BORIS JOHNSON: Come on London! Time to kick out high

Release time：2024-05-21 11:57:51 Source：International Identities news portal

Imagine your elation at the news. It’s almost a week from now, round about midnight on Friday, and the cameras are crossing to City Hall, London, where the votes have finally been counted.

The candidates are lining up on stage, and you notice a wild-eyed look, as though they have just learned something they can’t quite believe.

As the Returning Officer of the Greater London Authority reads out the total votes, there is a catch in her voice, the slight tremble of one who knows she is about to make history, and take the political world by storm. As she blurts it out, you give an involuntary yelp of startled ecstasy.

It’s actually happened! Londoners have defied the odds and from across the 600 square miles of the greatest city on earth they have turned out to vote for common sense and justice. The doughnut has revolted. The hole has stayed at home.

The people of the UK capital have voted to evict the high-crime, high-tax, do-nothing Mayor Khan. They have voted for an end to the persecution of motorists and the indulgence of knife-wielding gangsters.

You can do nothing with a Khan’t-do spirit, says Boris Johnson, here going head to head with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan on the Elizabeth Line in 2022

They have canned Khan and put Sadiq a la poubelle. They have defied the pundits and voted for the can-do pragmatism and work ethic of Susan Hall, the excellent former leader of Harrow council and the candidate for – the Conservative Party!

You find your eyes almost watering with joy, as you try to take in the implications. No more ULEZ – a plan that was never intended for outer London, and no more of the sinister pay-per-mile plan, Khan’s barely concealed agenda to impose road charging on anyone using so much as an inch of London roadspace.

No more wokery from City Hall, a lefty finger-wagging culture so pervasive that the Khan mayoralty simultaneously discourages Metropolitan Police Officers from stopping and searching for knives, while encouraging the police to tell a Jewish man — as they did on film last week — that he could not walk the King’s highway because his very appearance might cause offence.

And no more Khan! No more of that mixture of cockiness and truculence, the endless mulish not-me-guvvery that has characterised his mayoralty.

You listen to the shock of the media, the funereal tone of some of the broadcasters, and you jump out of your chair, and rush around the room, beating your chest with excitement.

A Tory victory in London! Is it possible? Could it actually happen? You may think it unlikely, when you look at the polls — but then that is exactly what Labour wants you to think. Khan’s whole strategy is to create a sense of inevitability, so that he glides to victory like a lump of driftwood on the electoral tide.

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He wants you to think he is unstoppable, and that there is no point in Londoners turning out to vote against him — and that is exactly where he is wrong.

I have never met a Londoner who was actively happy with the Khan Mayoralty, or an investor who thought the Khan City Hall was doing a good job in championing the UK capital.

Today, to judge by the mood on the doorstep, there is hardly a household that positively yearns for a third Khan term, and four more years of his grumpy indolence; and there are plenty of areas where he is about as popular as mumps.

So my answer is yes: you bet it can happen. An upset is always possible, because Londoners are both savvy and mercurial. This election is always decided by differential turn-out. If enough Tories remember to vote, and enough Labour voters are washing their hair, then Khan could indeed be about to get the biggest shock of his life — and for a good and simple reason.

In the annals of democratic politics I cannot think of an incumbent candidate who has been less deserving of re-election. On every relevant metric, I believe Khan has failed, and has taken the city backwards.

With the help of leaders like Susan Hall, the previous Conservative mayoralty cut crime of all types, and especially violent crime. We not only cut neighbourhood crime — robberies, burglaries, car crime, and so on. We cut the murder rate by 50 per cent, and above all knife crime. How? Because we backed the police.

Voting out Khan would mean no more ULEZ – a plan that was never intended for outer London

With the help of leaders like Susan Hall, the previous Conservative mayoralty cut crime of all types, and especially violent crime

We gave them top cover to get on with their jobs, and if necessary to perform stop and search. We didn’t obsess about political correctness, and the result was that London became one of the safest big cities in the world.

As for Khan, he has postured and sermonised and followed lefty nostrums about stop and search — and the result seems to be that knife crime is up, violent crime is way, way up, and, as I have sadly reported before in this column, there is a view around the world that London is not now as safe as it once was.

And what does Khan do? He just tries to blame everyone else. It is pathetic.

I was a Tory Mayor under a Labour government — and I never once tried to blame Tony Blair or Gordon Brown for the problems of crime in London. I knew that I had been elected to deal with it — so we took responsibility, and got on with it.

All you hear from Sadiq Khan is that he can’t do this or can’t do that. In fact he might as well change his name from Sadiq Khan to Sadiq Khan’t.

We cut council tax by 11 per cent. Sadiq can’t cut council tax because I believe he has so badly mismanaged his budgets that he has been forced to increase it by 71 per cent.

In the eight Conservative years, we built record numbers of affordable homes — more even than Ken Livingstone. Sadiq can’t build enough affordable homes because he blights developments with his lefty social housing quotas.

Above all we helped to ensure that London lengthened its lead as the greatest city on earth — with the number one financial and tech sector in Europe — and the most popular tourist destination.

Life expectancy increased for both men and women, and we levelled up the city, with the poorest boroughs getting richer the fastest.

Sadiq can’t drive investment and growth because he seems to have no positive vision for the city. What great projects has he started, let alone finished?

Look at the enormous physical legacy of the eight Conservative years, from Battersea to Greenwich, from Ealing to the Olympic Park, via Crossrail, to say nothing of the buses, bikes, river crossings and heaven knows what else that we installed.

We left plans in place for Crossrail 2 and the extension of the Bakerloo line. What has he actually done? Nothing. It is hard enough to create better infrastructure in today’s Britain — but you can’t do anything if you have a Khan’t-do spirit.

Sadiq Khan has no equal in the game of blaming other people. But a Mayor of London is there to exalt this great city — not moan about it. His job is to take responsibility — not whinge that he can’t do a thing.

It’s time for change in London, for someone who can cheer people up and get things done, and that person is Susan Hall.

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