Boris Johnson defends the Tube Party

In his first Press Conference as Mayor of London Boris Johnson has surprised quite a number of people by defending the last ever Circle Line Party.

He said "It has been anthropologically misunderstood. I think what we had there was a kind of exuberant Celtic style wake." See the second feature in The Daily Telegraph.

Mmm. That's certainly an interesting reaction. So rather than go along with the majority of the media who turned the event into a rampant orgy of destruction, Johnson's view is designed to curry favour with a lot of younger people who were actually at the party and having a great time. He saw that whatever anyone says, there were thousands of people clearly chanting anti Boris songs and doing interesting things with his image.


His PR advisers must have been advising him to do some fast damage limitation here and to do it in his typical style of swallowing a Latin dictionary.

TimeOut magazine was there along with our favourite London Underground photographer Yusef Ozkzil aka Chutney Bannister.

See a selection of Chutney's other Tube Booze photos

"Whatever their motivation for being here, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that Boris's ban on tube drinking is little more than a crude attempt set out his stall as a public-school Giuliani. 'In the past, his politics have been libertarian,' accuses Alice. 'To immediately go in with illiberal zero-tolerance policies is quite hypocritical.' "

Peter Watts in TimeOut's new blog rightly says that Annie Mole has much to say on the subject. He concludes:

"Now the dust has settled, I can't really see what all the fuss is about. There's no denying that this is a pointlessly populist gesture from Boris – and given that his campaign was full of such measures, we shouldn't be surprised. As any fule kno, the problem isn't drinking on the tubes, it's drunks, and banning the former will make very little difference to the latter, as it's quite difficult to get pie-eyed during a short hop on the Jubilee.

But, equally, is not being able to drink on your 20-minute Tube journey really such a big deal? If it is, perhaps a Tube ban is the least of your problems."

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Friday, June 06, 2008 Permalink COMMENT HERE
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