Boris says awesome things...

Partly thanks to a campaign backed by the Evening Standard, a £3 million fund has been set up to help the victims of the recent riots in London.

The High Street Fund is designed to support small business owners trying to rebuild their livelihoods after the recent riots. According to the Standard: ‘The emergency grants – the majority are expected to be £1,000 or less, awarded on a case-by-case basis – are intended to help shopkeepers with repairs, replacing stock and getting the funds needed to start trading again.

‘Donations are constantly being received and it is now hoped that more leading companies will donate to the fund. To qualify for funding, owners will need to explain what has happened to their business, how it happened, and how assistance from the fund will help get them survive.’

Supporters so far include BP, Santander, Lloyds and Deloitte whilst Boris has also committed £500,000 from City Hall funds.

Announcing the fund, Bozza said: “I know that there are businesses that need this help and I know there are people who are willing to give, people who have been deeply moved by the sight of men and women who have got up at 5am every day to prepare their shops only to see their work trashed or torched. That is why we have set up the High Street Fund.

“I have seen at first hand businesses showing remarkable resilience and true fighting spirit. However, it is no secret that many high streets in the capital are still suffering. Small businesses need urgent help to repair damage and get goods back on the shelves and the High Street Fund will help to do just that.”

It is expected that the first grants will be awarded as early as next week.

You should have seen the one that got away, officer. It was this big....

As the clean-up and fallout from the recent London riots continues, Bozza was back on the streets today to see how the jolly old people of the capital are holding up.

This time he was in Woolwich where he commented that ‘business was bouncing back’ and then signed some bunting (no, us neither).

The Mayor chirped: “It was good to meet both shoppers and traders and frontline police officers here in Woolwich today.

“I’ve heard a lot of praise for both the police and the council for all they’ve been doing since the riots and it’s really good to see how quickly the area is recovering.”

And, according to Southwark News‘ Twitter feed, the people of Woolwich ‘seemed pleased to see him in out patch’. (Their patch? What – London?)

Boris then went to visit other regeneration projects in the area, including the site of a new Tesco store (which could be, as far as we can tell, any street corner these days. Armando Iannucci was right when he recorded this for the excellent BBC series Time Trumpet…)

The Mayor also visited the site of the Woolwich Arsenal Crossrail Station. “I’ve also been able to see a lot of the really good work going on here in Woolwich – from the new squares to the Crossrail site – there’s no doubt that Woolwich is definitely on the up.”

So, Ken Livingstone is back and once again challenging to be Mayor of London. The man who has enjoyed more comebacks than Status Quo is set to race Boris to be Mayor in the 2012 election, although comments he has made this week might not do him any favours.

Ken appears to have fallen foul of something called Godwin’s Law. The law broadly states that given enough time in any discussion, regardless of topic, someone inevitably brings up Hitler or the Nazis in order to make their point.

A popular corollary to Godwin’s law is that once such a comparison is made, the debate is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress. And that’s what Ken appears to have fallen foul of this week.

The 66 year old former Mayor told Total Politics magazine that next year’s contest for London’s top job was “a simple choice between good and evil”.

Ken said: “I don’t think it’s been so clear since the great struggle between Churchill and Hitler. The people that don’t vote for me will be weighed in the balance, come Judgement Day.”

Sigh.

The Sun reports that Livingstone’s aides say his comments were light-hearted and meant in “a spirit of good humour”. (Oh yes. All the best comic lines from dinner parties and social events involve comparing people to Hitler and telling people that don’t agree with you that they are likely to be condemned to eternity in hell.)

Critics claimed they were in “incredibly poor taste” after last week’s riots and showed him to be “a nasty, divisive character”.

Tory MP Gavin Barwell said: “Londoners need a mayor who will unite our city. It is crass even by Ken’s standards…”

One of the political ramifications of the recent London riots has been the clash between Boris and his Government colleagues over planned police cuts.

The Mayor launched ‘an emphatic defence of his call for the Government to reverse planned police cuts’ in the Mail on Sunday , revealing that ‘crime has plummeted in the capital since the streets were flooded with officers.’

In an interview with the newspaper, Boris said: “Muggings and knife crime are down. The key lesson is that police numbers have got to be kept high, and people want to see robust policing.”

Boris also said: “In the current circumstances, going into the Olympics, with London’s population growing, we must keep policing at the appropriate level, which means 32,500 officers.”

However, the Mayor’s comments were dismissed by Chancellor George Osborne who has ruled out a change to the planned cuts despite the riots. Osborne said the Government was committed to reforms aimed at trimming £2 billion from the annual budgets of forces in England and Wales.

Boris said that the police swoops following riots had ‘hoovered up’ known offenders and he also called for the rioters to be ostracised by society.

“About 69 per cent had previous convictions. So you are looking at a lot of crims,” he said. “It is very important that good comes out of these events. A big fat rock was lifted up to show the creepy crawlies underneath.  We are going to shine a torch on them and we are going to get rid of them.

“People want to see people handed in. Society must ostracise these people. We ask parents and people who know looters to tender that information to the police. They can expect the knock in the night, to be ostracised, and to be turned into lepers by the rest of society.”

It’s one of the major problems of modern life. Forget losing your trolley pound at the entrance to Asda, forget having a faulty cork on your pinot grigio and forget your Sky Plus not recording an episode of Midsomer Murders.

The team here at Boriswatch Towers have, like you, often been stuck on a London bus and cursed the fact that there’s no high speed wireless broadband so we can do our online banking from the double decker of the number 90.

Well, all that might be about to change. For people across the capital who want to play Angry Birds on the way to work, Transport for London have announced that moves are well under way to install wi-fi on all of London’s buses.

The news comes after the announcement that Transport for London will install Wi-Fi hotspots in as many as 120 Underground stations by June 2012.

And, if being able to by your groceries whilst hurtling down Knightsbridge isn’t enough, bus passengers will also soon benefit from new smartphone applications. Something called ‘bus countdown datasets’ are being released which, in conjunction with an app called iBus (obviously), will rigger messages inside buses about what the next stop is.

Kulveer Ranger from Transport for London explains: “There are 6.5 million journeys a day in London on 8,000 buses. The bus countdown datasets that we are pushing through will become immensely powerful in terms of real time data for transport.”

Once the data is released, application developers will be able to build apps that accurately tell you when your bus will arrive, for example.

So, you’ll know when your bus is coming and you’ll be able to log-on whilst on the top deck. Sounds far too organised to us…

"Help! I'm being kidnapped by these two men in suits."

Mumblings over David Cameron’s relationship with alleged voicemail interceptor Andy Coulson and George Osborne’s continued, well, Osborne-ness have left a bit of a void in the Conservative Party.  Who could possibly step into the breach and take the party forward in the event of Cameron’s tenure at number 10 coming to an end…?

Well, after his recent successes regarding the Olympics and his popular move to abolish the 50p tax rate has made Boris the favourite.  His star is high both with his party and the public, and it is conceivable that the Mayor could end up running more than just the capital.

“There are at least 20 constituencies within an hour’s drive of London with chairmen who would fall over themselves to turf out a sitting Tory MP and offer Boris a seat,” says one senior Conservative. “Boris could get back to the Commons tomorrow.”

However, what about the problems that have forced Boris’ resignation in the past? The scandals about his private life? The blunders? And what if he loses the 2012 Mayoral election to his old nemesis Ken Livingstone?

Apparently, none of this will matter. According to a veteran Conservative MP: “…Stuff bounces off him. He goes through scandals, people know what he’s been up to, and they accept it. He’s an unstoppable force.”

Boris is the 4/1 favourite to be the next Conservative leader with a major bookie, with William Hague and George Osborne considered next most likely. it’s also 16/1 that Boris will end up being Prime Minister at some point in his political career. Well, with popularity like this, who’d back against him? We have a bob or two on that outcome at Boriswatch HQ….

But more than that, stuff bounces off him. He goes through scandals, people know what he’s been up to, and they accept it. He’s an unstoppable force.”

There’s a lot of things that Boris wants to get rid of in London. Cars, congestion, the 50p tax rate and FIFA officials, to name but four. Now, though, the Mayor is on a crusade to eliminate another poisonous scourge of our society.

Carrier bags.

The Daily Mail reports that Bozza’s team has already held talks with council leaders and the London Waste and Recycling Board to work out the best way to reduce plastic bag numbers. The plan is to ban free plastic bags along the lines of a scheme soon to be launched in Wales.

“Plastics bags are an unnecessary scourge on our environment and I’ve set out my ambition to make London a plastic bag free city,” said the Mayor.

“We are planning a renewed campaign to help do so ahead of 2012, when the eyes of the world are on us.

“Whilst London doesn’t have the powers to implement bans or charges, I am keenly following Wales’s efforts to solve this problem.”

In 2007, Boris began his crusade against the humble Asda bag which is used ‘for about 20 minutes’. “The bag is then discarded and takes about 400 years to biodegrade, and the result is that we are slowly sprinkling the planet with the crinkly detritus of our consumption.”

Experts estimate that the move would cut the number of bags by a staggering 90 per cent. What we’d use in the waste paper bins in Boriswatch HQ is as yet unconfirmed…

One of the lasting legacies that Boris has left to London is the cycle hire scheme – or the Boris Bikes as they will undoubtedly forever be known.

And, the Mayor was at the Westfield Centre in Shepherd’s Bush to celebrate the first anniversary of the scheme which has been a resounding success. To stage a useful photo opportunity, Bozza asked Samantha Brown of Clapham to join him in a short rise on a Boris bike through the centre.

Sadly, the 26 year old promptly fell off the bike.

“That was the most embarrassing moment of my life,” she said. “I haven’t ridden a bike for three years…”

The Mayor was on hand to check that the shopper was OK before continuing the anniversary celebrations with the news that Barclays pledging an additional £25 million to the project and extending their sponsorship until 2018.

This money will be used to fund the extension of the network through Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, and Kensington and Chelsea. The Mayor was obviously delighted, saying: “[It is a] testament to the huge impact of Barclays Cycle Hire and to the rapidly increasing popularity of pedal power in London that I can announce we are now planning to swathe a huge chunk of the west of our city with our beautiful blue bikes.”