Andrew Gilligan

For those who think there could never be a worse disaster than HS2, or hope that governments can learn from their mistakes, I have disappointing news. Later this month, ministers will unveil a future platinum medallist in the Fiasco Olympics: a project which even their own infrastructure watchdog calls ‘unachievable’. A new, high-speed line between Liverpool and Manchester which will actually take longer than the existing rail service. Called Northern Powerhouse Rail, this section alone will cost a claimed £17 billion (in reality, perhaps £30 billion). It will be a high-speed railway on which trains can never reach high speeds, because the stations are too close together.

Readers of progressive newspapers have occasionally been invited to admire a man called Miqdaad Versi. He was the subject of a respectful 2018 profile in the Guardian for his 'personal mission to confront…the Islamophobia of the British press' one complaint at a time. Versi's 'spreadsheet of shame' showed 'how flagrantly British papers get their news about Muslims wrong'. Alas, a large number of this piece’s claims about the corrections supposedly forced on shameful British newspapers by Versi were themselves wrong and had to be corrected at the bottom of the online version. That is, as it happens, a truer reflection than the Guardian intended of the organisation which Versi set up, and where he remains 'lead strategist'.

In Robert Jenrick’s fare-dodging video, it felt a little unfair for the Tories’ checked-shirt crusader to include that shot of the Tube station assistant with his feet up. The guy was probably just on his break, and you don’t blame the infantry for the failings of the generals. But on a wider level, the mayor, Sadiq Khan, and TfL management have had their own feet up for nine years now, with results that people are starting to notice.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10RzzluJFEQ Today’s London is not, of course, New York in the 1970s. But parts of the London Underground are looking rather like it. Each time I’ve travelled on the Bakerloo Line recently, the train has been covered in graffiti, inside and out. It doesn’t seem to be the same on any other line – yet.

According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve certainly become a lot more excitable since he took over. I like to imagine the Mayor of London, late at night, combing the thesaurus for fresh superlatives to bugle his ‘unprecedented programme of far-reaching improvements’ for the taxi trade (allowing black cabs in more bus lanes) or his ‘bold package of measures’ to revive street markets (creating a London Markets Board and an interactive map). One release even panted that Khan had ‘personally scrutinised’ the New Year’s Eve fireworks display ‘to make the acclaimed event the most exciting yet’.

Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we? If a senior adviser to my old boss, Boris Johnson, had celebrated John Smith’s heart attack, mocked Gordon Brown for talking about his dead son and referred to senior members of the Labour party as ‘scum’, how long do you think that person would have kept their job? Thankfully, however, this particular mini-Trump, the former reality TV star Amy Lamé, was appointed (as London’s ‘night czar’) by a Labour mayor, and her -targets were all Tories, so it’s fine. As, apparently, are Lamé’s years of virtue-signalling on social media for higher spending and taxes while arranging to receive her own City Hall salary through a personal company so she can pay as little tax as possible.

Why isn’t the mayor making mincemeat of Ken? Politicians do love their five-point plans, ten-point plans, 12-point plans, don’t they? Most of the points are usually Polyfilla, the political equivalents of ‘Your call is important to us,’ but at least there’s a nice round number involved. Last week, however, with characteristic originality, Boris Johnson unveiled British politics’ first-ever nine-point plan. Unkind critics sniped that it was a ten-point plan with one point missing. Even for better-disposed observers, such as myself, Boris’s Nine Commandments — intended as the foundation of his re-election campaign — leave something to be desired.

This summer’s election to choose a new deputy regional sales manager of the Co-op, sorry, a new leader of the Labour party, has rather obviously failed to set the nation on fire. But one level below the sundry Eds and assorted Milibands, there’s a much clearer and more interesting battle for Labour’s soul. In the party’s highest-membership region, London, the graphic designers and diversity outreach consultants who make up Labour’s new industrial base are choosing a mayoral candidate to oppose Boris Johnson in 2012.

Andrew Gilligan says the new coalition must reformulate our relationship with moderate Muslims — and marginalise the extremists for good One of the unsung heroes of this year’s election campaign was the Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, Jim Fitzpatrick. Alone in his party, Mr Fitzpatrick stood up before the election and said something that everyone in east London Labour knew, but no one else had the guts to put on record. To my newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, and Channel 4’s Dispatches, he blew the whistle on the way that, in his words, the Tower Hamlets Labour party had been infiltrated and ‘corrupted’ by a radical Islamist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, rather as the Militant Tendency operated in the 1980s.