Bryony Gordon’s opinion piece in The Telegraph gets off to an odd start by talking about whether or not to sit next to a tramp on the tube:
What do you do in such a situation? Stay standing and risk fainting, or sit down and risk vomiting? I was weighing up this conundrum when I noticed that the tramp was reading the New Statesman. How peculiar, I thought. And then I realised that it wasn’t a tramp: it was Ken Livingstone, in an ill-fitting, grubby-looking suit.
Ahh, if only he was a sharp dresser like those young boys in the SS he’d have the tubes running on time. It’s ok though because Bryony has come to praise Mayor, not to bury him:
it is refreshing to find a politician who isn’t a stinking hypocrite. It made my heart flutter to learn that he slums it with the rest of us in rat-infested tunnels, when I had fully expected to him to be ferried around in a blacked-out Range Rover, paid for by the people in the rat-infested tunnels. Hoorah, I thought – Ken really cares!
In fact Bryony would go further:
Because in my humble opinion, Ken should tax everybody who drives in London £25. Instead of calling it a “congestion charge”, he could call it a “stupidity charge”, because it is senseless to operate a vehicle when you live in London, and you can get everywhere by bus or Tube.
A London wide stupidity charge… Ken could buy a whole wardrobe of new suits from the kind of revenue that would bring in.
