Fed up with feeble Labour? Only you can put the boot in

Not so long ago, there appeared in these pages one of the best letters I have ever seen. It was a letter from a retired lieutenant-colonel. I have a feeling he lived in Gloucestershire and, even without having his precise words to hand, I can still feel the incandescent heat of his indignation.

It was one of those letters that smelt of the freshly spilt coffee and still echoed to the sound of the freshly smacked breakfast table. You could almost hear the air coursing from his nostrils in a great double-barrelled parp of rage that sent the crumbs of egg and toast scattering from his moustache, over the discarded edition of the morning paper and into the lilac-scented lap of his adoring wife of 50 years.

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This government seems to suffer from a kind of schizophrenia in its approach to the Criminal Justice System

I want them to worry about the whereabouts of these thugs and creeps, and on that matter they showed a profound indifference

Labour’s law – just squawk loudly and take no action

It was when the policeman coughed quietly at my shoulder and said that I was breaking the law that I knew the game was up. When you get to my stage in life, you cease to get that thrill out of being arrested. I had to turn and face the throng, who were trying to march with me from College Green, Westminster, to Downing Street. Sorry, folks, I was forced to announce.

About turn! Labour has changed the law, and free-born Englishmen and women can no longer walk a few hundred paces down the Queen’s pavement to Downing Street to protest at the closure of their local hospitals.

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Boris returns from China to find that roaring capitalism has stirred no interest in democracy in a country wedded to authority for four millennia.

BORIS ON CHINA

It was towards the end of my trip to China that the tall, beautiful communist-party girl turned and asked the killer question. ‘So, Mr Boris Johnson,’ she said, ‘have you changed your mind about anything?’ And I was forced to reply that, yes, I had. Darned right I had. I had completely changed my mind about the chances of democracy in China. Before flying to Beijing I had naively presumed that the place was not just exhibiting hysterical economic growth, but was about to enter a ferment of political change. I had assumed that Tony Blair was right when, in 2005, he went there and announced that the 1.3 billion Chinese were on an ‘unstoppable march’ towards multi-party politics.

I now know that he was talking twaddle, and, what is more, that his Foreign Office advisers knew it. Like most reporters of my generation I spent a certain amount of the 1980s in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and we all remember that sense of suppressed mutiny, how easy it was to find people willing to prophesy over late-night vodka or slivovitz that one day the lid would blow off the cooker and Western-style democracy would be ushered in.

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Ryton workers have a better future than French brothers

It is no consolation to the workers of Ryton and their families who face the misery of a factory closure that one day this column must, with Darwinian inevitability, face the same extinction.

I do not wish to diminish the gravity of events at the Peugeot plant when I say that there will also come a time when the forces of international capital will decree that there is no longer any economic justification for this space to be filled by the manual labour of this particular semi-skilled artisan.

The ancient word-plant will be shut. The gerundive turning-sheds will fall silent. The lathes will cease to hone the metaphors, and no sound will be heard in the vast grammatical assembly lines save the drip-drip-drip from the cracked skylight and the scuttling of rats in the stock of unused similes.

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Piece written for an Italian paper about the elections…

Il Sole 24 Ore, a financial paper

Boris says:

“Why not bung it on the blog to show I am alive?

Yesterday we all climbed Vesuvius!”

[Ed: With our apologies as we have now been asked to remove this piece from the site]

How a flock of French dodos could drag down Europe

It was when Air France told us that our bags were still in Paris, rather than Peking, that I suddenly understood why the French national carrier is, in my opinion – an opinion I am wholly prepared to defend in the libel courts of any European nation – the single worst airline in the world. My understanding of the problem had been slowly forming over the past 24 hours.

It began as I stared at the back of the pockmarked neck of the bus driver at Charles de Gaulle, his iPod wires dangling insolently from his ears, and I watched the passengers beg him to get his panting machine into gear and take them to the departure gate, and I observed his shrugs of dismissal as no one went, and no one came, and the bus stood still and the minutes ticked by.

My insight grew steadily clearer when we reached the gate, and the five shoulder-padded Air France women and three Air France men refused to let us on the Peking aircraft, even though the thing lay berthed before us for at least another 25 minutes, and even though we were late in making the connection from London only because our first Air France flight had been half an hour late in landing in Paris.

And so when the French national airline flew us five hours later to the wrong Chinese city, and then told us on landing that our bags would not arrive until the following day – even then, monsieur – I did not pop with rage. I did not allow myself to swear, even in French.

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It is time to end this crisis, and rescue the Lords, by insisting on a fully elected chamber, in which all peers are chosen by the same method, and yet without the same democratic mandate as the commons.

Elect the Lords – and stop our gongs going for a song

I was stuck at a traffic light yesterday when a brand new red Toyota 4X4 drew abreast, containing three extraordinary women. Their cheeks were flushed, their lips were red, they wore sexy little cream pant suits and matching cream hats, and identical pink shirts to go with the flowers in the brim.

They were in that state of innocent euphoria that causes human beings to hail complete strangers. “Oi Boris,” they shouted through the window, “we’ve just been to see the Queen!” And then the Beverley sisters (for that was how they introduced themselves) waved the square blue leather case containing the three identical ribbons and medals they had earned for a lifetime of belting out hits (I think they said there was one called Sisters) that have no doubt brought pleasure to millions, if not to you or me.

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All around us, in our courts, in the oppressive liberty-destroying Bills being rushed through Parliament, we see the disasters of multiculturalism, the system by which too many Muslims have been allowed to grow up in this country with no sense of loyalty to its institutions, and with a sense of complete apartness.

The Shabina Begum case never had anything to do with modesty

I don’t know whether you caught young Shabina Begum talking on the television yesterday, but, as I studied the pictures of this exceedingly good-looking and confident young woman, I was suddenly conscious of a paradox.

Here she is, at the centre of a national media storm, and one that has been very largely whipped up by her own supporters. There goes our Shabina, batting her (rather beautiful) eyes through her visor, and thereby exciting the interest of millions of otherwise apathetic viewers, who are not only infidels but very possibly male infidels at that.

Continue reading Dress in Educational Establishments →