When he’s gone too far – eg his attempt to get populist on the Olympics it has gone very badly for him and he cannot afford to do that too many more times without it being noticed that he is incontinent of bullsh*t.

FRor those of us who want rid of him (and I am including the LDs here obviously) the only thing to be done now is to bide time and not (and this is where I would scold LDs) to follow him down the road of empty populism.

Next time round Boris will have no novelty value and if the election is about big and serious issues he ought to lose.

In an ideal world he’d lose to a unified candidate of the progressive left of centre and not to someone with a narrow party label, but I guess that will remain my dream and not the reality.

What’s dodgy about the elected government of Venezuela, anyway? Hardly Saudi Arabia.

So it’s alright to do deals with dodgy regimes as long as we share the proceeds and even make a profit?

Very Lib Dem.

[Similarly, I can’t say how I know this, but the environment officer issue is definitely not a case of “we need time to think of the right person”; it’s more a case of “nobody qualified to do this will do it, as the whole GLA environment team are about to quit, the whole thing will be a disaster, and they’ll get the blame…”

Doubling bus fares for poor people and axing a deal which got London cheaper oil during an oil price crisis (and which my fellow Boris-Watcher Tom has calculated may have even left us in profit)?

Antagonising some of the funders of the Rise festival by axing its core anti-racism message, so they’ve withdrawn their funding and thus necessitated a greater proportion coming from the taxpayer? (Oh and clearly having absolutely no idea that the Rise change was happening, even after it had appeared in the national press.)

Having a ‘forensic audit’ looking into allegations of cronyism run entirely by, er, Tory party cronies?

Seems a funny definition of “exactly the right things” to me.

Of course, he will have to have a thick skin as lots of people take their pot shots, and try to score party political points. But, for my money, he is doing exactly the right things.

The Forensic Audit Panel in particular appears to be as worthy of its name as Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and deserves far more ridicule than the mild rollicking Mike has administered here.

You can make one fairly obvious judgement already, which is that Boris has to get a better grip on the mechanics of the job. ‘Big policy announcements’ or not, if you’re incapable of actually implementing them what’s the point? Who in his appointments has the necessary skills?

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