Peter Hitchens writes:
Boris Johnson won London despite being a member of the Tory Party, not because of it, a fact he clearly recognised in his acceptance speech. I don't believe he was listed as being one of 'David Cameron's Conservatives' on the ballot paper, as the luckless Tony Lit was. Nor will he be able to run London in a conservative way. You might as well try to fly a submarine, or eat soup with a fork. The GLA is designed, by its boundaries, its constitution and everything else about it, as a focus of left-liberal power, and an elected mayor is a thoroughly un-British institution, being based on a republican, presidential system in which the elected monarch is much more powerful than the legislature.
Quite.
Hitchens also rightly points out that forty-four per cent of thirty-five per cent is still not very many, and that the figures cited all over the place last week were crude extrapolations, not totals of actual votes.
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He didn't rely on BNP second preferences to win, though, did he? I seem to remember that you were confidently claiming that he couldn't win without them.
ReplyDeleteWould have have won without either the first or second preference of everyone whose list vote put Richard Barnbrook on the GLA?
ReplyDeleteThat's not knowable in principle, because there's no read-across in the counting. But almost certainly, yes.
ReplyDeleteWould have won without the second preferences of those who voted Barnbrook first preferences - yes, absolutely certainly, because he had more first preferences than Ken had first and second preferences. See here.