It’s over three years since Boris Johnson first ran against Ken Livingstone for Mayor of London, but his new attack website suggests that almost nothing has changed in his approach to fighting the former mayor.
His old criticisms of Ken from 2008 are not so much trotted out as dragged out, nobbled and lifeless, on to the race course.
Livingstone’s support for the unions, controversial left-wing politicians and Islam are all limped out, with multiple links to posts by Andrew Gilligan completing the Wadley-era Evening Standard feel.
To the surprise of approximately zero Londoners, we are told that Ken is a fan of Hugo Chávez, various Muslim leaders and the occasional junket. Who knew?
In fact, give or take a couple of references to Press TV and the fascinating subject of internal Labour Party politics in Tower Hamlets, the entire website could have been written back in 2008.
In this alternate universe, the past three years have never happened. And so, while Ken is attacked for his large numbers of press officers and his huge pay-offs to “cronies”, Boris’s large numbers of press officers and his huge pay-off to one of his own “cronies” fall down the memory hole.
Because the truth is that, while Boris campaigned against Livingstone’s formula for being Mayor of London, it is a formula to which, by and large, he has kept.
So, Ken’s international embassies, or “Kenbassies”, as the Tories called them, have largely stayed, as have the travel concessions for young people that the Tories deemed so unacceptable just a few years ago.
Ken’s staged battles with his own party leadership have been replaced with Boris’s staged battles with Tory chiefs. And Ken’s outrageous jokes and comments about totalitarian leaders have been replaced with Boris’s outrageous jokes and comments about other totalitarian leaders.
Thus, in some ways, the antiquated feel of Boris’s campaign website is entirely in keeping with the antiquated feel of Boris’s mayoralty. Where Ken led, Boris has largely followed. And after almost three years, Boris has failed to point London in any discernibly new direction.
In the absence of such a new direction, no volume of attack websites will convince anybody that four more years of either candidate is anything to get too scared about.
Adam Bienkov is a blogger and journalist covering London politics and the mayoralty.
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