Boris says awesome things...

Just a short note on a dismal Saturday morning. We couldn’t ignore this crucial breaking news in the papers: Lily Allen: Why I’ve got the hots for Boris Johnson.

At least Boris has options…

Boris’s education policies have been the focus of a couple of our recent entries here at Boriswatch Towers, with mixed opinions as to their expected success. However, today we’re pleased to report an announcement that should hopefully please everyone: Boris has stated plans to offer approximately one thousand apprenticeships every year within the Greater London Authority. Quoth Boris:

I am confident that London will emerge from this downturn strong and ready to challenge what will undoubtedly be stiff competition. But we must be ready and that means, even during this uncertain period, we must keep up our training schemes so we have a skilled workforce for the future.

This certainly seems great for London’s youth — especially given that it’s not just manual labour, but that 150 apprenticeships will be provided by the Metropolitan Police, with hopes that many other organisations will follow suit — but are there going to be enough places to ensure that a good percentage of young people can be given the direction that Boris wants to give them?

What do you think? Is this a good way to help reinvigorate the workforce, or does it need another trip back to the drawing board?

Note: The Powers-That-Be here at the Towers would like to apologise for the truly awful pun that makes up the title of today’s entry, and would like to assure readers that it won’t happen again. Honest.

Boris doled out this year’s London Planning Awards last night, managing to rubbish the winning design company More London Developments before giving them a Best Built Project award.

More London Developments helped develop the More London site, on which City Hall (known as The Great Big Pickled Onion by Boris, and The Glass Testicle by previous mayor Ken Livingstone) stands. What are Boris’s thoughts on the Onion’s design, specifically the huge circular staircase and wall-to-wall windows? Let us tell you, in full detail – it deserves nothing less.

Welcome to this fantastic event in one of the worst-designed buildings in London. Above me you can see a staircase that is almost entirely unused but nonetheless occupies most of the volume.

[The building has] windows which do not open but are almost impossible to see through because they are constantly covered with guano or other substances and are impossible to clean. And whoever knows the secret of cleaning the windows in City Hall has either died or crept away to South America and there’s nothing we can do about it.

If the man responsible for creating these windows – the architect – is still in this city then I would be delighted if he would make himself known to me.

And with that, the award was announced. Wrapping up the ceremony, Johnson billed his earlier “various disobliging remarks� as “a measure of our broadmindedness� in selecting the winners.

All of which make us awfully sad we weren’t there…

After our recent look at Peter Hendy, Boris’s Transport for London chief, building.co.uk have run a fascinating article that gives a glimpse into the mind of another one of BoJo’s closest advisors — this time the man described as his chief of staff and planning guru, Sir Simon Milton.

While his name might not be intimately familiar to many people outside London, he’s in charge of sorting out the myriad planning applications that go through Boris’s office, a concern that is apparently top of the Mayor’s list of priorities. Milton apparently spends two hours a week with Boris setting out their vision of London’s future, and states that Boris’s enthusiasm for the job is one of the most refreshing things about him, calling him ‘probably the most fun person [he's] ever worked with’.

Of course, Milton is pretty famous in his own right, standing as one of surprisingly few high-profile gay Conservatives, and as such is one of the more recognisable people heading the Mayor’s office at the moment.

The rest of the article deals with Milton’s views on London’s development prospects under Boris’s governance, and whether or not he thinks the City will be better off at the end of it. Thankfully, he seems to be under the impression that things are ticking along fairly well in the capital, and that Boris’s legacy will be a positive one.

What do you think? Is Milton right, and will people ten or twenty years from now view the Boris years as a turning point in the face of London and its architecture, or is it all just hype to disguise the fact that (as Sir Simon himself says) the next few years are likely to be ‘very difficult’? Let us know in the comments.

Fans of Boris from outside London can rejoice: you might be getting a Mayor of your very own. According to the Times, David Cameron is laying out plans to allow a referendum on whether or not other big cities in the UK would like an elected official to hold the same position as BoJo.

As it stands, any council can ask to have a Mayor, but it seems the Tories believe that a referendum would highlight the issue and bring new desire for a radical shake-up of local governments. It’s hard to deny that Boris has captured the public’s imagination in a way that’s not often found in local politics, and this should have a positive effect on the future of our national municipalities.

The article does have a great deal of other points to make about the Conservatives’ plans for local government — not all of them pleasing to all parties, it would appear — but it looks as though the idea of having local Mayors at the forefront of planning decisions is a popular one. What do you think? Does local politics need spicing up, and is this the way to do it? Are we destined for cheap Boris knock-offs that won’t capture the public’s interest nearly so well? Would anyone even want a Mayor anyway? Let us know in the comments.

Keith Vaz has never been squeaky clean. A quick look at his Wikipedia entry shows a political entry dominated by controversy – the Filkin inquiry, the Hinduja affair, suspension from the Commons. He is, in short, either a dubious fellow or incredibly unlucky.

Which makes it all the more strange that everyone’s focusing their attention on Boris’s reaction to being rumbled at the Damina Green inquiry. The political commentators can all see what’s happened – Vaz saw an opportunity to corner Boris, poked and prodded him until he blew up – then released the transcript and waited for the Big Bozza to go postal. I seem to remember a similar kind of thing happening to people quite a lot when I was at school.

The media are, of course, having a field day! Even Radio 4 got in on the fun, employing actors and beeping machines to play out the transcript of the conversation in (almost) all its glory. Boris compounded the embarrassment further by being caught cycling inside City Hall, something the security guards didn’t take kindly to. His mind was probably preoccupied by working out precisely how tightly to strangle Vaz.

I should think Boris is more annoyed that he’s allowed himself to be caught like a heffalump in a trap – he’s forgotten the number 1 rule, Don’t Feed The Trolls. Vaz has revealed that the Home Affairs Select Committee is anything but balanced.

Next time,  it’s Keith Vaz who should be keeping things clean.

Away from all of the recent attention being giving to the snowfall over London, life in the Capital has been going on as normal — and for Boris, that includes preparing to attend a conference on education to be given later this week. Much of the focus at the conference is expected to revolve around exactly what can be done about the current rate of exclusions in London schools — a big issue for Boris, who can’t afford to ignore the fact that almost 1,500 students every year are permanently excluded (expelled, for those who want to cut through the more politically correct newspeak), and approximately 53,000 are suspended.

The problem is clear, and it can only be a good thing that Boris is looking for a solution. The Guardian reports that one of the Mayor’s primary concerns is to have more black teachers in schools, in order to better represent the student population as a whole. This is perhaps an understandable response, as statistics show that students of African or Caribbean descent are three times more likely than white kids to be excluded — figures that make for disturbing reading. However, while that might help black students, is it going to have any effect on the expulsion rates for their Caucasian equivalent? Should we be focusing on solutions that help all children, rather than just a subset of the population, or is it more important to fix what is an obvious discrepancy before looking at the picture as a hole? Whichever option the education system chooses, it’s going to be a big job, but young people have always played a major part in Boris’s policies, and so we can expect the debate top be at the forefront of the media for quite some time.

Is this enough? Should Boris be doing more to help pupils,or is this a good start on which to build in the future?

Never afraid to speak his mind, Boris has once again made the headlines for daring to comment on the Carol Thatcher’s recent Golliwog comments on the BBC. However, contrary (perhaps) to expectations, he’s said that the BBC’s decision to fire her is unnecessarily harsh — which, given the furore over Sachsgate, is likely to raise more than a few eyebrows in the media. Quoth Boris:

“The way to deal with it is if someone says something a bit offensive in a green room and you’re the producer of the show and everybody else has taken umbrage and feels uncomfortable … you take that person on one side and say: ‘Listen, you’ve got to understand we’ve got to work together and you’ve got watch what you say and you’ve got to be sensitive,’ but I don’t think you fire someone. I really don’t.”

This is, perhaps understandably, a bit of a political minefield for BoJo, as many people hold the view that he’s walking on thin ice as far as London’s multicultural nature is concerned; Ken Livingstone, for example, has stepped up and noted that Boris should ‘concentrate on the job he is paid to do and stop pontificating’. However, given that the BBC has received over 2,200 complaints regarding their decision to drop Thatcher (compared to just 60 comments in agreement), the Mayor might have a better grasp on public opinion than the people baying for blood.

Is Red Ken right? Should Boris have kept his mouth closed on the subject, or is he right — and entitled — to voice his opinion on topics that don’t directly concern him? Let us know in the comments.

It’s said that if you want to get inside the mind of a General, the first place you should go is to his Colonels. With that in mind, it’s perhaps strange that the people who report directly to Boris get such little airtime and recognition, especially outside the capital itself.

However, This is London is taking steps to fix that, and has recently published a fascinating article with Boris’s Transport for London chief Peter Hendy. It’s certainly a timely piece, given the recent half-debacle over the city’s issue with snowfall, and gives a good look at the ins and outs of Boris’s transport policies.

For those not in the know, Hendy last hit the news in a big way just before Boris started his tenure as Mayor as a result of several leaked emails in which he stated that he might actively make a stand against Boris’s public transport policies — policies that would go directly against systems put in place by Red Ken and Hendy himself. Despite being widely touted for the axe as soon as BoJo got into office, however, he’s still there nine months later.

What do you think? Is Hendy doing a good job in the Transport office, or should Boris have had a bit of a reshuffle when he first arrived? Let us know in the comments.

Once again, Boris’s knack for a soundbite sums up the day’s events. Interviewed on BBC New earlier, Boris explained why the buses aren’t running, how bikes’s are a snow-bashing alternative, and how it is the right snow, but the wrong quantities. It also is a great example of Boris giving information back to the public, rather than hiding in an office making decisions. Woo – this is getting slowly back to the Boris we know!