Boris officially took office at midnight, and will apparently be at his office in City Hall all day today putting his team together. He has continued to emphasise that he wants to crack down on crime, and has said he will seek the Met commissioner (Iain Blair's) dismissal if there is not sufficient progress.
One area of immediate action will be cutting the expenditure at City Hall, and Boris has apparently already committed to slashing the ex-mayor's vainglorious media and marketing budget by 20%. He will also replace the twelve key advisers currently inhabiting City Hall, as they are all, of course, Livingstone placemen.
Johnson is the most powerful Conservative in the country at the moment, so his actions will continue to be closely examined. I think he will surprise us all and could well prove an effective mayor. Incidentally, for all the accusations of homophobia thrown at him, I note that his key adviser and virtual 'deputy mayor', Nick Boles, is one of the few openly gay Tories around!
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Rumour has it that David Cameron's office spent the latter part of last week calling round competent, senior Tories both inside and outside of politics, desperately looking for people to staff the London administration they've landed themselves with. Volunteers have not exactly been queueing up outside City Hall, so it will be interesting to see just who emerges once Johnson has finished "putting his team together". One is reminded of the invasion of Iraq - the Tories, like the US, expended so much effort on the act of seizing power, they forgot to work out in advance just what they'd do when they got there. Let's just hope this acts as a warning to them in advance of the next election.
As for his homophobia, it's well known that his campaign team was stuffed full of gay Tories (no pun intended). "I'm not homophobic; some of my best friends are gay", Boris might say. Or, alternatively, he could say "The essence of that Tory case is unchanged ... it is more sensitive to spare parents' anxieties than to allow leftwing local authorities to waste taxpayers' money on idiotic and irrelevant homosexual instruction." That was in 2000, over his support for the visciously homophobic section 28.
Erm, there are also 3 out of 11 openly gay tories on the Assembly! Nick Boles will not be feeling like Dafyd...
Such a nice blog. I hope you will create another post like this.
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