Boris: 100 days in

There’s an interesting article in today’s Times about Boris’s first 100 days in power. I didn’t realise that Boris had been in charge for as long as 100 days. Mainly because Boris is one of the first people to achieve a key elected government position and use it as a change to reduce his public profile. In particular, the article compares the influence and power of the two:

David Cameron
Annual salary: £132,317
Staff: 258 at Central Office
Budget: Party has debts of £7.75m
Powers: Constitutional duty to hold Government to account, appoints Shadow Ministers
Mandate: elected by around 290,000 Conservative members

Boris Johnson
Annual salary: £137,579
Staff: 800-plus in Greater London Authority
Budget: £11 billion
Powers: planning, development, transport, culture, environment
Mandate: directly elected by 5.4 million London voters

Make no mistake about it, Boris Johnson is the most powerful and influential Conservative in the country right now. I don’t doubt that statement would hurt Cameron’s flaccid ego, but the facts and figures speak for themselves. And if you wish to see what the likely Conservative government is going to do once they get into power, then look no further than Boris Johnson’s London.

Now, don’t look at what Boris says – the guy always has spoken a lot of crap, and always will do. And don’t look at those tedious scandals involving his aides that have damaged Johnson. He just needs to learn to tell his aides to keep their traps shut sometimes and also needs to learn to vet those who come to work with him. No, instead look at what he does. What policies he implements.

So far, we’ve not seen a great deal of policies from Johnson. In fact, his first 100 days in power, his most striking policy has been a small yet significant reduction in the freedom of those who live in and visit London:

He highlighted the alcohol ban on public transport as a key achievement, claiming it was popular with most Londoners, despite protests by many young people. “It took Margaret Thatcher quite a long time before she earned the honour of having tens of thousands of young people hurling execration in her name. It took me only a few weeks.”

So, with the London Transport network utterly fucked each weekend, and with teenagers knifing each other to death against the backdrop of the spiralling black hole of taxpayers’ money that is the 2012 Olympic games, Boris’s proudest achievement is banning booze on London Transport. Instinctively, it seems, Johnson is socially conservative; not pragmatic, nor liberal, nor libertarian. And if you extrapolate his first 100 days in power to what Cameron would do in his first 100 days in power, it doesn’t look good. We’ll see the sort of socially conservative policies that appeal to portly, old Tory party chairmen being implemented at the same time as seeing the new administration avoiding the real issues that scream for attention.

With the Labour government falling apart faster than a whore with leprosy, it is vital that we start to look at what Cameron’s Conservatives will do when they get into power. Johnson’s administration will be a good sign of what that government is likely to do. And based on Johnson’s first 100 days, it will be a mix of empty rhetoric and the banning instinct that is meant to achieve nothing more than positive column inches in hate-filled, reactionary tabloids. The Tories run the risk of doing exactly what Boris has been doing – thriving on the fact that he is better than the Labour alternative without really aspiring to offer the radical change we need after years of Labour rule.