Thursday 25 June 2009

Taxi!

"Quite a lot of journalists are late . . . Boris was stratospherically late", former Telegraph editor Charles Moore once said of erratic star columnist Boris Johnson.

The London Mayor has clearly been applying the principle by which he files his newspaper columns to the simple act of catching a cab.

Paul Waugh anatomises some of the more lavish claims.

My fellow anoraks will know, the traditional football fans' shout of "Taxi! for Mr ..." to suggest that it is time to sack the manager harks back to the infamous episode back in 1961 when pools millionaire Sir John Moores sacked manager Johnny Carey in the back of a London cab.

Part of the point of the shout was that this offers a rather swift method of execution, given the ready availability of taxi cabs.

Not something that may be apparent to Boris.

Along with credit card shenanigans of disgraced and sacked Deputy Mayor Ian Clement, this may well all form part of a nefarious Tory plot to show that there are easy taxpayer savings to be made of such wasteful expenditure.

In Boris' City Hall, that seems to be true. (Perhaps Clements, keen to export the ethos and efficiencies of the private sector to City Hall, may ruefully reflect that he might have expected to get away with such dodgy ethics outside government).

So it is time for Boris to pay back some of the more egregious examples of disorganised waste, methinks.

Better still, call him a taxi - or get him an advance booking in good time for 2012 anyway.

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