The Scoop

Why Boris Johnson should stay on his sun lounger

Adam Bienkov | Monday 8 August, 2011 10:05

Kids are rioting, homes and businesses are being burned down, the police are rudderless and yet Boris Johnson still doesn’t think he should get off his sun lounger to help clear up the mess.

The Metro reports that Boris has “total trust in the police’s ability to cope without him” and so won’t be coming back early from his holiday.

Boris broke the news, which will be a relief to some, and an outrage to others, down the phone to the BBC over the weekend.

The effect of Boris’s reassuring phone call was somewhat muted by his inability to get Mark Duggan’s name right, but his message was clear. The police were doing a “very, very good job” and he was staying put.

A second night of rioting didn’t seem to give the Mayor any cause to wobble either and his Deputy Kit Malthouse, claimed on the Today programme that relations between the police and the black community were in a state of “continuous improvement.”

Now it’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would convince Kit and Boris that the police are not in a continuous state of improvement, but if two senior Met resignations and widespread rioting won’t do it then perhaps nothing will.

However, whilst it’s easy to criticise Boris for fiddling whilst London burns, it’s much harder to think of how Boris would have actually helped the situation if he had have come home.

For the past three years Boris has had his hands on the tiller of the Met, and for the past three years it has continued to lurch from one crisis to the next.

The problems at the Met are deep and rather than try to solve them, Boris has simply pretended that they don’t exist.

Whether it’s his dismissal of the phone hacking investigation, his defence of the policing of the G20 protests, or his attitude to the recent riots, Boris has never been slow to dismiss public concern about the police.

So whilst it would have been good PR for Boris to jet back to City Hall yesterday, it wouldn’t have solved the problems that even now, he’s unwilling to face up to.

And until he does face up to them, he may as well stay on that sun lounger a little longer.

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