Boris Johnson, Part 1

We had a two-week reprieve of Riley being the mayor of the episodes.

And now we're back on trans girl time.

And it's time to revisit

the overarching plot of the first season of the show.

Riley.

When's it happening?

What's going on?

Can we get a date range

for your transition?

Yeah.

The thing is, if you actually do, it becomes like exponentially funnier and less funny at the same time in a kind of like black hole sort of way.

It is the only way to take the power from us.

That's kind of true.

Yeah.

You know how they always say in schools, right?

If you're getting bullied, you just transition, you know, and it just,

you know.

Like the only way to stop yourself being bullied is to do all kinds of like stupid trans bullshit.

I don't even like doing it, but I tell you what, I'm not getting bullied, you know?

Yeah, that's right.

At least not in a place where you don't want to be.

Yeah.

You have to walk between the genders like a Zen master walking through a rainstorm without getting wet, basically.

That's how you avoid bullying.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

You have to become the Zen Sunni Duncan Ideco goala of gender.

I mean, if you read the later books,

there's definitely some like polyamory that that goa is into, you know, like a special

and welcome

to another episode.

I'm just going to say, yeah, Dune update.

I just finished the second book, so I'll keep everyone updated as I go through the books.

I just finished Messiah.

So the Dune updates will continue for a few more episodes at least.

Are you hoping for a pretty regular time?

Like, oh, these are going to be some normal sci-fi books.

Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm really, what I was thinking about is I'll be really, I'll be really, really upset if I'm suddenly catapulted thousands and thousands of years into the future, even past the future of the books, into

a different kind of time with the same guys being alive because he's turned into a worm.

We've made a horrible mistake because this isn't the Dune read-along podcast.

No dupes, no mayors.

This is the mayor one.

It's no gods, no mayors.

It's Nova.

It's Matty.

And it's Riley.

Hello.

Hi.

And it's my turn in the driver's seat.

I'm the mayor of this episode and the next episode.

And I thought we're coming out of the gate with heavy hitters.

We had friggin Giuliani.

We had Rob Ford.

And now I think it's time, given that it's my turn for someone who, under whose rule I kind of like had parts of my life, someone I know about intimately.

It's none other than Boris Johnson, who is mayor of London.

Excuse me.

November.

November.

Can I ask you something?

Do you mean Alexander Boris defeffel Johnson?

Because

it's so interesting.

I didn't know that you had joined led by donkeys.

And, you know, at any moment, like a sort of like armed police response team will be like crashing through your windows to like haul you to Belmarsh prison.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I, you know, I'm, I'm very against the use of the carceral state in general, right?

I'm willing to make an exception if led by donkeys.

Maddie, just to fill you in, led by donkeys, it's like, it's like a kind of version of, it's like a low-effort suburban version of Banksy.

So even lower effort than Banksy.

Okay.

For making kind of like points about like Brexit.

Yeah, do you remember like ad busters?

There are a lot like that.

Although, weirdly, I read an article about them and all of the people involved were hardcore activists.

They had been

diving into the sea in front of

oil vessels and stuff.

And now they're hanging banners behind Liz Truss or whatever.

Yeah.

I mean, at least the Adbusters guys were fighting cops at the WTO protests and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My friend had the poster that was the American flag, but all the stars were replaced with brand logos.

I need to speak of being American.

I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

I

I know how you feel, and I understand what I do to you.

Is it going to stop me doing this to you on Trash Feature?

No, it is not.

However, what I needed to say is one, I think it would be very funny if the first thing the Starmer administration does in solidarity with

the Tories who are so abused by them is declare Led by Donkeys a prescribed terrorist organization.

That to me would be very funny.

It is illegal to praise Led by Donkeys.

You have to start referring to them as like LBD

to make them sound a little more scary.

Or you have to say the prescribed terrorist group led by donkeys.

Like it becomes elite.

Like the guys who, like, when Liz Truss has like a low-rent speaking engagement, just drop a banner behind her that's like, I crashed the economy.

Essentially, that is like, yeah, where it's illegal to associate with them.

The second thing was, Maddie and Nova, I don't know if you know this.

I'm so, so, so sorry for doing this to you, Nova.

I, I, I went to Adbusters camp when I was 15.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

What?

What?

Yeah.

I had no idea you had such a like

an activist upbringing.

I didn't.

I drew

on a mattress shooting a gun at a Nike logo.

Yeah, you're in like an adbusters training camp in the Libyan desert, you know?

Yeah,

running through tires that have all had like the Michelin scraped off of them.

Yeah, the Mu ad Jadeen.

Yeah.

No,

So, no,

my parents wanted me to attend.

If you've never listened to Glue Factory, you'll have heard me talk about this before.

My parents wanted me to attend something called the United World College System, which is like George Soros asked.

Yeah, and they thought that a good way to do this would be like, because there's one that's in like the west coast of Canada.

called the Pearson School.

And it's like a magnet school or like a Montessori school for like, you know, teens, basically.

And it's sort of, it's like a campus in the woods.

woods and like you know it's it's all very it's like so in order to go to like free-range schooling at Professor X's school for like troubledly autistic Canadian teens you had to go to a Libyan desert training camp for adbusters in order to establish your like woke credentials except it's on the tar sands it's not in the desert what happened is i think my my parents were like okay they offer like a summer course So why don't you try that?

I don't think they understood that the summer course was just happened to be at the school.

It wasn't affiliated with the school.

And the school was, this course was called the Pearson Seminar on Youth Leadership, and it was taught by people who are now DEI consultants.

But for 15, and the courses you could do there over the summer included an introduction to culture jamming, which is like how to do ad busters but yourself, like how to bust your own ads.

I've been wondering how every time I'm around your house, like all of the ads and bus shelters and stuff have been busted.

And I've been wondering who's been doing that.

Apparently it's called culture jamming.

I didn't know that before that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

They also, there was a lesson on how not to be racist where they had a

like they gave you a post-apocalyptic scenario.

And they were like, all right, you can, you're in a survival bunker.

You can bring in a pharmacist.

You can bring in like a manager.

You can bring in a social worker and a criminal or whatever.

And then you were like, okay,

I guess we're not going to bring in the criminal.

And they were like, oh, yeah, well, the criminal, the criminal was white and a financial criminal.

I can't operate on that man.

He's my son.

Yeah, basically like that.

And then there was another one on how not to be homophobic where they like kicked it off.

They kicked it off with like, it's like, okay, everybody go around the circle and let's all say a hurtful word you've heard gay people called.

I'll start ass fuckers.

It was taught by Rob Ford?

I mean, I'll say this.

Clearly, this worked, right?

Given how like racist and homophobic you are.

Yeah.

And

it's one of these things that seared into my mind forever, which is like the guy leading the anti-homophobia, who's not himself a homophobe.

He's a very like keen anti-homophobe.

But he has a...

He's in fact a homo.

He had a soul patch and like a beanie with a brim.

And

he was like a...

Yeah, he was like a ska guy.

He was like a ska guy.

Oh,

jeez.

And so I spent two weeks.

The rudest way for a boy to be is a homophone.

And so I was there for several weeks, very confused, because I didn't know why I was there.

And I didn't understand why I was being taught what I was being taught.

Because I just thought this would help me get into the prestigious high school because I was still in my like teen libertarian era.

As I try to hold this podcast,

I just thought you might like to know about it.

And then I have a segue after your observations.

I have two observations.

And my first observation is this is not like the like some of the podcasts we'll get to where like there won't necessarily be a lot about the actual mayor because it's quite like thin grawl and we're having to stretch it with like podcasting bullshit.

This guy actually did stuff.

But the second observation is that it may be, is it is it too much?

Is it a hippo violation if I say that we record these immediately after Riley has therapy

um i just like i gotta i got us i gotta i'm gonna get us back on track are you ready are you ready okay let's go let's go let's go okay here we go interesting story riley what's interesting about it to me is that little boy grew up to be one of the three hosts of the no gods no mares podcast

yeah welcome to an episode of that by the way i'm so sorry to derail us i just i just remembered about camp adbusters and thought you might like to know about

i i understand how intrusive trauma can be

Riley's been in the jail of being the host that keeps it on track for too long, and now he's unleashed.

Speaking of the Adbusters US flag with all the logos and stuff, Alexander Boris Defeffel Johnson, born in New York City, which makes him an American citizen.

He was like the first or like second American citizen to be prime minister of the UK.

He had to renounce it because they started taxing him.

But how?

He's never made that much money.

Capital gains tax, I believe.

Yeah.

But so he's from this like very weird tough background his uh his dad stanley uh deeply insane stupid and apparently violent man who used to work for the world bank had a real like fixation on overpopulation which you know used to be in vogue back in the day it's something boris has written about as well but you know made enough doing this and like had enough accumulated wealth from shit like his grandfather being like you know one of the young turks or whatever to send his son to Eton, the like, you know, sort of like expensive breeding ground for future prime ministers.

And from there to classics at Oxford, the Bullingdon Club.

We may have heard of the Bullingdon Club.

This is a kind of drinking society that engages in class war from the other side.

Oh, I mean, I think, and, you know, famously shot Barry Lyndon in the leg, which was not very nice of him to do.

Absolutely.

I saw that 121 Savage video about that.

Yeah.

So about the Bullingdon Club, though, there's this element of it that gets under discussed, which is that when Boris was at Oxford,

that was around when this huge resurgence in drinking and dining clubs happened.

They'd fell on out of favor in most of the 20th century.

And it was in the 1980s with like, you know, with Thatcher, to be perfectly honest, right?

And with this...

renewed worship of

wealth and status and class in not in a way that hadn't happened in britain before obviously it's britain but in this turbocharged thatcherite way that's when drinking society every college rediscovered that it had like four drinking societies and and the form that these take is you and your most annoying friends uh get together dress up in like white tie get very very drunk and like vandalize a restaurant and sort of like so it's like stumps like stumble down the street burning 50 pound notes in front of like homeless people okay so it's like british skull and bones basically.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Less, less secretive formally.

Okay.

But yeah.

Yeah.

And also skull and bones is channels people into the intelligence services.

So they need to be like, they need to sort of have ambitions beyond just like puking in a really funny way.

Yeah,

it still does some of the same functions of like mutual blackmail.

This is where the like David Cameron fucking a pig's head story comes in, for instance.

I believe that was at a different party.

Yeah, sure, but it's all part of the same ecosystem.

And so Boris is a member of this with David Cameron.

And George Osborne.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

Like very, very close to all these people who went to Eton together and like then went to Oxford together.

And the thing about Boris's youth, right, is that by everyone's account, he has this combination of extreme ambition.

and also complete laziness.

So he wants to be like, you know, world king, as he says at one point, and is elected president of the Oxford Union and is completely undistinguished because he doesn't want to do any work.

Yeah.

Even though it's like the stuff that is

not that difficult.

It's one of the things that you can kind of do with your eyes closed.

He just doesn't bother to do it because he thinks he's above it.

And to be honest, it's something that like.

the entire rest of his life has borne him out on.

It's like sort of like he has taken off the tough training weights and been like, you know what, all of this bullshit pretend work of putting the square into the square hole.

I don't actually need to do any of this and I'll still get all of the nice things without having to do it.

And he's kind of been proven right time and time again.

Yeah.

And also the other the other thing to note is like the way he went to university.

Oxford is designed to produce people who are very good at bullshitting or very good at like running and winning elections.

Like

the degrees that most of these people take, politics, philosophy, and economics is made to, it's not, you don't get a deep understanding of any of them.

You learn how to bullshit your way through a conversation about more or less whatever.

You don't learn anything.

Well, I mean, Boris's degree is in classics, right?

What's it's

like, whatever the fuck they call it at Oxford, right?

And the thing about a classics degree is that it allows you to-moderns because it's an old school.

They call it

moderns.

We got a clean one.

They call it moderns.

Moderns.

But like what it allows you to do is to quote like sententiae or like, you know, to do a bit of like Greek poetry in a way that astounds people and sort of like triggers the like British class system, like forelock tugging deference lobe.

Essentially, it's a way for a TAF to hard reset anyone around them.

Yeah, he has a kind of like blindsight vampire power, I guess.

Yeah.

In this respect.

But so he graduates with

an upper second about which he is very mad because he didn't do any work and has this kind of like shiftless, directionless youth and then goes straight into journalism, which is like, it seems like it's going to be less work, right?

And he gets a job at the Times through a family connection, immediately gets fired for making up quotes and attributing them to his godfather, which this is, as far as I can tell, the only consequence he has ever faced in his life is getting fired from the Times.

Yeah, it's like when

Trump gave his Bitcoin speech and was just like, my uncle graduated, my uncle went to MIT, you know, a very smart guy.

You'd all love him.

He graduated tremendously.

Yeah, he graduates bigly.

And he makes a bunch of quotes and attributes them to his uncle who graduated MIT tremendously.

Yeah, and it's such a like kind of laziness thing of being like, well, the quote doesn't say what I want it to say.

So I'll just invent one that does.

Doing that to your own godfather is also insane to me.

Yeah.

I mean, famously, A Guy You Shouldn't Betray, they made like three movies about it.

Three movies about that, yeah.

But so he immediately then finds another job at the Telegraph.

These are two like very prominent conservative like national newspapers, by the way.

Also, you go back to like how this happens,

the roots of that are also in Oxford, right?

Because what he does put effort into while he's at university is the Oxford Union.

Yeah, and being fun, being fun to drink with and be around, and being funny as well.

And so he knows how to, he knows how to campaign, how to schmooze, and how to, as you say, November, be funny and fun to be around.

So, you know, British journalists are like, well,

he has the blindside vampire power to to make a normal person just sort of compulsively bow to him.

Yeah.

And, and, but also the blindside power of someone who has like grown up in the same like environment as him to be like, Boris is an absolute laugh, actually.

Like, man's a riot.

And so people who like people like David Cameron or George Osborne, who like are trying to do the work hard and play hard thing of being like, yeah, I'm putting in the hard yards of being evil and also I like to party.

I just like also aware of of this guy who's doing like, you know, Animal House, essentially.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, let's not, as a podcast, announce ourselves as being above making people like you by being funny and nothing else.

I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to come out hard with that stance.

I would never go to a British public school to learn those skills and then kind of directionlessly fall into something that requires me to do that to people in order to make money.

You could do it anywhere to make people like you.

Doctor's office, therapist, party, guy at the store,

sexual partners.

It's the only way to do anything is to make them laugh.

And that's the only way to make a person like you.

And I think it's fine as a podcast.

We just admit that.

And Boris was right for doing it.

Yeah.

Well, the thing is, we're not doing it in order to become awful mayors, you know?

Not yet.

Yeah, we don't want to become mayors.

We just want to endlessly critique mayors.

Fuck off.

Oh, that was that was earnest.

Okay, like genuinely, like out of nowhere, just like instinctive hatred

So but so he gets this job at the telegraph and the telegraph send him off to to do some like essentially like rum springer to go to Brussels and write about the EU and well of course he wanted to be a war correspondent first and they were like we can't put you in any danger He was

killed immediately to find a helmet that big.

He's like, I want to have this kind of churchillian experience.

And they're like, you are the flabbiest man on earth.

Winston Churchill only got flabby later in life.

You can't do this.

And so instead he goes to Brussels and his kind of like specialism, his stock and trade, is writing these kind of scare stories about the EU, right?

That were kind of like.

I grew up with these as like constant background noise.

He wasn't the only one doing this.

Every paper had like a Brussels correspondent who was like, now these mad Eurocrats are going to try and like make it so the bananas have to be straight.

And they're going to teach your kids that they can't be straight and they have to be gay.

By the way, the bananas thing for American listeners, that was like the er

version of that column.

Like it's a real column.

Yeah.

It's a real column?

Absolutely.

Or shit like, oh, you won't be able to buy beer in pints anymore because of the EU.

So you'll have to buy it in like 550 milliliters.

The bananas would be easier to ship if they were straight.

I'll give them that.

This is true.

This is true.

Think about it.

How neatly you could pack a crate full of bananas if they were shit.

But like all of the scare stories that you get now about like migrants or whatever, you used to get those about the EU.

Yeah.

And this was like a sort of drumbeat for years.

And Boris like has said quite openly that he knew this was all shit, right?

That he was making this up.

He described this kind of style of journalism as like throwing a brick over a garden fence and like hearing a greenhouse shatter, you know?

And this worked out very well for him.

And the Telegraph then employed him as a columnist.

Incidentally, in the course of this, one of his friends from school, and we have to, we have a name alert here, Darius Guppy.

No!

Darius Guppy.

Darius Guppy.

The fun thing about Etonians is that if you think that's a funny name because it's like the, you know, like the fish, like the nickname for a fish, a guppy, it's because that guy's grandfather, Lechmir Guppy, discovered the fish.

Oh, discover the guppy.

How did he discover a guppy?

I don't know.

He typified the guppy.

I'm putting him in the Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge Memorial.

That name's actually a guy's name, Hall of Fame.

Yeah, Darius Guppy.

So Darius Guppy was a guy that Boris went to Eaton with.

He was kind of like a,

I don't know, I guess you'd call him like a rake or possibly a criminal.

Call him a fish?

Yeah, he was being written about by a News of the World tabloid journalist.

And he called Boris in a phone call that I think Boris recorded.

No, like a third guy recorded to get compromise on Boris, asking Boris for this guy's address so that he could have goons beat him.

A mayor loves a goon.

That's one of the things that we're learning.

Yeah, so we need a goon stinger.

I mean, honestly, like the mayor with the fewest goons so far appears to be counterintuitively Giuliani.

Genuinely, yeah.

Because his dad was in the goon life.

Yeah, that's right.

Well, I mean, Giuliani had the NYPD,

which was sort of it's sort of like thickly laden with goons yeah but like he you need like personal goons personal like for extra legal gooning so darius guppy had goons boris didn't have goons right and darius guppy was like why did darius guppy have goons he's a i don't know

whose dad invented a fish Yeah, he was just some guy, but like,

from this, he had some goons, and

he wanted to have this guy beaten up for writing about him.

By the way, the way this guy talks is very, very funny.

He's recorded as saying, like, this guy has got my blood up, Boris, and I will stop at nothing to get my revenge.

Unclear for what.

And so Boris is like, well, what are you going to do to him?

Because I don't want it to come back on me if he's beaten.

And Darius Guppy says, he won't be seriously hurt.

He's going to get like a broken limb or a broken arm.

Nothing you didn't suffer in rugby.

Which is just an insane, criminal series of things to say.

And Boris is just like, yeah, okay, I will get you his address.

Nothing serious.

I'm just going to snap his arm in half.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a normal thing for to happen to a person because actually in the full moon, I gained the strength of a guppy.

But the thing is, Guppy is, if you look at the transcript, Guppy is like hyping his goons to Boris.

Like what he says is, nothing which you didn't suffer in rugby, okay, but he will get scared.

And that is what I want him to do.

I want him to get scared.

I want him to have no idea who is behind it.

And I want him to realize that he's fucked someone off.

And whoever he's fucked off is not the sort of person he wants to mess around with.

Because I guarantee you, Boris, I guarantee you, these people are, you know, if someone hurts their boss or threatens their boss, I promise you, it's just total sort of, it's like they're dogs.

They're like Alsatians or Rottweilers.

They love their masters.

They are affectionate towards them.

They are evil bastards to everyone else.

I feel like that could easily come back to Boris, though.

It's like...

Yes.

Oh my God, the guppy goons.

They're coming around the corner with a baseball bat.

I've been beaten up by like two guys in tweeds who could possibly have given up my location.

I like you saying this directly into a tape recorder, also, apparently.

Yeah, yeah.

Also, by the way,

I love the contempt for the guys that do the beating.

It's like, oh yeah, all

the guys who do the beating are dogs.

This will never come back on me, Darius Guppy.

But so the guy, even though Boris says he's going to get him his address, nothing comes of it.

The guy is not beaten.

And Darius Guppy goes to prison for an unrelated but massive fraud.

Yeah, the fraud that he was going to have that guy beaten up and then didn't.

It was a, no, it was, it was, he was like doing like, I think it was like a benefit scam or something.

It was like 1.8 million pounds of fraud.

Fled to South Africa.

And when this comes out later in like 1995, Johnson is like, oh, yeah, I was joking.

I was like humoring him.

You know, you say some stupid shit on the phone with your friends.

And it's like, that does not feel like a good enough excuse.

We're recording a podcast.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

I just, I, I, because I saw that he moved to South Africa.

I did, I did a cursory Google being like, there's no way that this guy would possibly have been involved in the Equatorial Guinea coup.

Oh, Darius Guppy?

I mean, this guy who's just in South Africa with no obvious form of income, but like in a massive house and just kind of like with a desire to fuck around?

No.

So this is...

It's most, Constantia's most upmarket streets include mansions of stunning sides and grandeur with magnificent views of Cape Town and Table Mountain.

Among those who bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John, Michael Douglas.

But the oddity is that Constantia's

residents are also not that respectable.

Because not only did Mark Thatcher set up himself in palatial style here, but so did Spencer's ex-friend, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy, the neighbor of Simon Mann.

That's a weird fucking neighbor.

Also, the Spencer thing is funny because he got in a fistfight with Darius Guppy because Guppy fucked his wife, allegedly.

And so presumably they're like staring daggers at each other over these like South African lawns, you know?

Weird, weird vibes out there.

It was also,

it was a jewel, a jewel heist.

Crazy.

Imagine getting cucked by Darius Guppy.

Anyway,

so getting gucked.

Awful.

So Johnson is writing these kind of columns, right, which are later going to get him into trouble in the kind of like sneering imperialist mold.

He gets a job and then becomes editor of the spectator, the sort of like far-right magazine along the same lines.

Right.

And all of these columns will come out later in due course.

But, you know, it's sort of like nakedly like pro-colonialism, racist.

A thing that we are probably going to mention a lot is the fact that Boris Johnson humorously calls ping pong table tennis.

The thing about Wiff WAF is that WIFWAF is originally part of a much longer quote.

from a Boris Johnson column where he goes on this deranged sort of tangent about how China will never achieve anything because they have no authentic cultural achievements, and that Chinese like pianists perform, you know, like Western artists like Schubert very well, but there are no Chinese composers, and they didn't even invent table tennis because it was originally invented in Britain and called.

I think that's a really good way of understanding Boris, right?

Is that all of the kind of like comical stuff belies a sort of like broader, very racist point?

He is the avatar of the British class system.

He's the avatar of the British upper classes in trying to sell themselves to others of basically saying, hey, all of this, this like, this, this brutal colonial extraction, this contempt that we have for everybody who doesn't sort of fit in this sort of mode of life, you know, like talking about, as ever, it's like, you know, it's, he, the list of these sort of sort of most egregious sort of things that Boris wrote in those columns, like, oh, gay people are tank top bumboys, black people are piccaninnis with watermelon smiles.

Like, these are the words that these are the phrases.

These are verbatim quotes.

Yeah, these are verbatim quotes.

Fucking hell, that second one.

Yeah, these are verbatim quotes.

Jesus, the first one's kind of accurate.

Yeah.

These are verbatim quotes from Boris Johnson's columns, right?

They would get brought up again and again and again.

And, you know, but

what he's saying, I think, is, hey, all of this bigotry, if you're minded to it, we can have some fun with it.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's satirical.

It's, It's very Clarksonian, you know?

And I think the other thing is

you can deflate a lot of this criticism by kind of playing a professional oaf.

And if you just read the columns, if you have no conception of who this guy is, you don't look at his stupid fucked hair, you're like, oh, this guy's just like an ordinary racist.

But because he's kind of like blundering around, falling down manholes, getting stuck on zip lines and stuff, you go, oh, okay, well, he doesn't take himself seriously.

So like I don't have to either.

And maybe he doesn't, maybe he doesn't really mean it.

And if he does, then it's not really consequential, you know?

Yeah, I mean, what I remember, not to jump ahead too much in time, but I remember like in the campaign for prime minister, those quotes would be thrown around by people who supported and opposed him.

And the people who opposed him would take it seriously.

Like this person is basically a danger to minorities, which he was.

And

he continues to be.

And the people who supported him would be like, he's expressing the politics that I like in a way that's fun, you know?

And this, this allows him to get a number of guest spots on TV, most notably this

like news comedy show called Have I Got News for You?

How do we explain this to Americans?

Have I Got News for You is like a sort of a panel comedy show.

It's what people used to do for fun before podcasts were invented in this country.

I feel like as an American, we're pretty familiar with like the idea of like a quote-unquote panel show on British television.

Like we get it enough now.

We've seen them enough.

It's a panel show about that week's news with like a kind of like particularly political focus.

Okay, it's wait, wait, don't tell me.

Yeah.

The worst.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And it's comedy as well.

So you've got like stand-up comedians on there and sometimes politicians.

And because Boris is a politician who knows how to be funny, then they get him on Have I Got News For You a lot.

In large part, the kind of like his big break into public consciousness is because Angus Deaton, the then host of Have I Got News For You, gets caught in like a like a sort of tabloid sleaze scandal involving like Coke and sex workers.

And the BBC is like frightened, fires him.

And as a consequence, they have to get guest hosts, one of whom is Boris, because he just, you know, he's easily booked and he's funny.

And so he hosts this show for a couple of episodes, which are, you know, he's, he's like, the problem with Boris as well is that he actually is funny.

A lot of politicians think that they're funny, but like.

The man can construct and tell a joke, albeit a very racist one.

And so this makes him very popular.

At this point, he's still just a columnist or is he in politics officially?

He gets elected to a safe Tory seat in Henley-on-Thames.

Okay.

Like while he's still doing this.

This is also insane, but this is a thing that you can do is you can be a working journalist and an MP at the same time.

Yeah.

There are so many MPs that have shows on like friendly radio stations.

Yeah,

you have to do so little work to be an MP.

It's so wild.

Okay, so Henley on Thames is like outside of London.

Yeah.

It's like a town.

Okay.

Rowing happens there.

It's true.

It does.

This is also when he writes his novel, 72 Virgins, a sort of comedy, allegedly, that we did as a trash future live show.

Yeah, 72 Virgins is crazy because it's like he, in a weekend, was like, I quite like P.G.

Woodhouse, but what if P.G.

Woodhouse wrote about me?

Yeah.

Also, what if P.G.

Woodhouse was even more racist than he really was?

Yeah.

So he's fucking around living this kind of like fleneur-ish existence.

And before we get into what happens next, it's worth talking about the mayor of London as a job, right?

One of the fakest jobs in politics.

Yes, and no, right?

Because the UK doesn't have a long tradition of elected mayors.

What we do is councils typically.

Like the city of London has a lord mayor, some of whom I'm sure we'll talk about in future, but like that's that's a ceremonial job.

What London has is a council typically.

And in the 80s, the Greater London Council was very left.

It was led by this guy called Ken Livingston, sounding the future episode Claxon again.

And he was this like left-wing firebrand who annoyed Margaret Thatcher to the point that she abolished the Greater London Council.

And there was no like government of London after that for like 20 years.

It went from like traditional parishes to a kind of civil version of like religious parishes all surrounding the medieval city of London.

So it was like

the bishop of Southwark was like someone who mattered in London politics for quite a while.

And the only bit of it that like elected a mayor in any meaningful sense, that had a position called mayor was the medieval city.

And it was, as you say, Nova,

entirely ceremonial role, mostly a parade guy.

Yeah.

Like once the Normans had been dealt with, it was a parade job.

Yeah.

I would love a parade job, to be clear.

Like I, the city of London fascinates me.

And we'll get to that whenever we talk about like Dick Whittington or whatever.

I love the city of London as like a concept to think about.

I don't love it as a thing.

I love it as a concept to think about.

But so the Great London Council gets abolished and what you have instead are like borough councils.

There's like London's London's made up of a number of boroughs.

These are like overgrown parishes, right?

And so that's what you vote for.

That's what you elect.

Now, Ken Livingston exists in the like Labour Party for a long time.

He's like a serious leadership candidate for the Labour left.

And what happens is that New Labour, the right of the Labour Party, rat fuck the left.

Imagine that.

Come on.

Yeah.

For I assume the last time ever.

Yeah.

Tony Blair becomes leader of the Labour Party.

Tony Blair also hates Ken Livingston.

But the Labour Party has a manifesto commitment.

They had done a referendum even on restarting a greater London authority that has an elected mayor.

And they try and get their guy for it.

They try and keep Ken Livingston out.

Unsuccessfully, he becomes mayor of London.

He does two terms.

And it's basically, it's like the job for him, it's Ken's job.

And by 2008, he is running for his third four-year term.

We will do an episode on Ken Livingston.

Oh, yeah.

But he is when, coming into the context of the election, Ken is.

Like all the stuff he does is pretty popular.

He is personally at this point unpopular.

Yeah.

And as our promise, again, once more to all listeners, we will do every mayor.

That's right.

That's right.

But he's like Mr.

London.

By the way, I'm going to say we will do every mayor in order.

We just won't tell you what the order we're following is.

That's right.

That's right.

It's a bit murky to me how Boris becomes the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London.

There is this like quite prolonged selection process, which he enters literally at the last minute and then wins with something like 75% of the vote.

But the key context here is that in Britain, you you can kind of sense when a government's time is up because the media keeps telling you so.

Great system.

Yeah, it's not democratic, but when would you ever expect that of us?

So in 2008, there are like local elections and the mayoral election happening.

Labour are expecting to lose seats to the Tories and the Lib Dems.

If you remember, hashtag I agree with Nick.

That was then.

What a crazy thing.

Hashtag I agree with Nick.

Yes.

It really rolls off the tongue.

It's British policy.

Yeah, this was the era of like highly paid consultants working on stuff like this.

So London as a whole, right, always votes Labour, but there is a potential route to power here for a conservative challenger because they're expecting a kind of like national swing away from labor.

And New Labor loved trialing new voting systems when it had something that it wanted to fuck with.

Like ask your MSPs, right?

Like whenever there's some kind of like devolved election that needs to happen, New Labor loves to be like, interesting, we will now try a like form of voting that is only used otherwise in Swaziland.

How come every time I try to vote for mayor, it just returns Richard E.

Grant?

Yeah.

So

like voting for London Mayor works like voting for French president.

You get a first and a second preference vote.

And if nobody wins on the first preferences, they go to the second.

And you also have a bunch of like sort of weird candidates who are going to harvest first preferences.

Like lots of Lib Dems in London, for instance, but also George Galloway is running.

And the BNP has a similar like a really sinister attempt to like enter London politics and they almost get in on like a few levels.

So you have this situation and you also have this phenomenon where London is like a lot of cities you have like a an inner city that votes like quite left and then you have outer boroughs that are suburbs.

Outer boroughs of London like Bromley where I'm from

are the most fascist places on earth.

My current way of understanding like how British fascism is experienced by people is that British fascism is experienced by people in pubs that you have to drive to.

Yes.

My God,

our London's outer boroughs.

Like, we're talking Enfield.

We're talking Bromley.

We're even talking like anything past Newham in Essex.

Also, we're talking about, but crucially, by the way, we are talking about any inner London borough that has a W postcode.

Yeah,

the richer, whiter bits of London, essentially.

And I mean, Bromley, very like sort of leafily suburban.

Every local councillor is Hitler.

Yeah.

Cool.

I've read 2000 AD comics.

Also, by the way, I know that Barnes is not that way.

It has a W postcode.

I know.

Come on.

Let's just move on.

But so, like, all of these outer boroughs reliably vote Tory, but...

relative to inner London, nobody lives in them.

And so it's never been enough to swing an election.

And so what happens is you have this campaign to bring down Ken Livingston involving Boris, an evil Australian man called Linton Crosby.

And let me just say that evil by Australian man standards, crowded field, and a newspaper called The Evening Standard.

And the Evening Standard doesn't exist anymore, but for a long time it was functionally like a branch of government in London.

It was given away for free at the tube near the...

You're confusing it with the Metro.

The Evening Standard and the Metro share an owner and share a decent amount of of stuff.

But the Evening Standard's weird or was weird because no one read it

ever, but like it still had this death grip on London politics.

I guess just because like, you know, you could get the headlines out onto a bunch of like newspaper boxes.

Yeah, you've got to handle it all the environmental storytelling for when the characters are walking around.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Genuinely.

Like you have a box full of newspapers with a guy shouting Evening Standard and on the front of it is a headline that's like, literally, this was an evening standard headline.

Suicide bomb backer runs Ken's campaign.

This is kind of the tone, right?

Is that if you vote for Ken Livingston again, Hamas will explode you.

And also, the other thing to remember is what had happened the previous year was the 7.7 attacks on the tube.

Yes.

Right.

So they were basically, they were saying, hey,

it was a little bit of like

trying to like be mayor of.

of 7.7, like trying to run on I'm going to be mayor of 7.7, you know, Ken Livingston is not hard enough on Muslims and then on Muslims.

And then what they usually do is they would say like, Ken Livingston, who was seen at Finsbury Park Mosque?

Because like

British people will have.

Background level of Islamophobia in British media at this time is really like hard to explain to people now, even.

And it's still bad now, but like, geez.

But like there were certain mosques that everybody in Britain knew were the what were like a byword for like domestic terrorism.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

That could never happen in America.

Yeah, right.

But like, imagine like every mosque in London is the 9-11 mosque in terms of like media coverage and controversy.

And so that's basically the tone.

It's like, it's extremely racist, extremely xiamophobic.

Lots of fear of crime, lots of fear of terrorism.

A lot of the attempts to smear Ken Livingston come through this one journalist, Andrew Gilligan, who used to work for Boris on The Spectator.

Andrew Gilligan, Nick Cohen in The Observer, if you remember him.

I'm making like octopus hand motions at my camera, but my my camera is off, so you can't see me.

But yeah, so like since cancel journalist.

And this whole campaign

is kind of like, in many ways, it's a prototype for the kind of like bringing down Corbyn campaign, except that it is helped in this case by the fact that some of it's true.

Yeah.

Ken Livingston was someone who did some ill-advised things.

for someone in the public eye and said some ill-advised things.

Yeah,

he's like a more stupid and more prejudiced man than Jeremy Corbyn by far.

And Ken Livingston, having been this kind of like Everard Clare figure

of the left for like 40 years, he had like said some

stupid and offensive things.

He had also said some quite reasonable things that could be framed as stupid or offensive things.

So like on the one hand, you might get like a sort of deep dive investigation into Ken Livingston that's like, hey, this guy said that like Britain's occupation of Ireland was as bad as the Holocaust, you know, which is a little hyperbolic.

But then you might also get like, hey, when he was in the Greater London Council in the 80s, he supported gay rights.

And it's like,

because he, yeah, it's, this is, it's one of those things where you're like, we've decided we hate this guy.

And so we're going to put a flashlight under our chin and repeat everything he said and hope that everybody gets scared by it.

Yeah, for good reasons or ill.

And incidentally, one reason for the standard to pick a horse here is because the mayor of London has, in some ways, relatively few powers, but one of them is the contract for free newspapers being distributed in tube stations.

Why does he have that?

They had to give him something.

The parade stopped.

And this, like, it's really hard to source all 76 of those trombones.

It's like a consolation prize is you get to decide what free newspaper gets had.

And again, like I say, this is ubiquitous, like, especially like back in the day before like smartphones.

Like you went into a tube carriage, everybody had this little like newspaper.

Oh, yeah, they used to do that in New York too.

It's still around.

It's called the AM New York, I think.

But it's always, it's like the most trite shit imaginable.

It's not like used as a political conduit for anybody.

Yeah.

And the Metro is owned by the same company as the Evening Standards.

So while Ken Livingston is getting smeared as this like mad newt kissing Hamasnik, Boris's job, he really likes newts.

It's a thing about him.

I don't know why.

Boris's job is to seem like urbane, to like walk back some of the like

nuts shit that he's written and to be like fitting in with David Cameron's like compassionate conservatism, you know, to be like, I'm socially liberal-ish.

I just want to like privatize everything.

Ignore all that stuff I wrote about sort of people who you're supposed to be socially liberal towards when I was writing.

I am socially liberal.

You can, I can be trusted to privatize the

ever-loving shit out of like the rest of London.

Because Tories have always hated London, and they've always hated it because it's, amongst other things, a very diverse place in terms of like race and religion and sexuality.

And so, this is the first time that they've bothered to lie about it, essentially.

Prior to this, all sort of Tory campaigning on London has been like,

don't you hate this place?

No, sorry, not prior to this, prior to this and subsequently to this.

This is the only time they ever ran a London mayoral candidate who seemed at all enthusiastic about London.

Yeah, to be like, give it a go.

You know, maybe, maybe you're like me.

You can trust our sort of like new softer Tories.

And

like, he's very self-effacing about this, very obeying.

He's very funny as well.

I know a ton of people who voted for Boris because they thought he was funny and because they thought mayor of London is kind of a joke position anyway.

And it'll liven things up a bit.

You know, he's a laugh.

Really, the power that you have is

you have some powers devolved to you.

You're sort of directly in charge of only really one.

The others are like, you're sort of consulted on a lot.

Yes.

Yeah.

So away from our general problem with with mayor tell you is you're in charge of the stop signs.

Morris is not even in charge of the stop signs at this point.

Not really.

To be in charge of the stop signs.

It's like a king never is always in power, like ruling with the sort of consent of like local aristocrats and stuff, right?

There's these balances of power.

And so the London mayor has to balance his power against local councils, which mostly handle the stop signs and then and all the bins and like education and stuff.

That's all like part of council.

He's kind of Holy Roman Emperor.

Yeah, that's the way to understand London Mayor.

And so

he wins.

Like he, he defeats Ken Livingston.

And if you look at the electoral map of this, it is 100% the like insanely wealthy bits of like central and west London and the outer boroughs that carry.

And every bit of London where everyone lives votes for Ken, but it doesn't matter.

Right.

It looks like every electoral map for the last 30 years.

Basically, genuinely.

And like, it's this weird thing of like, it's an obvious thing that no one has thought to try until now.

And so becomes London mayor.

And to steal a line from my constitutional law tutor, there are four devolved national administrations in the UK, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and London.

And so there are some powers, and this is something that's since broadened out to other cities, that the mayor of London has, but you're having to like rest them on top of this sort of like net of borough councils.

And your fiefdom as mayor is basically like transport, policing, the fire brigade.

You can do some planning stuff potentially.

Even policing, a lot of that is in like a commissioner role that you work with.

The only thing you're directly control is transport.

Yeah.

That's one of the reasons that transport in London is pretty good is because we had a guy who was really, really wanting to invest in stuff in charge of it for decades.

Yeah.

I was going to say, it's the exact opposite of the New York City mayor where you have like absolute terrifying power over every aspect of everybody's lives except for transportation.

which is controlled by the state for some reason.

You're the inverse mayor of New York City.

And I mean, the other thing is that like all of this stuff is dependent on government funding.

And so you have to like beg and cajole for it and do all the schmoozing with like both central government and like private, like private figures.

When, so like Boris inherits quite a good situation in terms of transport and stuff from Ken Livingston, because as much as like Blair hated him, he was a labor mayor.

It was a labor.

government that was in a kind of spending, albeit privatizing mood.

And so he got billions out of them for stuff like the tube.

This kind of style suits Boris because Boris is, like we said, is a lazy man, right?

He is like notorious as mayor of London for like showing up late and like unprepared and not knowing what he's meant to be doing that day.

And the first thing that he does is he appoints like six deputy mayors.

And if I say that within a hundred days, he fires three of them for separate scandals.

I like that that's that's like almost like a like a Venetian electoral thing.

Yeah, the three deputy mayors elect six deputy mayors from which two deputy mayors are selected.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He so his first deputy mayor is a guy called Tim Parker, alarming looking man.

And

he like hires this guy who's like longtime CEO of like various companies to be like, can you do the work stuff?

And he puts him in charge.

Yeah, he puts him in charge of city hall.

And then Tim Parker sets out to do this and Boris gets scared that he's being cut out.

And so he just fires him like three months in.

Sick.

In fairness, Tim Parker was, I believe, CEO of the post office when it commissioned the Horizon computer system that led to a bunch of postmasters getting like falsely convicted of fraud.

So Boris's ego may have saved London from even worse governance somehow.

Yeah, it's everyone in London gets convicted of fraud.

It turns out.

For operating the mailbox in your own house.

Deputy Mayor Number Two, Ian Clement, he manages to...

So Boris's first job as mayor is to go to the Olympics closing ceremony in Beijing because London has already, by the time he's mayor, won the bid for 2012 Olympics.

And so he goes to Beijing with a delegation.

And before he goes, MI6 goes, hey, just so you know, they're probably going to try and like fuck with you and maybe like, watch out for like honey traps.

and things of this nature.

And I guess Clement heard, watch out.

You don't want to to miss a honey trap

as he says hey i i've i heard they have delicious honey uh-huh over there you should check it out i know i'm no i know i'm no george clooney so when lots of attractive women are being particularly friendly it's not normal a pretty chinese woman came up to me gave me her card and asked me to go for a drink i wasn't thinking straight I was thinking like a heterosexual bloke who is an 11-hour flight from home.

He was married at this point, by the way.

I knew I shouldn't be doing it, but by then I was drunk.

And so what happens is he gets honey trapped, drugged, and gets his phone stolen by Chinese intelligence.

And he doesn't tell anyone about this either.

He's like, oh, boy.

Oh, no.

I really, oh, this.

I hope this does.

This never comes back to bite me.

Uh-huh.

Maybe it's nothing.

I didn't call the office in London to tell them, he said.

I have never had a conversation with Boris anymore.

I have never had a conversation with boris about this it wasn't a breach of british security on a national level what she had learned from me was economic information about how london is run it wasn't something that would put the people of the uk at risk so that was why i kept it to myself but it's right to set to stand up and say i'm sorry i messed up having done this he then immediately gets caught in an expenses scandal where he's like using his like like mayor of london credit card to buy like lunches and dinners and

like an audio system for his car.

He used it for his mayoral license to thrill.

Yes.

And so Boris has to fire him.

Deputy Mayor number three is my favorite.

The year of the three deputy mayors.

This is this is Ray Lewis, who was hired to provide, I guess, partially like a sort of anti-racist credentials because he was working with disadvantaged youth, but the way he was working with them was running a kind of gang intervention boy boot boot camp.

God, I can just, I hear, I hear so many echoes of Rob Ford here, just distributed throughout these three deputy mayors.

Yes.

Rob Ford is, you know, they killed Superman in the 90s and they brought him back as like three different guys?

This is Rob Ford as well.

He's going to split Rob Ford into these three guys.

This guy, Ray Lewis, he was actually David Cameron's first photo op as

a leader of the Conservative Party, by the way.

That was the

credential there.

But yeah, he was running these boy boot camps that were like, we're going to make you exercise until you don't want to be in a gang anymore.

You're going to roll around in swan poo.

Yeah.

And the Guardian asked four or five questions of this guy.

That's not very many questions.

No.

And these questions were: in order, why have the Church of England banned you from working as a priest?

Oh,

why did you quit the prison service on no notice and then have a two-year gap in your CV?

And is it true that when you were a Church of England priest in the mid-90s, you borrowed 45 grand from your parishioners, including an elderly woman and a man with learning

difficulties?

Oh.

And what he said in response to this was, this is nonsense.

If these things were true, they would never have made me a justice of the peace.

And then the Guardian went and checked and he was lying about about having been a justice of the peace as well.

Oh my God.

He was like, they'll never ask another question.

No, no.

Journalists are like that.

They will never ask a follow-up.

They'll never check this stuff.

What are you going to do?

Ask me a fourth question?

In Britain, usually they don't, isn't it?

That's an unusual occurrence.

for them to ask another question.

Why did you falsely claim to be a justice of the peace?

Was the fifth question that finally like undid him and Boris had to fire him.

And then he had to fire his chief political advisor for in a very 2000s phrase, blogging racistly because all of these guys had blogs and this guy had like popped off on blogspot about Afro-Caribbean immigrants.

Yeah, racism is supposed to go in the newspaper, not online.

But so while he's at City Hall, the other big thing is jobs for the boys, right?

Like, so like there's a couple of Ken people, most notably Peter Hendy, who you may have heard of, currently in the news, not sure why,

who is like the kind of transport guy.

He like, you know, fits quite easily from Ken to Boris.

But Andrew Gilligan from the Evening Standard gets this like sinecure as cycling commissioner, the editor of the Evening Standard.

Veronica Wadley gets a job as chair of the Arts Council.

And when this guy, Alexander Lebedeff, this Russian, buys the Evening Standard, Boris becomes very, very good friends with him to keep the standard on site.

And incidentally, The Evening Standard has burned so much credibility on this Ken Livingston will blow up your tube train campaign that when Lebedev buys it, they have to do a full front page rebrand apology tour of sorry for being like this.

It's genuinely astounding.

Incidentally, this guy was a former KGB agent.

There was this whole period in London where like a lot of the Boris Mayeralty was just like Russian oligarchs buying up stuff.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that isn't that when Roman Abravich bought Chelsea.

Yeah, and you like couldn't move for like BMWs with Russian diplomatic plates in central London.

Yeah, yeah.

And meanwhile, various dissidents were getting like thrown out of windows a few times.

Also, by the way, Alexander Lebedev, fascinating looking man, first Russian man to invent putting on his beard with an eyebrow pencil.

So in terms of what he actually does, in terms of governance, Boris doesn't really do much in his first term because there's not a lot he can do and there's not a lot he wants to do, right?

The big things are the 2012 Olympics and Boris bikes.

And a Boris bike, it's like...

Boris likes being photographed cycling because it makes him look more unkempt, I guess.

And he just genuinely does cycle as well.

But like a million photos of this guy on like a bike looking like an absolute dickhead.

And anyway, the like Ken Livingston, Ken Livingston had borrowed this idea from Paris of like, what if you just had like municipally operated hire bicycles?

Yeah, but a bike share, which is everywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's a good idea.

It's a great idea.

I love, there's a dock in front of my house.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, I used to use them all the time.

Yeah.

And this was, this is a good idea.

And it was one that came in just in time for Boris to take credit for it.

Because nothing good can be unprivatized, it was like heavily subsidized by Barclays Bank and then Santander Bank.

And TfL still has to subsidize it anyway.

But like, whatever, you know,

here they're city bikes because citibank subsidized them.

Because

British people have child brains, they were like universally called Boris bikes,

which transport policy in this country, it's so difficult to talk like an adult.

To say like, yeah, he was there for Boris bikes and then he banned Bendy buses is like, fuck off.

Don't make me talk like this.

Don't make me say these words.

Bens are for bananas, not buses.

That's right.

You know, I said in the previous episodes that Canada was a corny-ass country, but I'd like to now move that exact same criticism onto you people and the things that you say.

Yes, certainly.

America is the best country in the world.

Nothing wrong with the way that I talk or the things that I or people around me do.

Yeah, so he institutes the he institutes Boris bikes and he bans Bendy buses because Bendy buses articulated buses to bendy like yeah well they kill a lot of they kill a lot of cyclists and they catch fire and explode um which is a problem for a bus yeah you don't want that happening really also like don't forget like London street I think some again I think to remember also about like European city streets is that with some exceptions, they're tangled and short and sometimes narrow and they they don't go in nice grids.

And so to have buses that are like double the length of a bus trying to drive on anything other than sort of London's biggest roads is kind of insane.

Yes.

There's also like crossrail is happening at this point that's like digging down through central London, like east to west.

And, you know, Boris is able to like, you know, not stop that.

But the main thing, the main thing is the Olympics, right?

Which are going to happen in 2012.

If he wins a second term, he's going to be able to like enter a second term with the Olympics and get a big popularity boost off of that.

And so Boris's contribution to planning for the Olympics is to just kind of sprinkle some bullshit over it.

Because this is the thing about Boris is that like he has this extreme laziness, right, that allows him to fixate on a grand project.

He's a lot like Adolf Hitler, right?

In the sense that he is very racist and he doesn't like working and has these megalomaniacal ideas.

And an iconic haircut.

yeah exactly and so and so it's just like well why don't we have a cable car like a gondola system over the thames to get to the olympic park it's still there it is the single most useless piece of transport infrastructure i could imagine it is it goes from what is effectively like nowhere to nowhere.

The fact that it goes from the O2, which looks like a big circus tent, to nowhere, and is some more like circus bullshit really makes me feel that we live in a kind of like, you know, like the thing to remember, right, is it goes to a big concert venue, but from just like a random place.

Yeah.

It doesn't go from anywhere central.

It doesn't go from like a sort of some kind of central station.

No.

The station has like new build flats and big highways around it.

It's not somewhere anyone would ever walk to.

This is, it's all like corporately branded.

Emirates, the airline put in for this, which meant that like they had to call the tickets boarding passes passes and stuff.

Oh my lord.

And it's just this weird kind of scribble on a tube map now to be like, hey, do you want to get from here to here?

No one does.

And genuinely, like as soon as the Olympics were over, no one was using this.

Like

there was,

you could get a discount for like using it frequently, like a commuter.

You need to be commuting from a highway with a Novatel on it and a conference center to a sort of former Brownfield Peninsula with like a huge concert venue on it yeah who is doing that commute i have two jobs and one i'm a i'm a maid at the nov hotel and i go home at night and i polish the big boy at the o2 yeah and so the number of people who were like commuting on this a year after the olympics was 16.

oh you come no

and the year after that it was four It's so few.

Yeah.

Like you can, you can get this genuinely.

It's still there.

And I've never been on it.

I don't know anyone who's ever been on it, but it exists still.

And it's not even like a touristy thing to do.

No, not at all.

Because you have to go all the way out of town to use it.

And it doesn't like it go anywhere.

Because plenty of cities have like a stupid tram that's like dumb to use for your main thing of transport, but it's like a good view and it goes downtown or whatever.

You already have the London Eye for that.

And it's sponsored by a different airline.

If you want the like airline controlled like London view experience, you just go on the London Eye, which is also some circus bullshit.

But, like, speaking of circus bullshit, because there's more, like, when he got in, like, the designs for the Olympic Park were already done.

It was already planned.

He didn't have to do anything, which is like very, very helpful.

But he was like, this needs something.

It needs something like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.

And so, what he did was he collared this steel magnate called Lakshmi Mittal in a cloakroom at Davos.

And in a conversation that reportedly lasted 45 seconds, he went, can you build us some gigantic steel bullshit?

And Lakshmi Mittal says, yeah, sure, I guess.

And the result, I put a photo of it on the notes because it's so stupid.

I've never...

Heard of this.

This is again, I have to remind you, this is in a part of London that like tourists don't go to and is not really accessible by foot because it's cut off from like central London by a tangle of highways.

It looks like a fucking roller coaster you cannot ride.

Oh, you can ride it.

Yeah, you can ride it.

You can ride it.

They had to introduce this after they realized that what they had built was a gigantic, very technically complicated and insanely ugly steel tower.

called the Arcelor Missile,

after Luxembourg Metal's company, Orbit.

Of course it's Anish Kapoor.

That's fucking good.

I was going to say, it's Anish Kapoor.

Anish Kapoor did it as a con.

And this is one of the things I've known about for a while.

Just like it's always rattles around in my head whenever I see it.

Is that Anish Kapoor said he wanted to create a commentary on the concept of a tower in general?

He's ad-busting towers.

He's tower busting.

It's culture jamming.

The thing, the like selling point of this was it's a viewing tower for the games.

And then the games ended and it's it's still there.

And so now it's a viewing tower for

nothing, for nothing.

It's a viewing tower for the big mall in Stratford and then the other big mall, and then the highway, and then the West Ham Stadium.

I really want to go up this fucking thing because I never have, because I've never had a reason to.

And the thing is, in order to try and entice people to go up it, they built the world's longest slide around the outside of it.

You can pay 30 British pounds to slide down the outside of this in what I think is the most London moment in the entire history of civilization.

I love to pay $50 to ride the fucking IFS cloud cable car sponsored by Emirates Airlines to the Arcellar Middle Orbit and take the slide.

I love to live in London.

Yeah, genuinely.

The great thing about the tower as well, right, is that there's the, I don't know if this exists in New York.

I'm sure there's some version of it, but like the tower spits you out in a place that was sort of built on purpose by big money to kind of replicate a real place oh it's the you're talking about it's the schwarma yeah and hudson yards yeah yeah essentially uh it's a it's a little bit like that and so you go out and then it's like you're but except again hudson yards as far as i understand it is ultra luxury condos right uh yeah And like one theater space that's very depressing.

Our version of that is quote-unquote luxury flats that are all cheaply built and terrible.

And then it's the same chain restaurants.

It's cookie because they were bought as like financial instruments because no one wants to live in them.

Yeah.

And so, and so it's nearly.

You can't let them to people, even in the middle of a housing crisis, because, like, first of all, the rent in there is £3,000 a second.

And second of all, every single wall is mostly mold.

I mean, for £3,000 a second, I could ride the slide 100 times.

It's true.

Yeah.

And you know what else has been built?

So number one, what I like is Boris Johnson's ambition was he said it wants

it should be a 21st century version of Trajan's column or at least something like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.

Just commenting on the nature of statues.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also, you know what else has been built there, of course, in that area?

That area has had one other major thing added to it recently.

I know we're going out of order for the mayor talk, but that's where the London Orb was supposed to be beside the tower.

This isn't just like, this is a designated, like stupid bullshit area.

You know?

Well, yeah, because it's where the Olympics was, which sucked.

The other thing, the other thing we got to talk about as well is, and this is just something that I think me and Riley can both talk about with very little guidance for about 20 minutes.

So, transport, one of the things that you have to invest in.

The tube's very well financed.

It's got some problems, but whatever.

The thing that London needs at this point is new buses, right?

Like a new standard design of bus.

And there was this, um, there used to be, uh, like from like the 50s, this bus called a Route Master, which is very, very popular, very nostalgic.

If you think of like London bus.

Oh, that's the, yeah, that's the guy.

Yeah, that, that's, that's what it is.

It's got like an open platform at the back so you can jump off of it while it's in motion if you want to.

And I do.

Yeah, it's got a driver and and a conductor who like takes tickets and stuff.

Um, there was a popular British like sitcom about this as well.

So old people love this shit.

This looms enormous in the American mind about England, by the way, this exact bus.

To be fair, to be fair, ours too.

Yeah.

So what Boris Johnson does is he opens this bidding for a new route master.

And the result, well, first of all, there's a couple of things that this does.

One is it establishes a guy called Thomas Heatherwick, of whom we will hear more in the next episode.

He did the Schwarma in Hudson Yards.

Yes, he did.

It establishes Thomas Heatherwick's career as the guy you get for like iconic London stuff.

Yeah.

And what he designs is a like regular ass city bus, but it's got like a David Bowie like eyeliner swoop and like a curved ass.

And I'm looking at it.

It doesn't look good.

It doesn't look good.

I don't like him.

They were like, hey, we're going to have two staircases and fewer seats.

Yes.

I hope you don't like accessibility, but you do like Thomas Heatherwick.

Yeah, we're going to have the thing from the old Rootmaster where it's got like an open platform on the back that you can like hop on and hop off and there's going to be a conductor who's taking tickets.

They then realized they couldn't afford to employ conductors and they couldn't train them to take tickets.

So they had like 300 conductors who were just kind of around to do nothing and there was a door around the platform.

So if you tried to jump off this, there was a decent chance it would close on you and like mangle your leg.

while a kind of like hapless conductor looked on.

Oh, spot of bother, your leg appears to have been appears to have been mangly dangled.

That's no problem.

You'll be looking fit as the Oclaw Bittal Orbit in no time.

You'll be riding the IFS cable car with the best of them.

Let's get you to the NHS.

And then very quickly, they just like decided, this is a terrible idea.

We need to just keep this door closed all the time.

And you just, like, it's just a normal bus now.

It's too, everything else we wanted to do with it is too stupid.

All the conductors are fired.

And it's just this huge waste.

And into the bargain as well, it doesn't like catch fire.

But what it does do is make you feel like it's about to because the the air conditioning doesn't work and the windows don't open.

Uh-huh.

So, if you're on one of these in summer and summer in London is getting hotter every year and it's already brutal because of urban heat island, you're just if you're on the top deck of one of these, particularly, you are dying, you're melting.

But the other thing is, only some routes have them.

Basically,

if you ever take a bus in London, the bus you take, it's kind of like it is, it is each route like had its procurement done separately.

So no two bus, very few of two routes will have the same bus.

And they're all operated by like five different companies.

And ultimately this got so bad that before someone died, they had to take them all in and refit windows that opened.

Oh my God.

Oh, open.

Oh,

because otherwise you're just like banging on the windows as you were dying.

The firm that made these has now gone bust.

It went into administration like almost immediately afterwards.

And they're still around, you know, no one else uses them.

It's just London and they're going to be in service for God knows how long.

Or the reshoot children of men.

Yeah, basically.

Like put some like wire mesh over the windows on the outside.

The other thing that happens is like I mentioned the mayor of London has some responsibility for policing.

So Boris really like leans into this.

He like makes himself chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority.

And the Met police are much like the NYPD.

There's like a mafia within a mafia within a mafia.

And one of the first things that Boris Johnson does is to fire the Met Police Commissioner, a guy called Ian Blair, in part over Jean-Charles de Menezes, in part just to show strength and bring the Matt to heal.

Police commissioners.

We've had two episodes in a row with a police commissioner with the last name Blair.

Interesting.

Possible Blair effect?

It's like, you know, like Smith designates that you used to, you know, someone in your family was like a blacksmith in the same way Blair designates like kind of bailiff or something.

Anyway, yeah, so what Boris does with the Met is basically decrease the numbers because austerity starts kicking in, but also increase stop and frisk, stop and search in Britain, it's called.

And what this is doing is quietly brewing, like drawing back the like string of a big longbow in the form of intensifying the conditions that ultimately result in these massive riots in 2011 that like go up and down the country, but like particularly acute in London.

Like there's looting, stores get burned, all the rest it's not political in in the formal sense right i mean it was what what was the catalyst of the 2011 riots police shooting yeah but there are a bunch of other things happened at the same time where it's like the where like you say it was when we say it wasn't political it really is only in the most formal sense like these that's what i mean by formally yeah this isn't like yeah yeah they they were but they were also it was also a reaction like as you say austerity was starting and the first stuff that gets cut is uh like payments for like young people who are in like

a lot of payments you're not even you're not even like getting benefits to go to boys boot camp anymore yeah and so it's like a lot of the a lot of people are made quite like this is the first go of like the austerity as done by Cameron and Osborne and Johnson as well right like this is This is the first sort of move away from austerity as done by Blair, which was to try to remake the state through private firms.

And instead, the austerity of Osborne and Cameron, which is just to roll it back.

And

to aggressively roll it back very quickly.

And so like you are, you, a lot of people who were like relatively stable are made kind of unstable all at once.

It's a precariat thing.

It's like also an anti-racism.

uh sort of like thing and it's it's like i say it spirals very quickly and it kind of like in general becomes then about social exclusion, right?

And Boris, when this happens, is on holiday in Canada hanging out with Rob Ford.

I really hope he was.

I hope he was in the basement

with Rob Ford and Kayla.

Lost No Gods, No Mayors crossover episode.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so as these riots are like really spiraling out of control and the Met are kind of like losing their grip and like, you know, stores are getting burned down and stuff, he stays in Canada, sees out his holiday, comes home and then doesn't speak publicly for like, I think like three months.

Well, he was recovering from a weekend at the basement.

Yeah, genuinely.

He was attacked by Michael Kicklis.

Just genuinely.

And I mean, I don't know that there was, that Boris was ever the person to be like, you know, now is the time to kind of like come together in unity and like, you know, heal our divided society with WIFWAF or whatever.

But like, still.

Yeah, you kind of have to do that.

It's like a severe abdication of your duty as a public figure to not talk about the city burning down.

You have to make it look like you at least are trying.

Yeah.

Or care even, or even like aware of it.

And so, yeah, I feel like I'm doing the riots themselves a bit of a disservice, but like at the same time,

it's a whole other thing that like really could be a whole series.

We're doing the riots a disservice because this is an episode about Boris Johnson, who basically didn't pay attention to them.

Yeah, he didn't care, genuinely.

And the only thing that he did was he went, I am going to buy the police some water cannon.

And the thing is, he didn't have the authority to do that.

And he didn't have the authority to use them.

And the government told him not to do it, but he just did it anyway.

And he paid like £300,000 to buy like three water cannon and be like, yeah, but what if I do just use them anyway?

Right.

I wanna.

And that was the last time there was any civil unrest.

Yeah, exactly.

But they never used them just because it would have been so illegal to do.

That like

it real kind of like sort of colonial dimension here in that water cannon are used in Northern Ireland, but not in the mainland UK.

And so the kind of the firewall on that held.

And Theresa May's government was like, no, you can't use these.

And ultimately, London was just stuck with these three water cannon that his successor, Sadiq Khan, had to like sell for scrap because no one else would even buy them.

I don't know why.

I don't know what we did to to them.

I would give them to the fire department.

Yeah.

So that's called solving problems.

But yeah, so he never ever used it.

So then, just maybe as we're about to do the fucking Olympics, just as, if you like.

The Geiger counter of Olympomania is going to go zoink off the scale.

He keeps talking like this.

That was him.

That was him.

That's Boris Johnson.

Yeah, it's going to go zoink.

The Geiger counter of Olympomania is about to go zoink.

Off the scale.

He just, he just...

The scale.

This is his way of speaking.

This is a guy who's good at parties.

Yes.

Astonishing.

Sorry, he's good at those parties.

This is when he's doing the act, right?

Like, for instance, I was looking up some.

He has a very long wicked quote page, right?

As you would expect.

And it's sort of like, it's all like sort of ofishly racist, but like sort of well-constructed sentences until he becomes mayor and then it's like zoink wiff waf uh rhubarb rubbing things of this nature and it's always interesting when that mask slips a bit because like the only joke on here that i found funny in and of itself is when he was launching boris bikes and he said that the the rate of cycling in london was higher in 1904 than it was at any time until this year.

And after all, what's the point of being

a conservative if you can't turn the clock back to 1904?

It's funny, it's self-effacing.

It's pretty good.

Yeah.

And meanwhile, everything else is like women's beach volleyball.

They're like glistening wet otters frolicking.

And that is a direct quote.

They're not like otters, though.

That's a different thing.

They're not wet.

I don't know what to tell you.

You're responsible for the things that you say.

It's, it's, God, that's a horrifying thought.

Yeah.

So as we're just about to like maybe lock in and do the Olympics, by God,

is that Ken Livingston's music?

Because

he has got to do the 2012 London mayoral election, which is the rematch, the grudge match, Boris versus Ken.

I mean, if people are interested in hearing about that, I have no idea how to even begin.

Well, they would, they would go to they would go to no godsnomayors.com.

Okay.

They could probably just read the evening standard.

They would subscribe to our Patreon for $5 a month, and they would get every alternate episode.

I should say, we're not always going to be doing this structure of like the first part is free, the second part you have to pay for, because not every mayor is worth two whole episodes.

I got to tell you all, I'm doing some research on some mayors, and I'm like, I got 30 minutes out of each of you.

Yeah,

it's going to get more digressionary, right?

The big mayors we're starting off with we wanted to do one serious mayor each right yeah and this is this is mine but well i think what we were doing is we were laying our mayors on the table yeah right yeah yeah like these are our best these are our finest three of our finest mayors minus eric adams eric adams the only mayor we want ever do like it's it's it's no we are we are playing if we're playing a game of cards It's like we've laid out some face cards on the table.

Eric Adams is the card that says the rules of how to play.

Yeah, Eric Adams is kind of like we'll maneuver around him.

You can like get gravitational pull of Eric Adams.

He's sort of like, in a lot of ways, the Joker.

Yeah, it's almost as if he considers governing to be funny.

I'm finding recently that he considers crime to be not funny.

So is he.

Yeah.

No, I, I, so the next the next episodes will probably be shorter like stories of less well-documented, less fulgent mayors.

Is that a word?

We've got some pretty good mayors coming up.

We've got a lot of good mayors.

We've got, like, Maddie, I'm excited to do yours.

I've gone to Australia for my next crop of mayors.

It's going to be two mayors and one.

Interesting.

A double mayor bill.

Two mayors, one pot.

A double bill of mayors.

And

there's enough mayor to go around.

Yeah.

I mean, growing up as a punk, I used to go to these shows where there'd be like seven, eight mayors on the same bill.

So two seems fine to me.

But yeah, so that's that's the plan going forward.

Is there's going to be a there's going to be a whole diversity of mayors, it's going to be whatever the collective noun for a group of mayors is, a city hall of mayors, a city hall of mayors.

We will see you on the Patreon for Boris Part 2, the second term, and then the long sort of like rise and fall.

But in the meantime, thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.

Bye.

Bye.

Wrong one.

There we go.