Boris says awesome things...

Basketball is one of those daft sports that only the Americans could invent. Big burly fellas strolling around bouncing an oversized ball whilst sporting the sort of vest your grandpa would wear on Skegness beach.

And, being an American sport, their teams play each other about 400 times every year, before a complicated play-off system and finals leads to a two day break before they scrap over which new players to sign and the whole merry-go-round begins again. So, hosting a couple of NBA matches in London isn’t a big deal for them – although it is more of a big deal for Boris who got to show off his basketball skills this week (i.e. none).

Boris said: “The NBA returning to the capital is fantastic news. I am committed to the 2012 Games leaving a genuine legacy of increased participation in sport, especially amongst young people.

“The NBA has generated enormous excitement from all its games in London and giving youngsters the chance to hone their skills with its basketball week will help us towards the slam dunk we are aiming for.”

Oh dear. He clearly knows one basketball term, doesn’t he? Anyway – if you’re into this glorified netball nonsense, there are lots of events going on in London this week before the Nets play the Raptors (it sounds like something from Harry Potter) at the O2 on Friday and Saturday.

And we were worried that the Olympic Games in London were going to be a last minute, panicked shambles. This week saw the official opening of the 2012 velodrome (a full 18 months before the Olympics begins) under budget and ahead of schedule.

Boris was effusive in his praise for the 6,000 seater venue. “This is just a breathtakingly beautiful piece of architecture and quite brilliant achievement of British engineering,â€? he said. “The Olympic Delivery Authority has played an absolute blinder. This place will live and live, 60 years 70 years and more.

“The velodrome will become a place of pilgrimage for cyclists and would-be cyclists to be inspired. It will be the crucible where future champions are forged. My spirits rise every time I visit the Olympic Park and venues like this. This is the most positive thing going on in Europe at the moment, an unambiguously successful and productive project.”

The Daily Telegraph reports that ‘the 250-metre piste consists of 54km of Siberian pine shipped in from Archangel and shaped by specialist craftsmen at a German sawmill, while 360,000 nails have been required to fix the track’.

Lord Coe, the chairman of the Olympics organising committee said the velodrome was “magnificent” whilst British cycling performance director Dave Brailsford said “They have taken the best bits of all the best velodromes around the world and the result is fantastic.”

“It has been put together by people who really care about cycling and they have also taken the trouble to consult us along the way. One of the other things I like is that it is just 300 metres from the Olympic village. It’s a facility the nation can be very proud of.”

Maybe he’s just trying to look clever. Or maybe it’s a plot to bamboozle his own Government by making statements that don’t mesh with their policy, but containing words they don’t understand?

Either way, Bozza has been munching on the dictionary again. This time the Mayor has called for a ‘greater sense of euergetism’, urging the super-rich to pay for schools and hospitals to stop the gap between rich and poor in recession-hit Britain becoming as big as it was in Victorian days.

Boris called on multi-millionaires and billionaires to follow the example of Victorian Britain where wealthy individuals viewed it as their duty to fund important civic projects. “We’re entering a very weird political climate, and we have been for 18 months or two years,” he said.

“We’re in danger of becoming really averse to wealth creation and hostile to wealth creators as a country, no matter whether they’re bankers or anybody else. I have to say that alarms me.

“Of course I want to see bankers doing their bit. I want to see a much greater sense of euergetism.

“It’s incredible that you’ve got the gap between rich and poor opening up now in a way we haven’t seen since the Victorian epoch. But what we haven’t got that the Victorians did have is that sense of duty on the part of the real titanic figures who are making money.

“In those times people really thought it was disgraceful not to endow schools and hospitals and libraries.”

And, just in case you’re not classically trained like the staff here at Boriswatch Towers, The Oxford Companion To Classical Civilisation says that euergetism is ‘a socio-political phenomenon of voluntary gift-giving to the ancient community embracing the beneficence of Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors, whose subjects saw such philanthropy as a cardinal virtue of rulers’.

So there you go. Euergetism it is, then.

In a development that’s bound to infuriate the presenters of Top Gear, London will soon have more electric car charging points than petrol stations.

Bozza is trying to make London the electric transport capital of the world, and Londoners will start to see branded Source London charging points strategically located across the city from this spring. At least 1,300 charging points will be installed by the end of 2013 in public locations and streets across the capital.

Boris said: “One of the biggest hurdles to greater use of electric vehicles has been a lack of charging points. But now Londoners will see Source London points popping up in locations all over the Capital. By giving increasing numbers of drivers the confidence in electric vehicle technology we will make a considerable contribution to improving our air quality and cutting carbon emissions.”

The Mayor is urging drivers to take advantage of Government grants and to purchase an electric car, safe in the knowledge that there will be plenty of places that you can plug it in whilst you’re doing your shopping or having a skinny mochalattechino….

We at Boriswatch Towers are, of course, as interested in what Bozza’s been up to as anyone else. Occasionally, however, we read an article about his latest plans or proposals which is so interminably dull even we want to weep.

This article in the Guardian is such a piece.

It’s all about Bozza’s decision to freeze police recruitment in London. The Mayor has found £42million in cash which is to be redirected to Scotland Yard to protect frontline police services. “In London we will buck the trend and have more uniformed fully warranted police officers than when I was elected,” said the Mayor.

“By the end of my mayoralty, we will have a target of 32,510 full-time warranted police officers – significantly more than I inherited.

“We are also rightly protecting safer neighbourhood teams, who are a superb asset to fighting local crime. My main objective remains to protect frontline services, and this funding will be an enormous boost to keeping our streets safe and having more uniformed police officers on patrol.”

In principle, this looks great. However, the Guardian‘s article then spends ABOUT TEN PAGES arguing over specifically how many police officers there will actually be in the capital as a result of this cash. We’ll spare you the details, but the article includes the following claims:

• 32,510 full-time officers will be in posts next year

• The draft budget presented to the assembly said the Metropolitan police was originally expected to lose 1,106 posts in 2011-12, but that this figure had been revised to 581

• City Hall said the current overall number of Met officers stood at 31,336

• a table listing the number of police officers, published by the Metropolitan police authority, suggests it is 32,502

• In the Policing Plan 2010-13, the budgeted number for full-time warranted police officers for 2010-11 was 33,091

• Opposition assembly members point to police projections showing that the number of officers is likely to fall to 31,913 by April 2013, and to 31,800 the following year

Please don’t read the whole article for the sake of your sanity. Trust us when we say that “there may be some more police officers in London after this announcement.  Or there won’t.”

Eh up – Bozza’s been at the water antics again….

Remember a year or two back where he had a bit of an incident in a river? Well, according to the Daily Mirror, the Mayor’s been involved in some further water peril. Apparently, whilst Bozza was on holiday on a private island near Tanzania last year, he was swept out to sea whilst swimming. Whilst taking a morning dip with his wife Marina, worried staff had to send out a boat to pick the Mayor after he underestimated the strength of the currents.

According to the Daily Mirror, “One worker, who asked not to be named, revealed: ‘They didn’t realise how strong the current was. They went out a bit too far and he was getting carried away so we had to launch a motor boat to get them.’”

When he made it ashore after being rescued, he tried to laugh off the drama, declaring: “That’s one for the memoirs.�

(Quite why this information has only come out now, we’re not quite sure. Perhaps Ken Livingstone is after the votes of London lifeguards and health and safety officials?)

In a sparkling display of understatement, a friend of the Mayor said: “He’s not the strongest swimmer.�

How do you tell the difference between a dead cat on the motorway and a dead banker on the motorway? The cat has got skid marks around it….”

It’s not the way that you normally expect Paxman to open an interview. However, as part of Newsnight‘s Rich Night this week, Bozza was asked about Vince Cable’s banker jokes and the role of bankers in the British economy as a whole.

It’s easy to be harsh on the banking community and, as Bozza says, there is “a strong public desire for retribution”. The public “see these masters of the universe, apparently completely unpunished.”

But, yet again, Boris seems to be the only person who has a balanced and sensible view about the banking system. “When you’re facing that kind of visceral public feeling you have to be very very careful that you don’t take steps that could do damage to the long term future of the UK economy.

“There’s no evidence that I’ve seen about getting these guys to vamoose off to Zurich or to deliquesce – liquidate themselves – that it will improve manufacturing in this country. What I’m saying is by shrinking financial services or attacking bankers I don’t think that you’re necessarily going to boost other parts of the UK economy.”

(Incidentally, when referring to ‘masters of the universe’, is Bozza reminding us that the character of He-Man appears to have been modelled on himself in his younger years….?)