Boris says awesome things...

We’ve all put up some sparkly lights for a special occasion.  Whether it’s some festive decoration for Christmas or the giant neon Boris face we attached to the side of Boriswatch HQ after his election win in 2008, nothing says ‘celebration’ more than a wanton misuse of electricity.

And now, London is getting in on the act.  Boris has announced that a planning application is about to be made to attach giant illuminated Olympic rings to Tower Bridge for the duration of the Games next year. The rings will be funded through a deal between the Mayor, City of London and London 2012 sustainability partners GE and EDF – who have both gained sponsorship recognition for the Games.

Stuart Fraser, policy chairman of the City of London bridge owner, said: “This proposal will help improve London’s global image – not just in 2012 – but for the next 25 years.”

There are also plans to bathe the famous monument in gold, silver or bronze light depending on specific British medal successes during the 2012 Games, allowing the city, as Bozza says, to ‘sparkle with special moments’…

Dealing with a high profile blonde with a penchant for saying and doing daft things should come as second nature to Peter Andre, which is why the singer was so at home with Boris this week.

The pair – an unlikely combination if ever there was one – joined forces to promote a literary project for young children. The Guardian reports that ‘the Mayor of London and the Mysterious Girl singer took turns to read passages from Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo to a group of schoolchildren at the launch of the scheme, run by the National Literacy Trust.’

Boris said: “said: “This is incredibly important because we are trying to encourage volunteers to come and help parents to get the confidence they need to read to their kids. The difference needs to be made at a very early stage in their lives. Once you’ve cracked reading at an early age then you’ll never look back, but if you don’t get it then it’s very hard to recover. That’s why it’s very important to crack it early on.”

And, in ‘The Pope’s a Catholic’ news, Andre commented: “Reading to your children is very important.”

Bozza hopes to encourage parents to read to their children on a regular basis and will try to sign up 500 volunteers from across the capital to work with more than 2,000 families in the city.

They may be two of the Conservative Party’s most well known names, but there may be no Christmas card exchange this year between Justice Secretary Ken Clarke and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Bozza has attacked Ken’s plans to introduce more ‘soft justice’ consisting of more fines, community service and community based rehab. In a piece for the Sun, Boris said: “Soft is the perfect way to enjoy French cheese, but not how we should approach punishing criminals.” [As a point of order, the Mayor has clearly never enjoyed a Comte, which is a pressed cheese and not to be served soft - Boriswatch Dairy Editor]

He continued: “Prison shouldn’t be about sitting on a mattress, playing video games and networking with seasoned criminals. Prison should change people and if it doesn’t they shouldn’t be let out.”

Oooh. Tough words, and not likely to go down well in Clarke’s office….

“I’ve taken a different approach to the revolving door of offending with the prison wing – Heron – I opened at Feltham Young Offenders Institute,” says the Mayor.

“On the wing we’ve managed to halve that national youth re-offending rate of 78 per cent by allocating each prisoner an individual “motivational”member of staff who helps them sort out their lives during their jail term, then works with them for a year after their release.

“The prisoners are pushed into further education, helped to apply for jobs and we’ve even got a few into university. If the boys start to commit crimes again, we don’t pay the staff. It’s payment by results. And it’s a powerful incentive. It’s not soft but sensible.

“I’m now pushing for a similar approach to be adopted more widely across councils, where we can offer payments to agencies who help keep local criminals on the straight and narrow. In short, local councils, police and the criminal justice system need to work hand in hand to stop the spread of people gearing towards a life time of criminality – career criminals.

“It’s the only way we can stop the revolving door of criminality.”

The ‘revolving door of criminality’ eh? Better than the ‘automatic door of misbehaviour’, I suppose.

Boris concludes with a call to action. “Let’s all get behind a solution that can really turn around the lives of those entrenched in crime: ‘No rehab, no release.’”

The imminent return of the drachma could be a step closer this week after it was revealed that Greece actually needs in the region of 78.4 gazillion euros in order to solve its financial crisis.

Whilst the eurozone politicians scratch their heads and wonder how they can help the ailing country (surely they can remortgage the Acropolis?) others think it’s time to stop bailing Greece out and let them sink under the weight of their debts.

Taking a break from his job of running London, Boris has decided to poke his nose into international affairs. “For years, European governments have been saying that it would be insane and inconceivable for a country to leave the euro,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph. “But this second option is now all but inevitable, and the sooner it happens the better.”

Boris also called the Greeks ‘reckless’ and, according to the Guardian, ‘warned the coalition government that Britain should not be expected to contribute to any new bailout of the crisis-stricken Greek economy.’

Running up huge debts and bankrupting the country to host the Olympic Games such as Athens did in 2000? Irresponsible and reckless. We’d never be as stupid to do something like that….

Eh? Oh.

It’s been a bit dry of late, which is creating lots of problems for the team here at Boriswatch Towers. Our ornamental roof garden at HQ is looking the worse for wear, and if our poinsettias don’t get a good drink in the next few days then I can only guess at what might happen.

Never fear, though, as Boris has a canny wheeze to solve the drought problems affecting the South East. The Mayor thinks it would be a grand idea to build a giant canal to divert water from Scotland (where they have a lot of rain) to irrigate the giant gardens of the South.

“Since Scotland and Wales are on the whole higher up than England, it is surely time to do the obvious: use the principle of gravity to bring surplus rain from the mountains to irrigate and refresh the breadbasket of the country in the South and East.â€?

[You can see why Alex the Salmon wants independence. First we pilfer the oil and now we're after the water - McBoriswatch]

The Herald is happy to let Bozza have the water. “My local coffee shop sells water for £1.25 per 500ml. I think this is a good price for Boris and the Scottish Government should pencil him in for about 50 million bottles….”

We’ve all been the butt of jokes at some point in our lives, haven’t we? I remember the Boriswatch Christmas Party in 2008 when one of our senior members of staff told a series of increasingly lewd jokes about the alleged nighttime exploits of [Snip - Boriwswatch Superinjuction Consultant] in front of the entire office.

And now, the Prime Minister has decided it’s acceptable to crack ‘funnies’ about two of his best known colleagues. At the Conservative Party Summer Ball (ooh, that sounds like fun, doesn’t it?), the PM decided to pick on Bozza and Ken Clarke in his speech.

At the event at the Natural History Museum, Cameron apparently looked around theatrically to see if he could spot the Mayor in the audience. “I was getting worried I hadn’t seen Boris,â€? he said, smirking. “I kept asking, ‘Has any one seen Boris?’ But then I learnt he had popped off to the museum’s Sexual Nature exhibition. Now, that’s no surprise, is it?â€?

Oooh. Get you, PM.

On a gin-fuelled roll [Allegedly - Boriswatch Lawyer] the PM then took aim at another senior Tory. “It says something about how far we have come as a party that we can hold our summer event among all these dinosaurs in this museum and not give a toss what the press say, eh?� he said, looking at Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke.

Next week, Cameron will join Andy Parsons’ team on Mock the Week, before appearing with Jason Manford on 8 Out of 10 Cats.

So, unless you’ve had a large sum of cash deducted from your bank account this week, it looks like you’ve failed in your bid to secure tickets for the 2012 Olympics in London.

Indeed, the Mayor awoke this week to find his bank balance in good order having spectacularly failed to secure any of the tickets he bid for in the ballot.  And, in true British style, he revelled in the fact that he was a loser (if there was an Olympic medal for ‘gallant losers’ we’d win that every Games.)

“I am proud to be British. No other country or culture in the world would have a situation where the mayor of the host city goes into a ballot for tickets for his family and gets rejected,” he said.

However, many have been critical of the ticket allocation process.  Stephen Hunt, an insolvency practitioner from Hertfordshire, briefly became Britain’s Most Hated Man this week when it was revealed that he’d secured £11,000 worth of tickets whilst a quarter of a million people walked away empty handed.

Despite being ‘cheesed off’ with the outcome, the Mayor was pleased with the demand for tickets and pointed out that there would be further chances to buy tickets in July and in November.

However, with some of Britain’s best medal hopes also missing out on tickets – meaning for example that cyclist Bradley Wiggins will have to deny either his wife or one of his children from seeing him in action – there have been criticisms of the system which appeared to favour wealthier applicants who could afford to bid for a higher number of tickets.

Organisers defended the allocation, however, with 2012 tickets boss Chris Townsend saying that leftovers from the allocation would be available to first-round applicants on a first come first served basis.

He said: “We have received a fantastic response from the public across all sports, including the less mainstream sports.

“We’ll be releasing further information once the process is complete after June 10.�

There’s been a bit of a stand-off between Boris and the Americans for some time now. You see, the Yanks owe London £5.5 million in unpaid congestion charges, a fee which most other embassies pay without fuss. However, the Americans believe the Congestion Charge to be a ‘tax’ and so they argue that they’re exempt from paying it.

It was handy, therefore, that Boris got the chance this week got to ask the main man to raise the issue. The Mayor met Barack Obama as part of his visit to the UK and the Guardian reports that ‘Boris last night kept his promise to ask the US president to get his embassy to cough up that £5.5 million its diplomats owe we Londoners. Full details of Obama’s response have yet to be extracted, but I was told that he remembered Boris writing in support of his candidacy for the White House.’

While the Americans maintain that they don’t have to pay a local tax, Boris apparently ‘told Obama that UK diplomats pay bridge tolls in the US, so his guys in London should pay our C-charge in the same spirit.’

Quite whether anything will come of it is debatable, but the newspaper was pleased that Bozza had been brave enough to tackle the issue. ‘Visitors who avoid paying it are being mean and ungracious guests’ reported the Guardian, although you’d have to think they weren’t *exactly* the words that Bozza used to address the President….

Imagine heading onto a leading supermarket website and filling your trolley with goods.  You pay your £150…and then wait.

Several weeks later, a lorry appears outside your house with a boxful of red cabbages, a jar of Branston pickle and twenty four cans of Apple Tango.

In a nutshell, this is what has happened to millions of people who have applied for tickets for the 2012 Olympics.  Payments are starting to come out of people’s bank and credit card accounts without any indication of exactly what you’re going to get for your money.  It’s a situation that is perplexing the Mayor, who has described the ticketing process as ‘a bit peculiar’.

“I think it is a bit peculiar that it’s that way around. It’s an administrative oddity. But it’s not the end of the world … I don’t think it’s particularly heinous that it’s that way around,” Boris said, appearing before the culture, media and sport select committee.

“The critical thing on the tickets has been managing people’s sense of disappointment or otherwise. There aren’t that many tickets available but there are plenty of events that are undersubscribed, so it is possible to come back for a second bite of the cherry.”

We’ve all faced the problem of unsold seats for a major event.

Just last year, the Boriswatch HQ Amateur Dramatic society’s performance of HMS Pinafore was scheduled to start in half an hour and we had two rows of empty seats near the front of the village hall. The eyes of the world (well, the eyes of the local rag and the village) were on us and we had to suffer the embarrassment of not filling our venue for our event.

So, to avoid this happening at next year’s Olympic Games, Boris has a plan. Yes, they’re going to bus kids to venues in order that it looks like the whole nation is feverishly excited about handball, rhythmic gymnastics and water polo.

“There will be an opportunity, we think, for kids to get into events if they are under-subscribed and if the (Olympic) Park needs filling up on the day,” said the Mayor. “You remember in Beijing they had a problem with stadiums and venues that looked a bit empty, we’re obviously thinking of ways to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

And, to be fair, it’s a win-win. The Olympics looks like it’s packed and kids get to avoid double geography with Mr Walters in favour of watching some badminton.

Bozza also denied that kids would only get tickets for unpopular and boring events. “People have the chance, perhaps not a huge chance in each case, of seeing Usain Bolt run or whatever it happens to be,” he added.

In addition, organisers have announced that 125,000 tickets, including for showcase events involving sprint champion Usain Bolt, will be distributed to London schools that had signed up to the ‘Get Set’ programme. A further 50,000 tickets are available to schools outside London.