This came up a lot just before the Mayoral Election, but more so after the event. It's quite easy for people to explain away the reasons why Ken was kicked out. After all, the Labour Government proper is singularly killing any chances of any other party but the Tories getting the fattest part of the vote at the next General Election and at the next round of the locals when they happen. Contrary to the assertions of David Cameron et al that the Tories are hitting the right kind of message with the electorate, this is more a case of the incumbents making such a hash of Government that people are - and have - willing to vote elsewhere.
In fact, Labour was doomed from the moment that Gordon Brown decided that he would not, after all, call a snap election. People don't like being treated like idiots and to be kept guessing as to "will he, won't he?" All he needed to do at that point was grasp the wave of relief that Labour had finally managed to get Tony Blair to leave the stage, especially since - at that point in time - that the Tories were not focused, not ready and not certain of how to attack Gordon or his policies.
The Lib Dems had zero chance of getting anywhere at the Mayoral Elections (see my "colours to the mast" post on this topic). This was always going to be a two-person race, but the real danger of Brian's participation in the Election was that he was only ever going to take votes off Ken and not Boris. And it was for this reason, despite being a Lib Dem, was that I couldn't vote for him. A cross against "Paddick" was, for me, exactly the same in all ways as my putting a cross against "Johnson".
The turnout in the Mayoral Election was impressive; but the fact it came down to 140,000 votes says it all. There is simply no excuse for people not voting. Postal voting is easy to register for and the polling stations themselves were open for fifteen hours.
Apathy has given us the Mayor that we deserve, on a tiny majority win. 18.98% of eligible voters in London voted for Boris, 16.25% for Ken and a remarkably low 4.3% for Brian as their first choice. Interestingly, however, Brian was the most popular 2nd preference, with 11.66% of eligible voters marking him as their next choice.
Returning to topic, however, why is having Boris as a Mayor such a bad thing? I won't go over the very-well trodden ground of his racist comments, homophobic comments, Liverpool gaffes...to be honest, there are a huge number of very high quality blogs in the blogosphere that have already covered these topics and I have linked to a few of them here.
For me, I have very deep reservations about electing a part-time Mayor who is still the Tory MP for Henley-upon-Thames, a man who refused point-blank to name or discuss the identities of any of the advisors that he "had already selected", a man who has no experience of managing local government, who has only managed fifty people and who has never shown any interest in the future of London until both he and the Tories decided that they could make a run of this and who based his entire manifesto pledges around a series of claims about bendy buses, Routemasters and some made-up numbers about their cost. Oh, er....let's chuck in some PCSOs and fifty BTP officers as well, then.
Ken spent eleven years at the GLA running London and a further eight as London Mayor. What the outer boroughs of London - and let's be clear that it was they - have done is to elect a man who cannot, and never will, identify with the majority of people living and working in London and who was initially set upon this path as a joke.
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