mayor of london

Amid an avalanche of crushing defeats nationwide for Labour, Boris Johnson is now Mayor of London.

This is not just a triumph for Boris, his team and his policies, for example on transport and crime, but a vindication of the Conservative Party's renovation at the hands of David Cameron - hailed by the Daily Mail as a PM-in-waiting - and his team.

It wouldn't take much effort to take apart Ken Livingstone's character; but as a friend of mine once said to an MP who had taunted him about his son's criminal past, when we go to God with our faults written on our foreheads, none of us will have grounds to feel better than anybody else.

The thing is, although Livingstone's failings may not be inscribed sans-serif upon his brow, he doesn't make it difficult for journalists to find an excuse to knock him and, by extension the Labour Party. Take his rift with a journalist after leaving his party to celebrate gay MP Chris Smith's coming out. Having discovered that his interlocutor, Oliver Finegold, was Jewish, he compounded his "German war criminal" remark by indicating that his newspaper, the Evening Standard, was "a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots" and had "a record of supporting fascism". The Evening Standard had indeed supported Oswald Mosley and even the Nazi party, but dropped this support in 1939 - six years before Livingstone was born.

It was a remark typical of the socialist propensity for holding the most indefensible prejudices, and hiding them by throwing their hands up in horror at anything which they think offends their pet minorities like radical militant Muslims and gays, etc. Richard Littlejohn writes:

Under the guise of 'anti-Zionism', anti-Semitism is rife on
British university campuses. But still the Government refuses to ban groups such
as Hizb ut-Tahir, motto: 'Jews will be killed wherever they can be
found.'

Being in the vanguard of the Conservative resurgance has its darker side. It is said that Labour is planning a rebuttal unit to take apart Boris' words and actions now and in the past. This is a technique that led it to victory in the 1997 General Election through the offices of their search-engine, named with uncharacteristic patriotism as Excalibur (the article linked to was written by Boris). As was the case with Excalibur, this rebuttal unit will observe no morality beyond the cold hunt for success, no matter the prospect of the British people, regardless of the amount of melanin in their skin, being held to ransom by the party's hostages to fortune.

Well done, Boris. May I suggest that you start up an ethical rebuttal unit, and even propose a name for it - "Ascalon"?