Russell Seitz

May 03, 2008

TORY !  TORY!  TORY!

43’s New Labour pals went to bed to rest up for Red Ken’s customary May Day parade, but arose instead to a waking Walpurgis nightmare.

  Over an hour has passed since Boris Johnson magnanimously accepted demotion from Editor of The Spectator to Mayor Of London.
Though he is the first Conservative elected to that office there are as yet no reports of the Guards massing for a charge into Fulham to raze Hurlingham Stadium , and restore the hallowed ground beneath to its rightful use as a polo field. Still, the night is young and elsewhere in Britain, Labor is reeling at the greatest local council losses in more than a generation.

The overthrow of Red Ken Livingston reminds us that even the most entrenched apparat can fall when the nanny state   fails to protect the electorate it unsubtly oppresses. London has seen crime rates soar despite a panopticon of surveillance cameras and social legislation that has turned police into common scolds at the expense of their attention to deterring violent crime. How London’s example plays in Scotland remains to be seen, but If Boris can undo some of the worst intrusions of Labour’s social engineers, there is hope of the UK becoming an example to Mayors like Bloomberg who seem to want their cities shunned.

Since BJ is a native New Yorker, his electability gives new hope to this magazine’s constituency. It is not too late to lure him to the Republican convention, where the infinite superiority of his front bench rhetoric will send the usual platform crawlers fleeing for cover, as he captures the terrorism issue by invoking his great grandsire’s Grande Porte terribilita. How many neocons can threaten to turn the Turks loose on al-Qaeda?  It’s enough to make Obama tremble in his borrowed Somali finery.

If 43 can parlay a career in undergraduate baseball management into the stuff of executive greatness, why can’t a Slough High captain of school capable of writing his own speeches ? The Speccie is infinitely better reading than The Congressional Record , and Boris even has experience of editing our glorious Proprietor, whose career as Chief of Protocol would seem assured , if only we can persuade BJ that the Special Relationship must be watered with the pink gin of patriots from both sides of the Pond.

We’re Over Here, Boris-  just six hours away , and TAS Washington Spectator is as sorely in need of a rewrite as the rest of the District Of Columbia—O Addison, where is thy Steele ?