning for the mayoralty of London by stoking up fear of violent crime should once himself have been involved in the attempted commission of an instance of GBH. Despite his new found enthusiasm for the Metropolitan police, did he alert the authorities to Guppy’s intentions? No doubt he takes the view that police attention should just be “for the little people”, and not for his odious chums from Eton.

But this is only the beginning of the charge-sheet against Johnson. Although he is campaigning to run London, he admits to completely administrative incompetence: he left a job as a trainee management consultant complaining that he could not “stay conscious” when confronted with financial information. We should not be surprised, in that case, if he is unable to master the fine details of running one of the world’s most complex cities.

Boris Johnson is not only shady, dishonest and incompetent. He is also a particularly offensive kind of clown, as is evidenced by his absurd litany of gaffes and insults. The people of Papua New Guinea are, according to Johnson, “cannibals,” while Portsmouth is “full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs”.

Worst of all is Johnson’s casual racism, although it is perhaps not wholly surprising from someone of his class and background. It takes a particular kind of bad judgement, as despicable as it is revealing, to think that there could be anything funny about describing the participants in the Congolese civil war as having “watermelon smiles” or talking of “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” (with conscious echoes of Enoch Powell?), yet both phrases appeared in a Daily Telegraph article by Johnson as recently as 2002. Such a man simply does not belong in modern, multicultural London.

I can’t argue with that. Indeed, I don’t think anyone can really. Has anyone heard a decent rebuttal of much of this stuff? I’ve mainly heard deflection onto the Evening Standard’s allegations against Ken, for instance, rather than reasons why the above catalogue of calamity doesn’t disqualify Boris from the job.

Posted in Conservatives, Crime, Incompetence, Lies, Media, Personal life | 1 Comment »

Boris can’t be "out-ethnic"ed by an Asian

Friday, 18 April 2008, 8.44 by Mr. Stop Boris

Boris continued his record of blundering racial offence yesterday by telling an Asian presenter on BBC radio: "You can’t out-ethnic me".

Unfortunately I hadn’t heard that there was to be a three-way debate between the candidates on the BBC Asian Network yesterday morning (perhaps because I’m not Asian and their station advertising is very well targeted? ;) ), but apparently there was, and the relevant part of the transcript reads:

Boris Johnson: Almost 100 years ago my Turkish great-great grandfather came to London and I’m very proud of that.

Presenter Nihal Arthanayake: What part of your Turkish culture do you maintain?

BJ: A lively … interest in Turkey.

NA: How often do you go and see your family?

BJ: It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London.

NA: Did you just find out when you needed it to get the ethnic vote?

BJ: I’m happy to say that lots of Turkish relations have been coming and going in our family for a long time.

NA: Are you down with the ethnics?

BJ: I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me Nihal.

NA: How many bhangra gigs have you been to over the last few years?

BJ: I can’t remember. But my children are a quarter Indian so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

NA: Okay, let’s not try to out-brown each other.

(I’ve taken that from the Evening Standard, which ran a surprising number of anti-Boris pieces yesterday (i.e. any). Their full article on this is here.)

As well as the obvious ‘out-ethnic’ gaffe, and his obvious complete lack of interest in and knowledge of the culture he claims to be so integral to him, I find the comment "It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London" particularly interesting, because of those first three words: "It turns out". That doesn’t sound like the phrasing of someone who’s taken a keen interest into his ethnic heritage throughout his life: it sounds very much like someone who has paid a lackey to do a quick bit of research to try and get more votes.

And of course the most laughably ridiculous bit is him saying "I can’t remember" when asked how many bhangra gigs he’s been to. I’d be prepared to place a large bet on the answer being an all too memorable zero. Strange that that should slip his mind so easily.

Posted in BBC, Diversity, Ethnic minorities, Events, Media, Personal life | No Comments »

Vendetta

Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 0.28 by Mr. Stop Boris

Dave Hill blogs from his Cornish retreat:

this reminded me of Pippa Crerar’s recent blog on the subject of Johnson’s apparent acknowledgement of his coke use to Janet Street-Porter and subsequent denials that he’d done such a thing. She gently pointed out that, "Boris was sacked from the Tory frontbench by former Tory leader Michael Howard in 2004 not for having an affair, but for failing to tell the truth about it." Frankly, I couldn’t give a hoot or toot if Boris powdered his nose illegally when aged 19 - after all, I did and look what a terrific fellow I’ve turned out to be - and wouldn’t blame him if he’d fibbed about it later. But just imagine if the Evening Standard was conducting a vendetta against Johnson rather than against Livingstone. We’d hear of nothing but denials and evasions and insinuations of profound untrustworthiness from now until polling day.

He’s right, of course, but that’s the Evening "Double" Standard for you.

And, because we are running a vendetta against Boris Johnson, of sorts, I feel I would be neglecting my duty were I not to take this opportunity to point out that Boris is evidently a liar and therefore should certainly not be trusted with running London, etc etc.

I had something else Dave Hill-related to blog about tonight but time has slipped away from me. Tomorrow will have to suffice. He won’t mind: he’s on holiday.

Posted in Blogs, Evening Standard, Lies, Media, Personal life | No Comments »

La la la la not listening can’t hear you la la la la

Wednesday, 9 April 2008, 23.43 by Mr. Stop Boris

The closer the election gets, the more shockingly biased Associated Newspapers’ propaganda pamphlets – printed with ink that won’t rub off onto your bum-cheeks – become.

Dave Hill’s been behaving like a thoroughly professional journalist throughout this campaign, giving each candidate a fair hearing, carefully weighing up their policies’ pros and cons and reporting things as he finds them throughout. He certainly hasn’t come to his blog with any particular axe to grind, unlike, say, a certain blogger sitting very near my computer at this moment, who’s only too happy to grind an axe (or preferably to bury it in Boris’s head) at any opportunity.

But even non-partisan Dave lost his rag with the latest Evening Standard bias yesterday; I say ‘lost his rag’, but that is perhaps overstating things somewhat, given that the title of his article is merely "Tut, Tut, Evening Standard". (Mind you, I’ve just noticed that his permalink, i.e. the link I just put in, gives away that that wasn’t the title of his first draft!) But it’s clear that the Daily Mail group of newspapers, for so long desperate to be rid of Ken Livingstone, are hell-bent on getting their crony Boris [who, don’t forget, saved Andrew Gilligan’s career when he was sacked from the BBC by offering him a job at the Spectator] into City Hall, no matter what the cost to their journalistic reputation.

So, how would they cover last night’s Newsnight debate, which by common consent no-one did stunningly well in but Boris definitely lost, in their evening freesheet, London Lite?

The answer is that they:

  • freeze-framed through the debate to find a still where Boris looked serious, Paddick looked reasonable and Ken looked a bit silly;
  • mentioned, for the headline and opening, that (unlike a certain other candidate) Boris has pledged only to serve two terms as Mayor (which is irrelevant anyway when he couldn’t possibly get re-elected after four years of incompetence and gaffes);
  • spent two-thirds of the article bigging up the pledges Boris has announced, which are a checklist of the things the Evening Standard has been moaning about in relation to Lee Jasper etc.;
  • mentioned one single topic from last night’s debate, namely Ken’s promise to resign if he breaks his word by putting up the Congestion Charge for sub-band G cars if re-elected;
  • somehow managed to segue this into a reference to a poll finding that Ken is the candidate considered least honest by the Londoners questioned;
  • er…
  • that’s it.

Seriously. No mention of Boris’s bus-based blathering, when Jeremy Paxman had to ask him the same question 12 times and still didn’t get an answer. Nothing. No coverage of the debate at all. This is a propaganda effort the Chinese government would be proud of.

They claim to be "London’s Quality Newspaper", but on the evidence I’ve been seeing, even despite its lightweight content and short articles, the only one of the big four to come close to deserving that title is thelondonpaper, which is at least even-handed in its treatment of the candidates in this election. Better to have one or two fair paragraphs about each candidate than 20 grossly distorted ones, after all.

Mind you, even thelondonpaper is short on coverage of last night’s debate. It goes some way to making up for this with an intriguing nugget of information about Boris’s fundraising:

It has emerged Johnson met up with old pals from the Bullingdon Club—an exclusive Oxford University set which includes Tory leader David Cameron—to appeal for funds for his campaign.

The Bullingdon Club, lest we forget, is renowned for its members’ disgraceful behaviour in Oxford. David Cameron and Boris Johnson were in the club together, and essentially what they did was:

  • Book a posh restaurant, using an assumed name (their reputation preceded them);
  • Turn up to dine – and get completely and utterly drunk;
  • Smash up the place, causing as much damage as possible;
  • Ask your rich parents to foot the repair bill to appease the distraught restaurateur;
  • Repeat at will.

Another famous Bullingdon alumnus is Darius Guppy, by the way: a lovely bunch, all in all.

So now it sounds like Boris has been catching up with his fellow Bullingdon thugs to try to get cash out of them. Makes sense: after his woeful performance on Newsnight last night, his campaign is looking pretty damaged, so I’m sure they won’t mind throwing money at it to try to restore it. What’s good enough for a restaurant…

Posted in Blogs, Evening Standard, Getting an easy ride, London Lite, Media, Other candidates, Personal life, Polls, thelondonpaper | 6 Comments »

Those strong London credentials come to the fore again

Tuesday, 8 April 2008, 22.19 by Mr. Stop Boris
Mr Johnson also had trouble when asked by the Sutton Guardian who he felt was the greatest ever Londoner.”Oh God. Churchill was from Oxford so I can’t say him, now let me think,” he said.

Prompted by local Conservative councillor Tony Shields, Mr Johnson then named Nelson as the city’s greatest resident.

Wimbledon (or possibly Sutton) Guardian

Posted in Incompetence, Personal life | No Comments »

Empty canvass

Saturday, 5 April 2008, 19.24 by Mr. Stop Boris

The Mirror covers Boris’s lying about cocaine today, but includes a paragraph at the end that I hadn’t heard about before:

Last night it was revealed that Boris has been campaigning in areas which are not even eligible to vote for him. He has been urging bemused residents of Epping Forest in Essex to back his bid for mayor - despite the whole area being OUTSIDE the capital.

He’s been focusing his campaigning on the outer London boroughs, where the Conservatives traditionally do better (although voting Conservative is no excuse for voting Boris), but this is going a bit far. Perhaps he thinks his support is literally proportional to his distance from Trafalgar Square, but canvassing outside London won’t do him much good on polling day. Long may it continue!

Posted in Conservatives, Incompetence, Lies, Mirror, Personal life | No Comments »

What goes up must come out

Friday, 4 April 2008, 18.36 by Mr. Stop Boris

When the Daily Mail secured the serialisation rights to a new biography of Ken Livingstone, knowing it would reveal three children he’d kept private for years, this can’t have been the 24 hours they had envisaged they would see when the revelation was made.

For a start, Ken revealed it himself on BBC London last night, rather than letting the Mail put its own spin on the story first.

Second, I haven’t yet heard anyone who’s particularly bothered about it. At most, people express surprise that he managed so successfully to keep his private life away from the prying eyes of the media for so long.

But third, for some reason, today was also the day that the mainstream media finally caught on to the fact, reported here on Monday, that Boris has snorted coke and smoked dope.

On ITV London Tonight he’s just been trotting out the completely hypocritical ‘defence’ that the drugs he took were somehow not as bad as the drugs today’s kids take - as if today’s kids are somehow more depraved and have actively sought debatably stronger drugs for the sake of behaving more rebelliously than Boris and his friends ever did, as I covered on Monday.

But setting aside the charge of hypocrisy, I - courtesy, perhaps surprisingly, of the Evening Standard - can go one better: his excessively strongly worded denials about cocaine this morning have left him open to charges that he has simply started lying about it now:

Janet: You said in interviews that you’ve snorted coke.
Boris: Well, that was when I was 19. It all goes to show that, sometimes, it’s better not to say anything.

[…]

In 2005, he joked on the quiz show Have I Got News For You: “I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.”
But then, in an interview with GQ magazine in June 2007, when he was asked whether any of the Class A drug went up his nose despite the sneeze, Boris responded: “It must have done, oh yes, but it didn’t do much for me I can tell you.” He added: “I tried it at university and I remember it vividly. It achieved no pharmacological psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.”

[…] 

But let me repeat his denial of this morning: “To say that I had used cocaine is simply not true.”

It might, at this point, be worth pointing out that Boris was sacked from the Tory frontbench by former Tory leader Michael Howard in 2004 not for having an affair, but for failing to tell the truth about it…

Indeed - there’s no doubt Boris has form as a liar. A timely reminder of his affair, too - I didn’t see any suggestion that any of Ken’s children came from, shall we say, simultaneous relationships!

And while the media have today grouped together the revelations about the two candidates, let’s not forget one key difference that can easily be overlooked amid claims and counter-claims about whether candidates’ personal lives matter in elections: by smoking dope and snorting cocaine, Boris Johnson was breaking the law.

Here’s hoping his drug-taking doesn’t play well with his the more traditionally conservative end of his supporter spectrum.

Posted in Crime, Lies, Media, Other candidates, Personal life | No Comments »

“Boris to homeless: my house is worth shedloads”

Friday, 4 April 2008, 0.29 by Mr. Stop Boris

That’s a good headline and it accompanied a decent anti-Boris article in yesterday’s thelondonpaper.

For some reason I only realised yesterday that, despite having Series-Linked both ITV London Tonight and BBC London news programmes, I should probably consider breaking the habit of the past year and actually accept the free newspapers being thrust at me in London, to keep an eye on what they’re saying about Boris and the Mayoral election.

So I grabbed thelondonpaper, which didn’t disappoint, and London Lite, which did.

London Lite – produced by the people who bring you the Evening Standard and the Metro, not to mention the Daily Mail – was even ‘liter’ than I’d imagined, offering pretty much no coverage of the elections at all.

Thelondonpaper offered the article with the headline above (a version of which is also online) which continued:

Boris Johnson was under fire today after boasting to homeless people that he lived in a big Islington house worth “shedloads of money”.

The gaffe-prone Tory had managed to steer clear of controversy in his bid to be elected London Mayor until last night’s housing hustings organised by homeless charities Shelter, Crisis and St Mungo’s.

Thelondonpaper has a London Mayoral Election web site, and is also running an online poll to see who you’d like to be Mayor, which currently shows Ken with 41%, Boris with 23% and interestingly Alan Craig from the Christian People’s Alliance and Christian Party in third place on 15%. Either the media and pollsters are missing a trick there, or web polls are hopelessly unreliable and easily subject to mass rigging. I wonder which.

Posted in Housing, London Lite, Media, Personal life, thelondonpaper | 2 Comments »

Is Boris overplaying his London credentials?

Thursday, 3 April 2008, 19.45 by Mr. Stop Boris

A Back Boris leaflet has arrived through our front door. Needless to say it hasn’t changed our minds and forced us to delete the StopBoris.org web site.

It has, however, left us slightly confused about Boris’s history, with respect to the London origins he appears so keen to play up in the face of two leading rival candidates who each scored ten out of ten in thelondonpaper’s ‘Bow Bells rating’ today (Boris scored six; saved from being last only by Siân Berry’s five).

According to this leaflet, Boris loves London because “It is the city of my childhood and adolescence. I have spent most of my working life here.” Elsewhere, the leaflet fills in a bit of his background as follows:

He was born in 1964 in New York and was educated at primary school in Camden, before winning scholarships to Eton and Oxford University.

This makes no mention of his time at the European School in Brussels, where Boris “spent some of his formative years”, according to David Cameron. (A convenient omission when aiming to appeal to Europhobes, perhaps.)

Wikipedia, which is obviously not authoritative, but provides the only independent biographical information I’ve got, says:

Johnson was born in New York and educated at the European School in Brussels, Ashdown House and then at Eton College, where he was a King’s Scholar, and read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Brackenbury scholar, and President of the Oxford Union.

Ashdown House is in East Sussex, Eton College in Windsor and, well, I think you know where Oxford is. So where’s this Camden primary school? And how did he find time for London to be “the city of [his] childhood and adolescence” in between attending all these places that weren’t in London?

While at StopBoris.org we’re not accustomed to writing things without bringing an anti-Boris perspective to bear, this is a genuine enquiry for an explanation from anyone in the know. Is Boris overstating his ‘Londoner’ credentials, or are we overlooking something?

For the record, I think people choose to be Londoners - they don’t have to be born here to be one, and indeed some people are born here and choose to move away, no longer wishing to be Londoners in the same way. But we are interested in any examples of Boris putting out dishonest information in his campaign, even if this is nothing like as serious as the outright lie about crime being put out by his team outside the hustings last night.

Posted in Personal life | 4 Comments »

Drugs

Monday, 31 March 2008, 23.09 by Mr. Stop Boris

Personally, I’m not into drugs - never even tried them. But I also subscribe to the view which seems to sustain London as one of the most diverse and tolerant cities in the world: everyone can do what they like, as long as their actions don’t impact undesirably on others - that sort of thing.

So personally, I don’t really care that Boris has snorted coke and smoked dope, but if you know of anyone thinking of voting for him who might care, perhaps you’d like to mention it to them!

That said, it seems pretty pathetic for him to try to cast today’s young people as somehow more depraved than he ever was by suggesting that they are all using much stronger variants of the same drugs he once enjoyed himself.

Either say: “I did drugs, I shouldn’t have done, I’m sorry, and I therefore think we should stamp down on their use”, or say: “I did drugs, I don’t regret that youthful experimentation, and I therefore think we should go a bit easier on others doing similar experimenting.” Don’t try to have your coke and snort it (to coin a phrase) by suggesting things were different in the good old days.

If anything, the only significant difference was that in his day - if we believe the type of headlines he’s usually happy to use to propagate fear of crime - there was far less drug use than there is now, making his experimentation all the more delinquent than that of today’s young people, surely?

Posted in Campaign, Personal life | 2 Comments »