I have to admit something: I’ve been studiously ignoring Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate for London mayor in the upcoming 1 May elections.
But I was given a bit of a rude shock when I glanced at a headline proclaiming that his lead over Ken Livingstone had been cut in half. It was news to me that he was in the lead at all. Surely it was clear he was a joke candidate when he proposed scrapping the admittedly unpopular but nonetheless almost new ‘bendy buses’ in favour of revamped Routemasters? (A plan that we now learn would cost £100 million – great use of public funds, Boris!)
However, just in case any readers are considering a vote, this report from Compass paints a rather different picture of the man aspiring to be mayor than, say, the BBC. Although the BBC notes his offenses to the city of Liverpool and Papua New Guinea, here are some more quotes:
‘What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is
said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth,
partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of
flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice
victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by
foreign politeness.
‘They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s
will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human
flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon
smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white
British taxpayer-funded bird.’ (Daily Telegraph 10 January 2002)
Conservatives: ‘accept that material inequality is inevitable, and
that trouble comes from too zealous an attempt to change
this.'(Lend Me Your Ears p126)
‘We seem to have forgotten that societies need rich people,
even sickeningly rich people, and not just to provide jobs for
those who clean swimming pools and resurface tennis courts.’
‘She [Polly Toynbee] incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing,
high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair’s Britain. She is the
defender and friend of everyone whose non-job has ever been
advertised in the Guardian appointments page, every gay and
lesbian outreach worker, every clipboard-toter and pen-pusher
and form-filler whose function has been generated by mindless
regulation. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid,
mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of
political correctness and ‘elf ‘n’ safety fascism.’ (Daily Telegraph
November 23, 2006)
‘When I shamble around the park in my running gear late at
night, and I come across that bunch of black kids, shrieking in
the spooky corner by the disused gents, I would love to
pretend that I don’t turn a hair…
If there is anyone reading
this who has never experienced the same disgraceful reflex,
then – well I just don’t believe you. It is common ground
among both right-wingers and left-wingers that racism is
“natural”, in that it seems to arise organically, in all
civilisations.’ (Lend Me Your Ears p210)
‘none was hotter than the shadow social security secretary,
David Willetts. Round and round he twirled, squiring one Tory
filly after another, until flushed and satiated they could take no
more. Around him we moved in our admiring orbits, old
beldames, jigging white-haired captains of industry, but none
was faster than Willetts… Why was the evening such a
success? There is one measurement I hesitate to mention, since
the last time I did, I am told, the wife of the editor of the
Economist cancelled her subscription to the Daily Telegraph in
protest at my crass sexism. It is what is called the Tottometer,
the geiger-counter that detects good-looking women. In 1997, I
reported, these were to be found in numbers at the Labour
conference. Now – and this is not merely my own opinion – the
Tories are fighting back in a big way. ‘ (The Spectator 10
February 2001)
‘Like much of western Europe, Britain faces a demographic
quandary. In the words of a recent UN interview the
populations of EU countries are “melting like snow in the sun”…
No one knows whether this is caused by the
fecklessness of the modern British male, or by women’s
liberation; or whether it is because divorce has become too
easy.’ (Lend Me Your Ears p395)
‘Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to
increase… Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all
imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are
technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov.
Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number
of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, although
there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to
Stanford and Caltech… It is hard to think of a single Chinese
sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by
Britain, including ping-pong, I’ll have you know, which
originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called
whiff-whaff. The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated
that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it.’ (Have I Got
Views for You p277).
‘if gay marriage was OK – and I was uncertain on the issue –
then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be
consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or
indeed three men and a dog.’ (Friends, Voters, Countrymen
p96)
‘Notice the way Peter Mandelson is pictured out on the town
with his boyfriend; not that there is anything wrong with that,
perish the thought, just that it would have been unimaginable
before the last election.’ (The Spectator 29 April 2000)
And he’s less of a bigot the BNP candidate that got pulled from the elections how, exactly?