Sketches of Boz

Boris looked me in the eye and I looked Boris in the eye; neither of
us blinked for a moment. I'd just asked him one of the very few
questions worth asking of a London Mayoral candidate: how are you
going to stop kids killing each other and get to grips with the
growing cult of young people acting in public like a cross between Sid
Vicious and a member of the Waffen SS?
Because, as that nauseatingly mawkish pop record We Are the World
reminds us: children are the future - and at our current accelerating
rate of moral squalor our future will make *A Clockwork Orange* look
like *Holiday on the Buses*.
And yay, Boris began to answer: "We need to cut bureaucracy in the
police, we need to deal with the violence and the incivility on public
transport and elsewhere."
It was nice to hear him declare war like that. How he'll do it is
another matter.
To a jaundiced observer like myself I know it to be practically
impossible, given the power and control supine liberality and
chattering class carping has over public debate. But ordinary, go-to-
work, taxpaying people are starting to notice that a great deal of
obscene and hideous things are happening in Chairman Ken's Workers'
Paradise.
Ken, Brian Paddick and Boris have all latched onto a funny little
wheeze of a soundbite: "We need to restore trust between the public
and the police."
In Ken and Paddick's case this simply means allowing people in
different 'communities' to demand different policing: If enough people
say they don't want their kids nicked for marijuana possession, then
the law of the land is dispensed with and a 'softly softly' approach
develops. This leads to an expansion of the drug culture in
underprivileged areas and the mass intoxication of already under-
achieving schoolchildren.
With Boris, it might just mean a return to the days when police fought
crime and were not merely a branch of social work. I can't see Ken's
mate, the super-liberal chief copper Sir Ian Blair liking that one
little bit. He and Boris have had a "frank and full exchange of
views," about it all, according to Boris. Sounds stormy to me.
The Conservative Party is traditionally the 'nasty party', and it'll
take a firm hand to steer us out of the current pigsty. Of course,
Tories are less fashionable than Tupperware or *The Black and White
Minstrel Show*, but as Duke of Wellington said (in the film version of
Waterloo, anyway) "there's always a time to cut cards with the Devil",
and for a lot of put-upon Londoners, that time may be now.