Honeymoon over for BoJo

To lose one senior adviser is… and so on. Britain’s most powerful elected Conservative, Boris Johnson, has suffered the second resignation of his short-lived London administration. The man now making a one-way journey through City Hall’s automatic doors is Ray Lewis. A former prison governor, Mr Lewis was hired as the tough guy with tough solutions to youth crime.

I can’t believe that Mr Lewis and I have an especially similar world view but I can’t help but think that - on the basis of accusations that are actually proved, as opposed to things that are ‘alleged’ and were apparently not being alleged at the point that Mr Lewis ran a prison and then a children’s charity - the current feeding frenzy is both unpleasant and unjust.

That said, having seen Lee Jasper (foolish but not proven to be guilty of anything else) hung, drawn and quartered by the right-wing press in the run-up to the Mayoral election, my sympathy for Mr Lewis does not extent to his patrons.

In the long-run, though, it’s seems likely that if all public figures are to be treated in this way, public roles are going to become less and less appealing to anyone who’s not either so bland and deferential as to have never upset anyone at any point in their life before politics, or such a power-mad egomaniac that they’ll be able to tough it out through whatever gets thrown at them.

That’s not a good thing.

Support the Green candidate in Haltemprice and Howden

I’m happy to admit that, as right-wing Tory MPs go, David Davis is one of the better ones. But his vision of Britain is very different from mine. In the absence of a by-election candidate from the party I’m a member of, I’ll be backing our allies in the London Mayoral Election, the Green Party and their candidate, Shan Oakes. Why not really stick it to Gordon Brown and support someone who backs both civil liberties and progressive politics? Labour MP’s such as Bob Marshall-Andrews might like to consider doing the same.

Neo-liberal power grab treaty killed again

The pathetic anti-democratic, neo-liberal monstrosity that is was the EU constitution and is now the Lisbon Treaty has been decisively rejected again.

I was going to say it was ironic that an ‘agreement’ designed to take power away from where it is most accountable and put it where accountably is, at very best, indirect would continue to live on long beyond the point that voters wanted anything to do with it.

It is, of course, not ironic at all. It’s entirely logical that if you believe that government should not be subject to the will of the people you continually reject their decision to disagree with you.

All that said, it will be amusing to see the Eurocrats next attempt to bounce this through. Maybe they’ll publish a new version of the treaty in really, really small print so people can’t see what it says.

Brown up the (Crewe) junction

No real surprise that the result of the Crewe by-election was the first Tory by-election gain from Labour for over 30 years. What is surprising enough to be a major concern is that the Tory majority was 7,860 votes.

The implications of the victory itself shouldn’t be overstated too much. Crewe was a safe Labour seat in the sense that Gwyneth Dunwoody probably would have held it at the next election even if Labour had lost its parliamentary majority but - and it’s a reasonably big but - it’s not quite the same as losing a non-contest seat such as, for example, Sedgefield.

But the scale of the loss sends a clear message about the electorate’s view of Gordon Brown. The fact that it was the Tories not the Lib Dems who benefit from the voter backlash may or may not be significant. In seats where Lib Dems have ‘come from nowhere’ in by-elections since 1997 there’s generally been another factor, such as the Iraq war in Brent East. It could be that the Tories won primarily because they were best placed to offer a kicking to the government.

On the other hand, there’s clear evidence that David Cameron’s policy of shunning policy in favour of improved presentation and general cuddliness is starting to pay dividends. In reality, with the exception of the period between 1979 and 2005, this has been the Conservative Party’s main electoral strategy for much of its modern history. It’s a sensible strategy and Cameron is certainly on course to be the leader of the biggest party after the next election.

The question for Gordon Brown is not whether he’ll win the next election but whether he’ll limp on long enough to fight it. As of this morning, the odds are against it.

Cherie between the sheets

Proof here that the Americans can actually do understated irony quite well when they’re minded to. The biog fest has been hilarious stuff with Cherie’s unremitting invasion of her own privacy originally not slated for release until the autumn but rushed out so that it could damage the Irn Broon premiership while he still has a premiership left to damage.

At a time like this, both Cherie and John Prescott probably deserve a visit from the late Dennis Pennis who could ask them what, if anything, they have left to reveal given that Cherie has offered the general public her reproductive organs and Prescott has served up the contents of his stomach?

Where’s Mary Whitehouse when you need her?

Traditional supporter attacks Labour from the right

It’s slightly baffling that The Observer - nominally the most left-wing paper available on the Sunday news stands - choose to run this story without asking any of the most obvious questions it raises.

Leaving aside the peripheral question of whether the new inheritance tax cut for the rich discriminates against unmarried couples, it’s difficult to see how someone can be both a traditional Labour supporter and someone who objects to their children having to pay to pay tax on inheritance over £300,000.

What’s becoming clear that there are group of comfortably-off middle class liberal leftists who have always strongly supported progressive taxation as long as it was primarily paid by other people.

I should declare an interest. Darling’s knee-jerk couples’ reform stands to net me personally in the region of £48,000 in taxes that I now won’t have to pay. That’s fundamentally wrong.

Why do I deserve a massive tax free windfall on the basis of my parents hard-work? Why should people who aren’t lucky enough to have hard-working parents with reasonably stable jobs who bought property at the right time have to start £200,000 behind me in the rat race?

It’s difficult to see how you can support a reduction in inequality while simultaneously support an approach which increases inequality and crushes social mobility.

Of course, you can’t blame middle class parents for wanting to help their kids get on the property ladder in a society where property ownership is the only model for a genuinely comfortable life but the fact that people - richer or poorer - are locked into this cycle of inequality is not going to be challenged by deepening and extending that inequality.

Maybe there was a time when The Observer would have cared about that. Maybe some lefties who actually know why they’re lefties should start spending their inheritances on starting a decent newspaper.

Presidential debate trundles on stupidly

It’s a strange political set-up where a poorly expressed statement of blindingly obvious can cause you as much as hassle as this.

He said this:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,”

“And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Mr. Obama went on. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Hilariously, though, for the Hillary Clinton campaign the major point-scoring has not been over the unnecessarily condescending way that Obama chose to express what is a self-evident political reality. No, they’ve retorted with a line that, if anything, is even more condescending by going on about how working class Americans who’ve been done over by Bush, Clinton, Bush for the last twenty years are “spiritually rich” despite being completely skint.

Only seven more months to go until one of these jokers has to try to beat a real cynical right-winger in a general election. It barely bears thinking about but it should be quite funny.

Vote match with Ken

This is quite interesting. I was moderately relieved to discover that in both the Mayoral and Assembly elections, I support the policies of the party I belong to more than I support anyone else.  The Lib Dem’s Brian Paddick is my second choice in the Mayoral vote but in the Assembly list vote, I theoretically support both Gorgeous George’s axis of indefatigability and the neo-Stalinist ‘Unity for Peace and Socialism’ ahead of the fourth placed Lib Dems. Bizarrely, I’m apparently less keen on SWP’s left list (3rd for Mayor, 5th on the party list) than on Nick Clegg’s Thatcherite sandal wearers.

The Greens, the party that will actually get my second vote, are my fourth choice in the Mayoral vote and my sixth choice in the party list.

Brown on drugs

Absolute madness here. I’m generally quite conservative on drugs. Whether or not cannabis is a specific cause of particular mental health conditions - something which would be extremely difficult to prove either way - in terms of what I’ve seen of the experiences of people I know, regular use doesn’t usually have a positive effect on mental health.

What I don’t understand is how moving from the current situation - where the Police openly ignore personal use - back to the old situation where most Police forces ignore personal use while claiming to be tackling it will have any significant effect on drug use it all. It will just reduce people’s respect for the forces of law and order by create a massive gap between what government says they’re doing and what they actually will be doing.

I can see strong on arguments for not legalising cannabis (it’s expensive enough to regulate the sales of the two major dangerous recreational drugs we alread have in the shops) but if politicians and campaigners genuinely do have an agenda around cutting use then regulated sale combined with a serious educational campaign - which actually genuinely does offer people an open free choice about whether or not they use the drug - is far more likely to have an impact than the current neither here nor there approach.

Lib Dems rewrite the dictionary

The Lib Dems are not supporting a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty because they regard it as ‘a completely different text’ from the original EU constitution.

Any voters reading a future Lib Dem manifesto will need to be wary of any phrase containing the words ‘completely different’ and following consultation with their English-Lib Dem phrase book will be able to ascertain that for Clegg and co. this phrase in fact means ‘95% the same’.

Either way, it looks like Clegg is going to save Gordon Brown’s bacon on this issue.