London

As we enter the final stretch of the campaign for London Mayor, YouGov have a new poll putting Boris four points ahead of Ken. It’s a touch better for the blue team than the 2 point lead YouGov found last week, but not as comfortable as the 8- and 10-point leads shown by ComRes and Survation respectively. Despite dropping a bit further behind Boris, Ken does not seem to be suffering from Labour supporters turning their backs on him. Indeed, he now gets 92 per cent of those Labour general election voters who express a preference between him and Boris — the highest level of party loyalty YouGov have found

Ni hao. In recent days, Boris, Ken and Brian have all leapt headlong onto Weibo, China’s highly popular version of Twitter. It’s an obvious effort to win the votes of Chinese-speakers living in London. Boris was the first — which, I suppose, says all you want to know about his sense of initiative, brio, élan, and whatever the Chinese word is for ‘mojo’. Ken and Brian both jumped in about two weeks later, around April 21.   Inevitably, because the vast majority of Weibo users live in China, our three London mandarins have ended up attracting followers based in the Middle Kingdom. A look at the mayoral candidates’ individual Weibo

It looks as though the London Mayoral election isn’t the foregone conclusion some thought it was. A new YouGov poll for the Evening Standard has the gap between Boris and Ken down to just two points — well within the margin of error. That contrasts with the eight-point lead that Boris had opened up last month: One interesting finding is that, despite all the controversy over his tax affairs, Labour supporters are not turning their backs on Ken. In fact, they seem to be rallying around him. Of those Labour general election voters who express a preference between Ken and Boris, Ken now has the support of 89 per cent.

Andrew Adonis, one of the policy brains of the Blair government and now seated in the House of Lords, has a letter in tomorrow’s edition of the Spectator responding to Neil O’Brien’s cover article of last week. In it, Adonis suggests one way that the political class could help purge the Londonitis from its collective system: move the House of Lords to Greater Manchester. Here’s the full text of the letter, for CoffeeHousers: Sir, As Neil O’Brien rightly says, London is New York, Washington and LA rolled into one, which is unhealthy for our national politics. So I have a serious suggestion. If the House of Lords is going to

In his cover piece for this week’s magazine, Neil O’Brien describes the great divide between London and the rest of the UK. One of the main differences he highlights is in their economies. He says: ‘In inner west London, economic output per head is £110,000 a year. In an important sense, these people are not living in the same country as the inhabitants of Gwent or the Wirral, whose output is just a tenth of this.’ In fact, London is set apart not just from those two poorest areas, but every other area in the country. You see, the second richest area — Edinburgh — has an output per head

Jonathan Freedland’s column in The Guardian today, explaining why he can’t vote for Ken Livingstone, is a remarkably direct piece of journalism. Freedland states that he ‘can no longer do what I and others did in 2008, putting to one side the statements, insults and gestures that had offended me, my fellow Jews and — one hopes — every Londoner who abhors prejudice’. Now, as Paul Goodman argues, we shouldn’t overstate the importance of a traditionally Labour supporting Guardian columnist coming out against Ken Livingstone. But Freedland’s reasons for doing so are ones that, I suspect, will resonate with a significant section of opinion. The issue with Livingstone is that

You’d think the American sub-prime crisis would have taught politicians the world over not to try to rig the housing market. But no, David Cameron is back on it today — about how to ‘unblock’ the system so the debt geyser starts to gush again. ‘The problem today is that you have lenders who aren’t lending, so builders can’t build and buyers can’t buy,’ says the Prime Minister. ‘It needs the government to step in, and help unblock the market.’ The idea that lenders may not lend because they feel the housing market may fall, and people may be unable to repay, is instantly dismissed. He speaks as if debt

What does No.10 make of Boris’s campaign so far? Not much, judging by Alice Thomson’s column (£) in the Times today: ‘Downing Street is worried. When the mayor came in with his Australian election strategist Lynton Crosby last week, they thought their plans were “underwhelming” and lacked a simple ‘retail offer’ for voters.’ This certainly fits in with what I’ve noted before: that Team Boris is being significantly quieter than Team Ken. Indeed, further research suggests that the current Mayor is trailing far behind his challenger in the all-vital Evening Standard campaign coverage. I’ve sifted through their archives for the past six months, and it turns out that for every Boris initiative being mentioned

The declaration by Len McCluskey, the leader of Unite, that public sector unions should consider disrupting the Olympics is going to re-ignite the whole debate about union power. McCluskey tells Andrew Sparrow that ‘The attacks that are being launched on public sector workers at the moment are so deep and ideological that the idea the world should arrive in London and have these wonderful Olympic Games as though everything is nice and rosy in the garden is unthinkable.’ McCluskey’s ill-considered threat is a headache for Labour. Unite is Labour’s largest donor and the Tories are already calling on Miliband to denounce him. I suspect that the Boris campaign will be

When David Cameron addressed Tory MPs on Friday, he told them that the London Mayoral elections were ‘the binary moment of 2012’. He argued that if Labour lost in London, one of their traditional strongholds, it would be a disaster for Ed Miliband. In the Cameron narrative, a Boris victory in May would mean that the Labour leader would remain under pressure and continue to be the subject of regular attacks in the press. Interestingly, there are Liberal Democrats close to Nick Clegg who share this analysis. Their worry is that a Livingstone victory combined with bad local election results for Lib Dem could turn the deputy Prime Minister back

Remember Downhills Primary School? This was the underperforming school in Haringey that became a political battleground towards the end of last year. On one side was Michael Gove and the coalition, proposing that Downhills — and schools like it — become academies, as that’s how to boost academic performance. On the other was the local MP, Labour’s David Lammy, as well as the school hierarchy and various union types, all apoplectic at having academy status ‘imposed’ from above. Harsh words were traded, meetings were convened, and little was resolved by it all. I mention this now because, late yesterday afternoon, something was actually resolved in Haringey: Downhills was put in

When is a homophobic comment not a homophobic comment?  When it is spoken by somebody on the ‘left’ of course. Ken Livingstone has just reminded us of a prevailing rule in British politics. His comment that the Conservative party is ‘riddled’ with homosexuals ‘like everywhere else’ would have earned him a sacking if the parties had been reversed and a Conservative politician had talked of the Labour party in this fashion. In the same way, if a Conservative had made the kind of smearing racial generalisation that Diane Abbott recently twittered, they would have found themselves sent beneath the bottom rung of the political ladder. And I dread to think