Boris is the kind of Tory I’d vote for: which means he can win

Rod Liddle urges his friend to stand for Mayor of London and demonstrate
what modern Conservatism can do — if you let it

I’ve voted Conservative only once in my life — during elections to the London School of Economics students’ union 23 years ago, when the Tory manifesto pledged to spend all of the union money on buying a racehorse, rather than giving it to the bloody miners, or Robert Mugabe, or Pol Pot, as Labour wished to do. A lot of my fellow lefties voted similarly, sick to the back teeth of the posturing, grand-standing, attitudinalising antics of these awful little gobby public schoolboys from Tunbridge Wells and Berkhamsted in their interminable Che Guevara berets and Coal Not Dole! badges. This sort of middle-class Leninist radical chic was well past its sell-by date even in 1984 and joyously lampooned by both Rik Mayall in The Young Ones and ‘Student Grant’ in Viz at the time.