London Mayor Boris Johnson has now appointed five deputy mayors in various guises – messrs Barnes, Clement, Lewis, Malthouse and now Tim Parker too. Do you get the feeling that, just perhaps, he’s not that keen on actually doing the job of Mayor himself? After all, it’s not as if he’s given up his journalism commitments and he’s still hanging on as an MP (though for how long, who knows? But the extra money must be nice while you can get it).
Subscribe
-
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
-
Like us on Facebook
-
Subscribe to our feed
-
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Most Read
- The Falklands are under threat again and we can’t rely on America to save us
- Defining our future in Burnham Britain
- William Wallace writes: The case for higher taxes
- “Palestine should be run by Palestinians” so why won’t Britain reckon with what it did?
- Mathew on Monday: Ann Widdecombe, robust debate and the need to disagree agreeably
Search
Op-eds
-
If Andy Burnham isn’t the Messiah… Good (Roz Savage MP)
-
Vince Cable writes: The rebirth of council housing (Vince Cable)
-
Britain should confront history honestly, not selectively (Gavin Stollar)
-
An early win for affordable housing – now let councils build (Victor Chamberlain)
-
Defining our future in Burnham Britain (Gareth McAleer)
-
After Dark podcast on the R101 airship disaster
-
After the murder of Ann Widdecombe, we must all be more careful of the language we use in political life
-
Burnham starts with the low-hanging fruit
-
Soho Parish primary: Without this school it's all just tourists, isn't it?
-
The Joy of Six 1550
-
Political history points against early general elections
-
Working 9 to 5
-
Django Django: Cameos
-
Is Farage set to lose Clacton?
Recent Comments
David Allen
The case for higher taxes is blatantly clear, unless you are a politician seeking votes. Everything in Britain - the NHS, the courts, the prisons, defence, and...
FS People
@ Mick Taylor “The whole thrust of our complex and bewildering tax code IS to protect the rich. ” But it is not. We actually tax high earners more as a pr...- FS People
The defences of the triple lock are just bizarre. @Mick Taylor “You propose making that worse by stopping uprating pensions.” That is not what was sai... 
Pawel Urbanski
I agree that capacity is the problem, but I think we might be fixing the wrong end of it first. Right now thousands of affordable homes are going up under pl...
Jana
My memory of being brought up in a council house was that ordinary working people lived in council houses and wealthy people lived in private houses. Today, the...
2 Comments
I thought this always was going to be the idea – that Johnson would be the front-man, but he was a “good delegator”. It actually makes a great deal of sense to me that the directly elected mayor system should work like this – the mayor constitutionally makes the decisions, but much of the practical decision making is done by people appointed who have the technical knowledge. It’s quite clear that mayoral elections aren’t necessarily going to put someone with the necessary technical expertise in the mayoral chair.
As an opponent of the mayoral system, I’d prefer it if appointments of the technicians who really make the decisions were in the hands of a representative council, and the representative council also has the final agreement on those decisions rather than one person.
But on the whole I think the mayoral system is safer if it becomes established that the mayor is to some extent a constitutional monarch, so I wouldn’t knock Johnson for moving it that way.
Didn’t a certain high profile Liberal Democrat personality get into a lot of trouble with the party’s Federal Executive for appointing a lot of Deputies with no obvious redeeming talents other than being good mates with said personality?