Bozza praised supermarket chain Sainsbury’s this week after the company announced it was fitting electric car charging points at all of its London stores.

Apparently, an hour and a half  plugged into the charge point will get a battery to around 80% full, meaning a car will be able to travel half a mile fifty miles.

Boris said “I warmly welcome the arrival of Sainsbury’s network… which will put half of all London’s population within three miles of a charge point.” The scheme is designed to tie-in with Boris’ plan to make London the ‘electric vehicle capital of Europe’.

Reports that the charging devices are merely rolled oats to feed the hamsters powering these so-called ‘electric’ cars have been strenuously denied.

Franny Armstrong, climate change activist and director of the film The Age Of Stupid was walking home in Camden on Monday evening when she was surrounded by a group of hoodie-wearing young girls who pushed her against a car, one holding an iron bar.

“I was texting on my phone so didn’t notice the girls until they pushed me against the car, quite hard,” she said. “I noticed that one had an iron bar in her hand. It was very frightening. At that moment a man cycled past and I called out for help.”

The passing cyclist turned out to be none other than the Mayor himself.

“He said to the girls: ‘What do you think you are doing?’ He picked up the iron bar, called after the girls and cycled after them. He returned a few minutes later and walked me home.” Apparently Boris called the girls ‘oiks’ (a much underused word) before insisting he walked the film director back home.

Armstrong called Johnson “my knight on a shining bicycle”.

The film director admitted she did not agree with Johnson’s politics, and had voted for his rival Ken Livingstone in the mayoral elections, but added: “If you find yourself down a dark alleyway and in trouble I think Boris would be of more use than Ken.”

When Bozza promised to tackle youth crime, this wasn’t exactly what we were expecting….

(thanks to the many that sent this story in, including “JimBob”, Paul D and Ben Royston, who called Boris a “bloody good bloke”).

Boris was on ‘civic dignitary’ duty today performing the opening ceremony for London’s newest £5million investment.  A new museum, or arts centre, perhaps?  Something for the Olympics, maybe?

No.  Today, Bozza opened a pedestrian crossing.

Modelled on the famous (and chaotic) Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, the Mayor opened the Oxford Circus road crossing where pedestrians now get 30 seconds to cross Oxford or Regent Street in any direction whilst all the traffic is stopped.

The ‘Pedestrian Scramble” (that is, alarmingly, its official name, not some nickname awarded it by people who don’t know what is going on) is aimed at reducing pedestrian congestion at this busy junction. We at Boriswatch Towers are slightly concerned about this new crossing, considering the Mayor’s endorsement was “We are very confident that this will work well – once people have got the hang of it.” (Reading between the lines, ‘not getting the hang of it’ sounds rather like being ‘run over by a bus’, which would be something of a concern.)

A local police community support officer also had their doubts.  “…It’s based on the assumption that everyone’s going to act intelligently, which is quite an assumption to make.” Especially in the centre of London, presumably.

One man unlikely to be including the Mayor on his Christmas Card list this year is ex-Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair.

With no reference to his memoirs that have just gone on sale for the Christmas market in all good bookshops (and some bad ones), Blair has been giving various interviews in which he reaffirms his belief that he was forced out of his job for no other reason than for Boris to show his political muscle.

“What happened has some dangerous implications for the future of policing,” Blair told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. “There is a system in which chief officers are appointed [and] they are operationally independent. If, at a stroke, they can be removed then the system has been changed. If you like, an external species has been brought into the indigenous situation.”

Sir Ian said Mr Johnson had effectively introduced the US situation where “chief officers come and go at the behest of the mayor”.

Blair also told the Guardian “It was a way of stamping his authority on the mayoralty. his number two, Kit Malthouse, had been critical before they came to power of my approach to policing, but the main reason was [Boris] saying, ‘I am in charge.’ He had discussed at the Conservative party conference, a month before, the need for the mayor to have hire-and-fire powers over the commissioner, and I can think of no other reason than that. He certainly never gave one.”

The Mayor’s spokesman wouldn’t really comment.  “We now have new leadership in place and the Met has moved on.” Apparently….