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Livingtone Out in London

Heh… It’s almost fun to watch the pain of the New York Times [1], as they’re forced to relate:

LONDON — Boris Johnson, the floppy-haired media celebrity and Conservative member of Parliament who transformed himself from a shambling, amusing-aphorism-uttering figure of fun into a plausible political force, was elected mayor of London on Friday.

Mr. Johnson’s surprising victory was not only a triumph of his own singular style, but also a resounding public rebuke to the Labor government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a day full of such rebukes. As votes were tallied across the country after Thursday’s elections, it emerged that the Labor Party had suffered its worst local election results in at least 40 years.

With final votes in for the 159 local councils in which seats were being contested, Labor lost 331 seats overall, and the Conservative opposition gained 256. The Labor Party took an estimated 24 percent of the overall vote, placing it a woeful third behind the Conservatives, with 44 percent, and the Liberal Democrats, with 25 percent.

But it was the mayoral race, in which Mr. Johnson, 43, defeated the experienced Labor incumbent, Ken Livingstone, 62, by 1,168,738 votes to 1,028,966 votes, that was the biggest shock — a sure sign of a deep national weariness with the Labor government. London has been resolutely Labor in recent years, and its loss is a bitter blow to the national party .

I’m not so sure this was a judgment about Brown so much as it is about Livingstone.  I can’t see, frankly, extrapolating these kind of local elections to a referendum on Brown. Still, it seems clear that something has gone downside up in British politics, and I suspect much of is has to do with the Islamising of England, much of which is being accomplished at the level of the local counsels. the business with the pools [2] is a fine example. [3]

Nice to see they’re starting to wake after their decades long slumber. One wonders, however, if the damage is not already done.