EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

Excellent :)

Could be IT incompetency and his phone or PC got hacked or malwared?

Interesting stuff but I don't buy the Moscow time claim.

From a piece on today's Times

I've seen this before but always worth a reminder

pretty sure there's space for ",and fucked a pig".

A heartening amount of anti-Boris material seems to be surfacing. Is something happening?

https://reaction.life/boris-must-go/

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-johnson-a-joke-trump-white-house-officials-eu-diplomats-kerr_uk_59a5370ce4b0446b3b86408b

Is something happening?

We have a lame duck PM, so the Tory party are in full on shadow leadership election mode.

There are all sorts of untold secrets about Johnson that if they got into the public domain would see him off immediately. He's a major scandal-in-waiting. (Not that he isn't already, if you know what I mean.)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/22/boris-johnson-940-million-system-to-blame

The vast majority of that expenditure was introduction of a hire bike scheme, replacing the "bendy buses", and figuring out what to do with the Olympic stadium. None of which I particularly disagree with.

The hire bike scheme was far too expensive and the allegation is that Johnson was quite unnecessarily giving a lot of money to his privatised cronies at Serco.

Edit: Forgot about articulated buses. I could well imagine that if Johnson hadn't been so useless and hands-off, he might even have made a go of that, but he lost on all significant points of resemblance to the old Routemasters, and the resulting product was a bus that isn't loved at all (I think that's actually only because it doesn't have a loveable 'face' like the old ones) and doesn't perform particularly well (problems with air-conditioning are well-documented, although I can't imagine that they can't be solved; the biggest problem is with the engines).

I always liked Routemasters, too, but by the time Johnson took office the time for a policy he nicked out of Livingstone's 2000 programme had well and truly passed. Livingstone didn't deliver on it (and on its sister policy, of keeping conductors on buses) for several reasons, not the least of which was that his powers as Mayor were insufficient to finance the development of a good new bus (see his long dispute with Gordon Brown over Tube privatisation), which didn't hold Johnson back. It was a classic example of a manifesto promise that hadn't been thought through.

I haven't studied the Olympic Stadium process in any detail, but I'm sure there's a well-informed breakdown of it somewhere, quite possibly in Hodge's report.

I always liked Routemasters, too, but by the time Johnson took office the time for a policy he nicked out of Livingstone's 2000 programme had well and truly passed. Livingstone didn't deliver on it

Is that true? My memory is hazy, I always believed that the bendy busses was a project driven by Livingstone rather than him wanting to replace them.

Livingstone had the Routemaster policy long before articulated buses came into widespread use. He was convinced by TfL buses that articulated buses were the future. Of course, this about-turn was widely seen as a betrayal and no doubt dented his popularity considerably.

Aah - I see, Bendy busses were his (tfls?) solution to the original Routemaster. I misread your comment that he (and then Boris) wanted a solution to replace the Bendies.

They weren't his solution, no. They were the solution settled on by TfL which he initially tried to oppose. He was eventually convinced of it, but he had already been so adamant about Routemasters (the famous 'ghastly, dehumanised' quote) that he couldn't communicate why he changed his policy. Johnson reheated the policy partly because he thought there would be mileage in attacking Livingstone over this.

Just spotted this by Owen Jones:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/29/theresa-may-sack-boris-johnson-britain

Sadly Owen Jones adding his support to something is unlikely to make it a triumph.

Nobody loses all the time. :)

he pretty much admits to this in the opening paragraph.

Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if (Boris) Johnson was behind all of this trash-talking. He's in a role that he that he absolutely doesn't want. He's not interested in it, he isn't capable of doing it, and he's never going to meet the country's collective expectations. He can only fail. Hanging on for a couple of years while his reputation gets terminally trashed doesn't seem like a good idea. So why not get out of it? Taking a bit of flak now is surely a price worth paying if he is then freed of his (grown-up) responsibilities and able to 'take back control' of his own image. He's very good at that, and there is no doubt that would put him in a much better position by the time the Article 50 countdown has completed. A serious statesman with a genuine interest in the long-term future of the country would stay around to make it work; Johnson only cares about himself.

Ah, my interest in Owen's opinion is such that I didn't read it!

lol. can't blame you there.

Bit jargon-y, but interesting academic piece
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544