London

A week that began with an insane decision from the European Court of Human Rights has come to an end with a sensible decision from Ofcom. The Iranian government’s propaganda channel in London, Press TV, has just had its license to broadcast revoked. Insomniac Islamists will no longer be able to enjoy their weekly dose of programmes presented by the likes of Lauren Booth, Tariq Ramadan or Derek Conway. And of course they will now forever miss The Real Deal with George Galloway. On that show you could see such treats as Galloway interviewing ‘President’ Ahmadinejad.

It looks like the May's election for Mayor of London will be a close run thing. A new poll today from YouGov has Ken Livingstone two points ahead of Boris Johnson – a big turnaround from the eight point lead Boris had in June: Ken shouldn't be popping any champagne corks yet, of course. His lead is well within the poll's margin of error, and there's three and a half months to go before election day. But he's certainly looking more likely to topple Boris than he did seven months ago. So why the change? YouGov's Peter Kellner has a good article on the poll's details here, but two key points jump out from the numbers: 1. Labour voters are getting behind Ken.

Boris Johnson was very well behaved this evening when he appeared before the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs. He stayed off the topics of Europe and tax and instead confined his remarks to London, saying that he wanted the capital to be an example of ‘cost-cutting, one nation Conservatism’. Those MPs inside the room say the performance was classic Boris, as one put it ‘he left no erogenous zone unstroked’.   Afterwards, Mark Reckless, a north Kent MP, asked the Mayor a sceptical question about his plan for a new airport in Kent. In the questions, I understand that Boris also took the chance to express his support for Rebecca Harris’s daylight saving times bill.   Interestingly, the turn-out for Boris was decent but not massive.

A week may be a long time in politics, but it is no time at all in protest. As the inhabitants of Parliament Square have demonstrated, even a decade is as nothing so long as you have a constantly morphing cause, a council with no balls, and a small but steady stream of acolytes. Last weekend I watched a bridal party sneak in through the side entrance of St Paul's Cathedral. This weekend I went back, curious to see whether the protest that had kept them from entering through the main door had located a point yet. Walking up from Fleet Street the first sight that greets the visitor is a large banner saying 'root out usury.' A surge of Presbyterian nostalgia powered through me. Perhaps I could identify with this protest after all?

The Werritty case has made everyone who believes that government is controlled by lobbyists and tycoons slaver. The Guardian screams that Ministers held more than 1,500 meetings with corporate representatives in the first 10 months of the coalition, which presumably the newspapers’ readers know to disapprove of. But how many unionists did Labour meet after a year in office — and how many corporations? The party that declared itself "relaxed" about profit-making presumably met one or two profit-makers. Or did Ed Balls, when he was City minister, stay away from the Square Mile?

A few months ago I hosted a debate at my think tank with one of the key Tahrir Square leaders. After his talk about Egypt, he warned the audience: the protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak were not just an Egyptian or Middle Eastern phenomena; it could – and, he said, would – spread to the West. For the youth of today, he argued, feel disempowered, empoverished and betrayed. As protests spread from New York to London and other European capitals, it seems that Egyptian protester may have been right. Today's efforts to occupy the London stock exchange failed but protesters remain on the grounds of St Paul's Cathedral. Whatever happens in the next days, protests like these are likely to appear, disappear and appear again.

If anyone had any doubts about just how personal the 2012 London mayoral campaign is going to be, they should have been dispelled by Ken Livingstone’s speech to Labour conference today. Ken claimed that the Mayor had ‘got what he wished for’ in above average unemployment and accused him of standing for a ‘privileged minority’. He then went on to draw an equivalence between Boris’s student antics and those of the rioters: “What is the difference between the rioters, and a gang of over-privileged arrogant students vandalising restaurants and throwing chairs through windows in Oxford? Come on Boris – what’s the moral difference between your Bullingdon vandalism as a student and the criminality of the rioters?