BORIS JOHNSON: Come on London! Time to kick out high-crime, high-tax, ... trends now
Imagine your elation at the news. It’s almost a week from now, round about midnight on Friday, and the cameras are crossing to City Hall, London, where the votes have finally been counted.
The candidates are lining up on stage, and you notice a wild-eyed look, as though they have just learned something they can’t quite believe.
As the Returning Officer of the Greater London Authority reads out the total votes, there is a catch in her voice, the slight tremble of one who knows she is about to make history, and take the political world by storm. As she blurts it out, you give an involuntary yelp of startled ecstasy.
It’s actually happened! Londoners have defied the odds and from across the 600 square miles of the greatest city on earth they have turned out to vote for common sense and justice. The doughnut has revolted. The hole has stayed at home.
The people of the UK capital have voted to evict the high-crime, high-tax, do-nothing Mayor Khan. They have voted for an end to the persecution of motorists and the indulgence of knife-wielding gangsters.
You can do nothing with a Khan’t-do spirit, says Boris Johnson, here going head to head with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan on the Elizabeth Line in 2022
They have canned Khan and put Sadiq a la poubelle. They have defied the pundits and voted for the can-do pragmatism and work ethic of Susan Hall, the excellent former leader of Harrow council and the candidate for – the Conservative Party!
You find your eyes almost watering with joy, as you try to take in the implications. No more ULEZ – a plan that was never intended for outer London, and no more of the sinister pay-per-mile plan, Khan’s barely concealed agenda to impose road charging on anyone using so much as an inch of London roadspace.
No more wokery from City Hall, a lefty finger-wagging culture so pervasive that the Khan mayoralty simultaneously discourages Metropolitan Police Officers from stopping and searching for knives, while encouraging the police to tell a Jewish man — as they did on film last week — that he could not walk the King’s highway because his very appearance might cause offence.
And no more Khan! No more of that mixture of cockiness and truculence, the endless mulish not-me-guvvery that has characterised his mayoralty.
You listen to the shock of the media, the funereal tone of some of the broadcasters, and you jump out of your chair, and rush around the room, beating your chest with excitement.
A Tory victory in London! Is it possible? Could it actually happen? You may think it unlikely, when you look at the polls — but then that is exactly what Labour wants you to think. Khan’s whole strategy is to create a sense of inevitability, so that he glides to victory like a lump of driftwood on the electoral tide.
He wants you to think he is unstoppable, and that there is no point in Londoners turning out to vote against him — and that is exactly where he is wrong.
I have never met a Londoner who was actively happy with the Khan Mayoralty, or an investor who thought the Khan City Hall was doing a good job in championing the UK capital.
Today, to judge by the mood on the doorstep, there is hardly a household that positively yearns for a third Khan term, and four more years of his grumpy indolence; and there are plenty of areas where he
