Cleaning Ken's House

Boris Johnson's first act as mayor of London was canceling the taxpayer-paid subscription former mayor Ken Livingstone had for The Morning Star, London's socialist newspaper.

Make that canceling Livingstone's 40 subscriptions to the Star. Brit blogger Iain Dale writes:

When Boris sat down at his desk on Monday morning he was presented with a huge press cuttings file, which included loads of articles from the Morning Star. 'Why on earth are you including these?' he asked one of his staff. 'Well,' said the staff member, 'Mayor Livingstone was keen to support the Morning Star'. 'In what way?' asked Boris.

It transpired that the GLA Building had a subscription of forty - yes, forty - copies of the Morning Star delivered every day. Boris's first action as Mayor was to cancel all forty subscriptions to the lefty rag, thereby halving its circulation with one stroke of the mayoral pen. That's what I call the mark of a real Conservative - annoy the leftists and save the taxpayer £10,000 a year at the same time.

And what an irritating rag it is that Ken and his paid pinkos read every day! Today's Morning Star leads off with a feature on Israel's 60th birthday with the catchy title 60 Years of Oppression, focusing on the corrupt, baby-bombing, victimites in Palestine. There's also Medvedev Hits Out at US War Policies and Hezbollah Threatens US-Backed Lebanon.

I'd give you links but this is a Socialist rag -- so you have to pay up before you can read a story. Workers of the world, subscribe!

Krazy Ken Killed As England Boots Labor

"A sure sign of a deep national weariness with the Labor government," opined the [NY] Times.

"A coach-crash election killing hundreds of Labour councillors and leaving a Prime Minister in intensive care," chimed in the [UK] Times.

England has followed Italy and France, shunning Socialist/Labor rule, hoping for governments that spend less time being tired, hack ideologues and more time being efficient and respectful of citizens' abilities to fend for themselves.

The English election was a rout of the sort Bush became familiar with in 2006: the Conservatives gained 256 seats, and Labor lost 331 seats, dropping it to a well-deserved third place, with the Conservatives taking 44 percent of the votes, Liberal Democrats 25 percent, and Labor 24 percent.

The biggest loser after Labor itself was Ken Livingstone, the hard-Left, America-hating, Islamist-cuddling, Warmie fanatic, never learned a thing from the fall of Communism mayor of London, who lost to Conservative Boris Johnson.

But it was the mayoral race, in which Mr. Johnson, 43, defeated the experienced Labor incumbent, Ken Livingstone, 62, by 1,168,738 votes to 1,028,966 votes, that was the biggest shock — a sure sign of a deep national weariness with the Labor government. London has been resolutely Labor in recent years, and its loss is a bitter blow to the national party .

“This was the first big test of Gordon Brown and David Cameron,” said Stephan Shakespeare, a co-founder of YouGov, a polling company, speaking of the Conservative Party leader. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, a lot of debate and a lot of polling, and until this moment the general feeling of malaise that hung over this government hasn’t been made concrete or specific. Now it has. It shows that something has profoundly changed in British politics.” [NYT]

The NYT gets through the news with no mention of Livingstone's voting history and politics, but there are plenty of reasons for his demise, beginning with the hatred he generates from car-lovers, and certainly including those who were galled by the embrace Livingstone gave the most radical of Islamists. Funny the NYT didn't mention that.

Matthew Paris sums it all up well in the [UK] Times:

It's over. There was nothing constructive in the voters' message. These elections were not an invitation to change. They were a big two-fingered salute, a raspberry, a pressing of the de-trousered national buttocks to the window of the polling station. The voters are bored, tired, disillusioned and out of love. The affair, which in 1997 was (for the British people) uncharacteristically intense, is over, and the falling out is correspondingly bitter. Such flames are not rekindled - and certainly not by Mr Brown, whose personal stamp characterises this administration.

This columnist's advice to the Parliamentary Labour Party is therefore simple. Give up. With the leader you've got and led as you are, all is lost.

For a really solid and well-done tracking of the election, go to Conservative Home (h/t LGF). See also: Boris, Ken, Barack & Hillary.

Boris, Ken, Barack And Hillary

There's another election going on that we in America aren't too aware of: Boris Johnson (right) is running against one of the great men we love to hate ("great" addresses "love to hate," not "men"), London mayor Ken Livingstone (left).

You'd think this would be a race about issues. After all, Livingstone has made himself into a symbol for post-modern, hard-left thinking, as Anne Appelbaum points out today in Slate:

His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro's dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. ... He called the U.S. ambassador to Britain a "chiseling little crook" and told a Jewish journalist he was behaving "like a concentration camp guard."

Eech. Less familiar to most of us is Johnson, but he's every bit as much a character:

Though he's been more staid than usual during the mayoral campaign, Boris is a man who can't stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of "drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs").

Adjectives like mop-haired, blustering, and old Etonian appear in just about every profile of him ever written. So does his most famous quotation—"Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3"—though that line is misleading since his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. "Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon," he once remarked, "there lurks a blithering buffoon."

Of course we'll track this election (election day is May 1) because it could spell the end of Livingstone's horrific reign, but Applebaum says it's more than a clash of two very different belief systems:

But it's nevertheless worth watching because this campaign could well be a blueprint for the elections of the future since it is postmodern and post-ideological in the deepest sense: In a world in which "issues" are not the issue and ... there's nothing left to talk about except who said what to whom and whose tongue was sharper while doing so.

Sound like our Dem primary? More than a bit. But this is, in effect, a general election, not a primary.

Let's hope this is another way America keeps itself cut off from its European roots.

hat-tip: RCP