Boris' first week

ConservativeHome's favourite seven moments:

The London-New York partnership.  Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, was not an admirer of Ken Livingstone but there was real warmth during yesterday's meeting with Boris Johnson at City Hall.  Both men are promising lots of co-operation and a new exchange programme, of ideas and personnel.  This will benefit Boris most - at least at first.  It's vital that Boris Johnson shows that the Conservatives' largest governing job in a decade is handled well.  The import of know-how from Team Bloomberg will help that task significantly.

The appointment of Ray Lewis as Deputy Mayor with responsibility for youth and opportunity.  Ray Lewis, brought first into the Conservative arena by Iain Duncan Smith, takes a very different approach to youth crime and opportunity than the Left.  Ray is a man who believes in tough love.  Melanie Phillips is a big fan, too.  Ray Lewis will oversee one hundred new Saturday clubs, aimed at helping young people off the conveyor belt to crime.

From 1st June there'll be an alcohol ban on London's buses and tubes.  In the week that cannabis rules were also toughened The Telegraph saw this as a defeat for social liberalism.  But an unlikely alliance of Bob Crowe and Guido Fawkes were unimpressed.  This won't be an easy policy to implement but in appointing the former BBC journalist Guto Harri as his communications chief, Boris will have first class advice on strategic presentation.

A full audit of spending at City Hall. When we had a vote of ConservativeHome readers on Thursday night this was your favourite move of the week.  Patience Wheatcroft, former Times Business Editor, and Stephen Greenhalgh, tax-cutting leader of Hammersmith & Fulham Council, have the job of auditing London's finances.  Earlier this week David Cameron noted that Conservative councils were more likely to be re-elected if they had kept council tax down.  Let's hope that Boris finds a way of delivering the same kind of financial discipline that we've seen from Conservatives in Hammersmith, Wandsworth and Westminster.  The large numbers of serving or previous Westminster councillors in his inner team suggests that Boris hopes so, too.

Sacking the CEO and Chairman of the London Development Agency.  Enough said.

A more co-operative relationship with London's boroughs. Ken Livingstone could hardly hide his disdain for London's councils - particularly the outer boroughs.  Boris Johnson has already sat down with borough leaders and appointed Cllr Ian Clement as his liaison with them.

And finally... Boris cancelled Ken Livingstone's daily order of the Morning Star.  Ken Livingstone actually ordered forty copies of the Communist Party newspaper at London taxpayers' expense (see Iain Dale).  There'll be many more left-wing causes that need to be defunded over coming weeks.

Overall: A very good start. As well as Boris himself, credit must go to James McGrath and Nicholas Boles as the top aides to the new Mayor.  And isn't it great to be in government again!?

Comments

[Tom FD]

Bloomberg does strike a nice contrast with... ahem... Chavez.

[Tony Makara]

I must admit that I buy all the political journals when I see them at the vendor, including the Morning Star every now and then. It always strikes me as bizarre how the Morning Star gives so much coverage to the millionaires playground that is the premier league, quite a contrast with the bottomless begging-bowl that is the Star's 'fighting fund' Boris was certainly right to cancel Ken's subscription, if we wish to indulge ourselves in reading news with a historical materialistic slant then we should do so out of our own pockets and not be milking the London taxpayer. I've been very impressed with the Boris effect so far and feel this is just the beginning of the real change that London needs.

[Yarmouth Tory]

All in all a very impressive start. I think that the doom mongers who have been predicting Boris would be a disaster have not realised two important points :-
Firstly that the party had planned for this moment, and that the quality of the team around him looks like it will be first class. Some have said Boris would fail because he is no good at micro managing - I do not know whether this is true or not, but it is becoming apparent that even if this is the case he has the talent around him for this not to effect overall performance as he certainly has the required skills to be a great team leader!
Secondly we have been out of power for so long that our people are really up for this in a big way. The party infrastructure has also been modernised and is now operating to a very high level - we saw this in the local elections. The support mechanisms are there to ensure he will not fail.
With regards to the cancelling of the prescription to the Morning Star, all good Tories know that if you take care of the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves !
Well done Boris and team, a great start !!

[IRJMilne]

No more copies of Pravda (aka The Londoner)!

[Chad Noble]

Not bad at all.

Well, except for the bonkers alcohol ban, but we can watch that one unravelling when the first person is stabbed for asking a lout to stop drinking or is stabbed by a sober lout who doesn't have a beer on them at all...

Then people will realise that if you ban all things louts do in an attempt to stop them being louts, rather than simply stop their loutish behaviour, then you will have to ban everything.

[snegchui]

Yes I am glad Boris won, and I am glad he seems to be making some good choices in his team selection. Most important, to me, is his sense of including all and playing down party differences.
I really support the alcohol ban, all this talk of violence and stabbing, it seems to underline an assumption of a right to assault and stab people who point out anti-social behaviour. The assumption of a right to kick and beat those who don't want people urinating in their toiletless tube carriages or be knocked down by reckless cyclists on the pavement has to change. The "right" to carry knives and guns has to be challenged and exposed for what it is, a complete lack of respect and empathy for other human beings.
An idea that Team Boris may like to look at is the monitoring of London Public Projects, as it is done now in India on some big Govt construction projects. Whether it was just carelessness or deliberate fraud, this kind of service may have stopped the furore over LDA fund disbursements. "(In India) Last October (2006) a new right-to-information law went into effect requiring both central and state governments to divulge information about contracts, hiring, and expenditures to any citizen who requests it....To minimize "leakage," the TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) software tracks every expenditure—and makes all of the information available real-time on a Web site accessible to anyone." The idea is people can visit the website, see what has been spent and report any anomalies between that figure and what they can see actually happening in their local neighbourhood.

[Keir Gravil]

Why are people so bothered about the alcohol ban? You must be pretty desperate if you want to drink on a bus or a train, why can't you stick to pubs and clubs. These, I think, are much more enjoyable places to have a drink than the back seat of a bus. They also said 'who is going to police this?' I take it no one has ever heard of the British Transport Police?

[asquith]

"why can't you stick to pubs and clubs"

Because they don't want to.

And you and your fellow authoritarians have no right to stop them having a quiet, peaceful drink which harms no one.

http://tinyurl.com/4l4jox (beware of the language)

[asquith]

Oh, and I'm a Lib Dem, just in case you get the wrong idea. But as an economic liberal, I find myself agreeing with many Tories on a lot of issues, and this is one of them.

[Patrick Benson]

Credit to Boles, yes. Razor sharp IQ and personable. 100%. McGrath is nothing more than a baggage-handler with zero charm and questionable ability.

[Chad Noble]

"You must be pretty desperate if you want to drink on a bus or a train, why can't you stick to pubs and clubs"

Actually, for people taking long journeys (60 mins+ for example), and with little spare time, it is both social and relaxing. Not everyone has time for both the long commute home and a chance to go to the pub.

Not everyone lives in the very centre, you see, needing just a ten min tube or bus ride. As someone who has enjoyed many an enjoyable train ride back to Suffolk sharing a bottle of red with friends, I don't see why someone with a long journey on the tube should be denied the same pleasure.

But then, I know logic and a vast majority who are law-abiding non-addicts who simply enjoy a drink on a long journey will not stand in the way of uptight authoritarian puritans like yourself.

[truth squad]

personable? arrogant and petulant more like.

[David]

"I don't see why someone with a long journey on the tube should be denied the same pleasure"

No, you wouldn't would you. Presumably you'd be happy for people to shoot up or sit in the tube naked, too.

[Martin Wright]

A reasonably good start without being brilliant. I particularly like the audit of City Hall and Patience Wheatcroft's involvement. She once did a memorable piece about "rubbish jobs" (the sort of things you see advertised in the Guardian) so I hope we'll soon be scrapping all the "outreach co-ordinators" and other PC roles that add no value. One thing though - I hope they've got some real auditors on the team, otherwise they'll never find where all the bodies are hidden.

On the other hand I don't like the alcohol ban simply because it smacks of nannyism, something we've had far too much of under Labour. Yes, drunks can be very unpleasant on the tube but in my experience their unpleasantness stems from what they've drunk before they boarded. There are already plenty of public order offences that can be invoked against drunken nuisances on the tube -if only there were enough police to enforce compliance. The ban looks more like gesture politics than a practical improvement.

To be honest I'm a little disappointed. Post-election media coverage hasn't really impinged on me,there's been some muscle flexing, some nannyism but I'd have liked some positive vision stuff ("sunlit uplands/shining city on the hill") too. That's just my impression - I may well be wrong.

[Norm Brainer]

Shooting up is hardly in the same league as having a drink.
...and what's up with a bit of nudity?... do you get offended if you see a woman's ankles?
It's the weird attitude to alcohol with the people who are for the ban that I find interesting.
Like it's liquid satan which they can detect with their holy sixth sense which people should only drink in specialised areas in case they are banished to hell.

But apart from this ken-style policy, Boris is doing well I think!

[David]

"Shooting up is hardly in the same league as having a drink."

It's just another intoxicant; who are you to deny someone else's pleasure on a long tube journey?

[roy s]

I view the alcohol ban on tubes as merely attempting to bring back manners and civilised behaviour. And as has been said on previous posts, I'd ban smelly food too for the same reasons. I cant quite put my finger on it, but its something to do with the arrangement of the seats as well. Its the facing across a narrow aisle on the tube that seems to make watching someone eat or drink unpalatable. Theres something that engenders a private party feeling when a couple of friends share a bottle of wine on a longer distance train which doesnt seem to impinge. Dunno, there are obviously psychological angles here.....

[Chad Noble]

"Presumably you'd be happy for people to shoot up or sit in the tube naked, too."

Sorry David, you're just going to have to carry on doing that in the privacy of your home I'm afraid. ;-)

[Norm Brainer]

@David...I'm not denying them of that - no skin off my nose if they did "shoot up"... but it's not really the same thing as having a beer, is it now?

[Simon Newitt]

Patrick (Benson), "McGrath is nothing more than a baggage-handler with zero charm and questionable ability." What on earth do you base that on???

[D Packer]

Ooh dear! Boris "needs a lot of help," because, er, he doesn't know how to do this job.

Oh well, I'm sure the party leadership will clamp down hard on people expressing that exact same opinion that they hold themselves.

Great. Can't wait for a Conservative Government then! Remind me, why...?

[Not Boles]

From the Social Affairs Unit - http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001779.php

"Yesterday's Sunday Times records that Munira Mirza has been appointed as Boris Johnson's "cultural advisor". The piece points out that Munira is the third person to be appointed by Boris Johnson who used to work for the think-tank Policy Exchange.

To my mind, much more interesting is the fact that Munira is very much part of the tight-nit little coterie which came out of the Revolutionary Communist Party.....

Munira Mirza herself runs what in less charitable times would have been described as a front organisation - the Manifesto Club. Its strap-line is "history is still young" - this might seem just an anodyne bit of snappy copy. But it fits rather well into what is the overall perspective of the Revolutionary Communist Party coterie. Their perspective - as I understand it - is that Marx is right - only that previous Marxists have got the timing wrong. We are still in the productive stages of capitalism - the time for revolution will still come, it is just that history is not ready yet."

Boris's office should not be a job creation scheme for Nick Boles's cronies!!!