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Post image for Rabbit: Chas and Dave Reunion – Gertcha! (Part 2)

Rabbit: Chas and Dave Reunion – Gertcha! (Part 2)

For the first part of the story, read “Rabbit: Chas and Dave Reunion – Gertcha! (Part 1)” – click here

After Glastonbury 2005, all went well for a number of years. I did an average of 15-20 shows a year with Chas & Dave: most made me money but a few lost. In retrospect I suppose they were playing just too many gigs in London, but every time I tried to ease up, Barry would sell a show to someone else, so I kept up the pressure. Their fee had trebled since that first show, but the audiences had doubled, so it was still worth doing.

Then tragedy struck. Dave Peackock’s lovely wife, Sue, fell ill. She was a genuinely happy woman who had never smoked a day in her life but she succumbed to lung cancer. Just when we thought she was on the mend, Sue grew weak and finally passed away on July 4th, 2009. It was a sad time for everybody, especially Dave, who was absolutely devastated. He withdrew from live work with Chas & Dave and for three months, Chas carried on with Micky Burt and a stand-in bass-player.

I called their agent, Barry Collings, in early September, and he told me that Chas was expecting Dave to return in time for the Christmas Beano. So I booked a date at the Electric Ballroom and started to advertise and promote the show.

On September 22, 2009, an important news announcement came out of the blue – at least to me. Aside from the Christmas Beano, I had several shows booked , including two at the 100 Club. I got an email from a friend saying they’d heard on the radio that Chas & Dave had split up, was it true? I didn’t know. I went to the band’s website, which carried an official announcement:

“Following the death of his wife. Dave has decided to call time on touring. All dates already booked and those going forward will be fulfilled by Chas & his band (details here). Dave has been overwhelmed by the huge number of messages of support for him at this difficult time and we say a big thank you to all who got in touch and posted their regards on the web.
“To quote Chas: ‘It’s sad but Rockney will roll on with  Chas & his band’.
“CHAS & HIS BAND are CHAS Piano/Lead Vocals, MICKY BURT on Drums and DARREN JUNIPER Bass Guitar. Darren is the son of an old school friend of Chas, the man who introduced Chas to Dave years ago, a story Chas relates on stage.”

The British public are a funny lot. The Chas & Dave show without Dave wasn’t all that different. It featured the same songs in roughly the same order and they sounded like they did on the records, but for some reason people stopped coming. My first show at the 100 Club billed as “Chas & His Band” drew less than a hundred people.

It was obvious that the Christmas Beano at the 1100-capacity Electric Ballroom could not go ahead. Especially when it became clear that Chas had also taken the opportunity to drop original drummer Micky Burt and replace him with Chas’s son, Nick. Barry Collings and Chas thought I should go ahead with Chas and His Band. But I knew it was better to lose the money I’d already spent on the show than gamble several thousand more pounds that I was wrong. Promoting is always a gamble, but when you’re betting against your own instincts, experience and knowledge, it’s a hiding to nothing.

I carried on with Chas and His Band – playing the 100 Club shows booked for Chas & Dave, but every one cost me money, including one – on New Year’s Eve at the 100 Club – that lost £4,000. Chas reduced his fees for the shows, but the high overheads and the fact that audiences weren’t showing up, meant that I still lost money. All in all, with the cancelled show and the ones I went ahead with and lost on, I was down the best part of £12,000, which was more than I’d made out of all the Chas and Dave shows in the previous year.

I owed Chas and Dave £6,000. I suggested I deduct a couple of thousand towards the cost of the cancelled Beano and my other losses but this was rejected and I ended up paying them the whole amount, on top of my losses. Barry Collings rang me and said that he thought there was a good chance that Dave would come back – at least for a farewell tour – and when that happened, I could recoup my losses that way.

Nothing happened for a year. Barry kept asking me whether I wanted to put on more shows with Chas & His Band and I kept telling him I couldn’t afford to, which was true. I’d given it a good try but it just didn’t seem to work at the 100 Club. Then, on June 12th, 2010 one of the 100 Club doormen rang me and asked me if I was involved with Chas & Dave’s Reunion Tour. I knew nothing about it. I fired off an email to Barry Collings, asking him what was happening.

He replied within eight minutes to say:

Hi, Chas & Dave are getting together again for one six week final theatre tour March /AprilI have sold the London date to the Indigo 02
Regards, Barry

I emailed back, pointing out that he told me I’d be getting the first call. He replied:

Hi they paid me big money. Otherwise I would have spoken to you regards. Barry

I pointed out that on the deal we’d agreed for the Christmas Beano, if transferred to the 02, Chas & Dave would walk out with very nearly £50,000, if the show sold out– which I believed it would. Were they getting more than that, I asked? No reply.

I emailed Chas. On June 14th he came back and said:

Jim, It was all left to Barry. He is our agent. If you want to get involved, give him a call.

So there it was. I asked if they wanted to do a warm-up at the 100 Club and I was told no. Chas and Dave eventually played 50 shows (31 of them sold out) including 3 at London’s Indigo 02.

It was a bad year for me. The 100 Club was threatened with closure because the owner was finding it hard to pay the rent. It was eventually saved, but by then I was told that the Fridays I had successfully promoted for nearly eight years had been given to someone else who was prepared to taken them on for 52 weeks of the year (I take July and August off to concentrate on the Rhythm Festival). Jeff wanted me to do Sunday nights at the 100 Club, but I had already been approached by he Borderline, a nearby club in central London, and I moved my Friday promotions there.

Then on April 25th, 2011, I was forwarded an email from the 100 Club:

To celebrate the end of their record breaking farewell UK tour and forthcoming live CD release with EMI Records, Chas n Dave perform to their friends, families and diehard fans in a special 100 Club show where all lucky ticket holders will receive a free limited edition live double CD of this final tour show together. The first half will be made up of their 1970′s pub set followed by all their hits from the 80′s, in what is going to be a highly emotional farewell to them on their final tour show together.
TIME: 6.30pm – 11pm
ADMISSION: £27.50 adv + bf (get your tickets now as there is only a limited number left)

Again, it would have been nice to have asked. Or even invited. Apparently I am not counted as part of their “friends, families and diehard fans”.
Gertcha!

Update (18 May, 2011)

A friend who was at the “last ever gig” at the 100 Club and who spoke to Dave, said he was up with working with me again and that another reunion show was not out of the question. Not being one to miss a chance, I sent an email to Chas and Dave’s agent, Barry Collings that read:

Hi, Barry. Any chance of a one-off c&d christmas beano?
Good money for a one-off.
Cheers, Jim (Driver)

He replied:

Hi. Sorry. Already booked at 02 indigo. Regards. Barry

There you go!

Update (30 January, 2012)

Word came back that Chas and Dave were going to do some more shows in 2012. On 23rd January 2012, I emailed Barry Collings and I said:

Hi, Barry. I’d like to do a short little tour with Chas & Dave to “round things off” as I feel I was given a slightly raw deal after I had to swallow the costs of the cancellations (with the promise of first option on a reunion) after Dave left but then wasn’t given a chance to recover any of this when he returned and the O2 offered such a great deal.

We could then all make some money, shake hands and travel our separate ways. Or maybe do it again…

Could I please put an offer in for a Chas & Dave “Back To Their Roots” short tour in May 2012. This would not interfere with the O2 shows and would be fun for everyone to do. It could go one of two ways:

I then went on to list two offers that involved either playing three shows or five shows and offering many thousands of pounds.

Barry replied and said:

Will put these offers to them but i would say very doubtful
Dave has retired aside from one or two major festival dates in the summer and a couple of xmas shows at 02 indigo

On January 30th he came back to me with the answer:

Put your enquiry to the guys but regret that Dave has not changed his mind about semi-retiring
Best Regards
Barry

… apart from the odd music festival and shows at the O2, of course.

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Post image for Rabbit: Chas and Dave Reunion – Gertcha! (Part 1)

Rabbit: Chas and Dave Reunion – Gertcha! (Part 1)

When Chas and Dave got back together  again in 2011 for what was billed as a “Final Farewell Tour”, thousands of people were thrilled and excited by this news. But not me. Now they’ve announced that their final ever show is to be at the 100 Club on Sunday May 15th, 2011.

For six years I worked with Chas and Dave and I organised the vast majority of their London shows, including their annual Christmas Beano. When I first came across them in a professional capacity (I was promoting Friday nights at London’s 300-capacity 100 Club), Chas & Dave were playing to half-full Sunday night houses there.

To be honest, back then Chas & Dave were generally regarded in the media and on the streets, as a bit of a joke. A kind of musical Arthur Daley, who came with a whiff of jellied eels and Mann’s Brown Ale. As Ian Aitch said in the Guardian in 2005: “(There’s) a general conception that Chas & Dave are a knees-up comedy duo to be lumped in with the Barron Knights, the Grumbleweeds and one-hit novelty acts.”

I thought differently.

To me Chas & Dave were (and still are) an important part of British rock music and as vital to London and its music as The Kinks, Ian Dury, Squeeze and The Small Faces. An instruction to new writers is “write about what you know” and that’s exactly what set Chas & Dave apart from the herd. At a time when most British popsters were singing about Route 66 and Thunderbird Cars in a mid-Atlantic drawl, Chas & Dave were lauding “Edmonton Green”, Friday night in the local and “London Girls” in their real (London) voices.

Success began for Chas and Dave in 1979 with the chart success of “Gertcha!”. At their peak in the early to mid-1980s, they were huge; as recognisable in Britain as Starsky and Hutch, Michael Jackson and Maggie Thatcher. They’d had several top 10 hits, had been featured in every commercial break singing about Courage Best Bitter, and even had their own Saturday night peak time ITV series. But, by 2004, their star had long been on the wane. That’s when I come in…

When the people organising Sunday nights at the 100 Club moved on, club owner, Jeff Horton suggested I put Chas & Dave on for one of my regular Friday nights. I tracked down their then agent, an Essex woman called Julie, and booked Chas and Dave for a fairly modest flat fee  and set about spreading the word.

I worked hard on the event and spent a lot of time and money organising flyers, posters and emails. A couple of years previously, one of their other admirers, Pete Doherty had included them in the London shows for the Libertine, which helped introduce Chas n Dave to a younger audience. It was that market I was aiming at, rather than the middle-aged Cockneys who remembered them from their 1979-1980s heyday.

That first night went well (very nearly sold out) and we put in another. Pretty soon Chas & Dave were selling out shows at the 100 Club  every time I put them on and, more importantly, we were getting on well. I got to know Dave, Chas and drummer Mick Burt, as well as their loyal and hard-working wives. Pretty soon I was putting on most of their London shows and working directly with Chas and Dave to help boost their image.

They’d appeared at a punk festival in Blackpool in 2004 and Chas and/ or Dave had mentioned how they’d really like to play at the Glastonbury Festival. I said, leave it to me, and I called an old friend of mine, Paul Charles, who was responsible for booking acts for the Acoustic Stage at Glastonbury. Although he was almost completely booked up, he liked the idea and managed to squeeze them in on the Saturday afternoon at 2.30pm.

I didn’t get any money for this (as far as I know, their new agent, Barry Collings pocketed the commission) and there wasn’t even a spare ticket available for me to go and watch them. But, as has become well known, that one hour set changed their lives and revitalised Chas and Dave’s career.

As Chas wrote in his book about Chas & Dave, All About Us: “We walked on stage to the biggest roar we’ve ever had in our lives. The crowd filled the tent and the whole field we were told later… Some thirty thousand people had trekked across to see us. We’d played to bigger crowds before, like when we supported led Zeppelin for instance but these people had come to see us and us alone. There have been many highlights in our career… but I would say this was the best for me. Playing live has always been my biggest buzz and Glastonbury was the ultimate.”

After that, Chas and Dave became hot property. That was when we thought up the idea of the Christmas Beano. Chas and Dave still wanted to play at the 100 Club but now we’d try a big annual show at a much larger venue. The first one was at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and we had 1,200 in to see Chas and Dave and a very good tribute band, Rolling Stoned. Their new agent, Barry Collings found it hard to say no to people offering money and so every year we did a Christmas Beano there’d always be another event competing with it. “Oh, is Harlesden in London?” Barry, the Southend agent would say. (I can’t remember exactly where they all were, but they were places like Walthamstow, Cricklewood, Ealing, Wimbledon and Crouch End).
Continued…

Click to Read Part 2

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Post image for Settling The Bill

Settling The Bill

London cop drama, The Bill, has been on my TV longer than the fruit bowl. First appearing in 1983, in the guise of a one-off drama called Woodentop, it became a weekly series a year later and has passed through various formats up to and including its current one hour slot every Wednesday and Thursday, football fixtures permitting. (To be honest, it’s only 42 minutes if you don’t count the recap of what’s already happened, the ads and very annoying parodies plugging the sponsorship product).

There’s no doubt that, during its 25 year run, The Bill has had its moments. Sad that most of them occurred during the golden years when Burnside, “Tosh” Lines, and Sergeant Bob Cryer ran the roost in the late-1980s to mid-’90s. Although, to be fair, the later stories featuring Bill Murray as Don Beech did set the pulses racing.

In later years, The Bill turned into something of a soap opera in uniform, sharing a small pool of actors with BBC undercover rival, Eastenders. A seeming shortage of actors who can pretend to be vaguely comfortable in an east London setting, means that the same ones keep turning up in different roles. Roberta Taylor, one of the Walford exiles, appeared as three separate Bill characters, before surfacing in 2002 as Inspector Gina Gold. And she’s not alone.

Bruce Byron, who plays cocky cockney DC Terry Perkins, had previously appeared on the other side of the Thin Blue Line, as Mr Smee in October 1994, Paul Archer in 1997 and John Shaw in 1998. Then, in 2000, he was introduced as Detective Inspector Lomax before being demoted and reappearing as Terry. Then, blow me, if in the interim he didn’t turn up in Eastenders as Gary Bolton. And there are dozens more.

Imagine my confusion a while back, when watching a rerun on UK Gold – as it was then. Superintendent Adam Okaro appeared in the undercover role of an African war criminal. Any minute now, he’s going to whip out his warrant-card and nick everybody, I thought. We reached the end of the episode and his deportation before I realised that actor Cyril Nri was there merely as a representative of the approved actor’s pool.

You can’t really blame the producers and casting directors. After all, there are only 200 living actors in the whole of Britain. I’ll check online: no, it appears that there are estimated to be 10,000 British actors, 95% of whom are said to be regularly out of professional work at any one time. They must be pretty crappy if the ones who appear on The Bill and Eastenders are the pick of the crop. Or perhaps the casting directors find it easier just to keep calling the same couple of agents over and over again. Surely, that can’t be true…

I’ve been off The Bill for a while. A period of melodrama and totally unlikely domestic plot lines made me look elsewhere for my TV thrills. Plus the cops unrealistically referring to witnesses and criminals alike by their first names (as in, “So, looks like Terry killed Carla in a fit of rage and Mick, Colin and Darren all lied when they said they were with Mel and Kim?”) grated. It had all got so fantastic – in the unreal sense. A while ago, I dreamt that Star Trek Deep Space Nine type aliens were scattered among the cast and I woke up believing it had actually happened.

Although Sun Hill is supposed to be in Tower Hamlets, most of the filming takes place in south-west London, as near to the studios in the old Triang factory in Morden as they can get. A thesp who worked on The Bill in its early years told me in confidence that, because actors tend to be significantly smaller than real-life policemen, Thames TV had constructed scaled-down sets, with reduced sized doors, filing cabinets and chairs to make the characters appear “proper sized” and suitably imposing.

For some unfathomable reason, last night I drifted into the first episode of a new Bill story, “Forgotten Child”. Despite the predictability an 8pm ITV drama demands, it was far better than I was expecting and I got to the end without feeling I’d been cheated. I even wanted to find out what happens next. Praise indeed…

The story centred around an underage girl runaway from Leeds, whose drug-scarred body had been found behind a strip-pub in Sun Hill. Investigations pointed to a nationwide ring trapping underage girls and luring them into prostitution and drug-dependency. Just another story of life in the present-day version of Dock Green, you’d think.

Although the story was multi-dimensional, a couple of aspects of “Forgotten Child” were mildly annoying, including a character who was supposed to be from Leeds having a definite Liverpool accent. You can almost hear the assistant chief producer saying: “But it still says ‘Northern’, dahling” – assuming anyone on-set even noticed. Then there’s the clever but unrealistic plot device by which minor characters impart important information (“We’ve found the pub landlord’s DNA all over the dead girl’s body”) as the investigating DC and Superintendent amble down the corridor, recapping the main points of the plot for slower viewers. In my limited experience of the real Bill, Superintendents and DCs don’t tend to mix too much, never mind stroll down corridors, practically arm-in-arm.

To be fair, it isn’t meant to be real life, it’s The Bill. And when one of your main characters attempts to commit suicide in his dressing room because he’s been axed from the programme as Reg Hollis, er… actor Jeff Stewart did in 2007, it’s possible to regard aliens showing up on screen as quite normal. Even in a dream.

Note: The Bill finally came to an end on ITV-1 in August 2010.

Life As An Out-Of-The Loop Music Promoter (Part 1)

Post image for Life As An Out-Of-The Loop Music Promoter (Part 1)

I’ve been a music promoter for most of my working life. It’s basically the same as being a theatrical impressario except, instead of plays, I organise rock ‘n’ roll shows. The wife likes to think of it as being something like a professional gambler, but that’s just her.

A music promoter hires a venue, finds an act people will (hopefully) pay to come and see, and sells tickets. Ideally, ticket money will exceed costs and so a profit is made. That’s the theory at least. In reality you are gambling that enough people will buy enough tickets to pay for everything. If it’s too hot, people won’t come; if it’s too cold, they won’t come either. A big sporting event on the television can ruin you. So too can another, bigger event somewhere else.

There’s a lot of money to be made in music. Problem is, 5% of the participants get to keep 90% of the loot, while the rest of us scrabble around for what’s left. I can’t deny that there have been rare occasions when I’ve made relatively big money. One such occasion was a Boomtown Rats concert in 1977. Afterwards, I couldn’t see the bed in my hotel room because it was literally covered in bank-notes – not to mention the young woman who’d come back with me from the show. But at the time I was living in a one-room office, sleeping on the floor, and I’d lost hundreds of pounds practically every gig I’d put on that year. The only secret of promoting that matters is to win more than you lose.

Generally speaking, to make serious money you’ve got to be in ‘the loop’ and I’m not. Being ‘in the loop’ means being part of the music mainstream.

I’ve always been something of an outsider and I only got to do the Rats in the first place because very few promoters back then would sully their hands with ‘punk’. I’d followed a hunch by booking this unknown Irish band for £250, largely because I rated their début single, ‘Looking After Number One’, and it paid off. It could easily have been another flop but, luckily for me, by the time the gig came around, the single was number 2 in the NME charts.

Usually putting money on bands you personally like is the kiss of death. At least it is in my case. My personal taste doesn’t often coincide with that of the general public. Big Brother, Susan Boyle, tabloid newspapers, obscure 1950s R&B, even more obscure British folk musicians and Socialism are just some of the subjects the general public and I disagree on. The big promoters, like major record company executives, never ever put money on what they personally enjoy, they “invest” their cash on what they are told other people will enjoy. Invariably it’s the lowest common denominator that comes into play. Was it Barnum (perhaps paraphrasing H L Menckne) who said: ‘No one ever lost a fortune underestimating public taste’?

Popular music is one of Britain’s leading businesses and for the last 50 years or so, the biggest players have been major corporations. Led by accountants masquerading as cool dudes, these outfits are not only in ‘the loop’ they pretty much are the loop. The players all know each other, they’ve all worked in one another’s offices at some time or other and they all go to each other’s parties. Maybe they’ve even got the same accountancy qualifications.

I first realised the situation had become critical in the early-1990s when I was a music journalist taken out to dinner to meet the big cheeses of a major British record company. Every single one of them was a lawyer or an accountant and their collective knowledge of music was woeful. A couple of the collected musos had great sport goading them with such misinformation as: Jerry Lewis had turned to rock & roll after dissolving his partnership with Dean Martin and added the “Lee” as a tribute to US General Robert E Lee; Prince Andrew is the name of a 70-year-old ska legend; and the news that Chuck Berry devoted his spare time to playing and mastering the Dixieland jazz trumpet after attending a funeral in New Orleans. These people knew how to maximise profits, they know all about downsizing and negative equity but, when it came to music, they didn’t know their Associates from their Donnie Elberts. Literally.

In my time I’ve been in on the ground floor of quite a few movements in popular music. Rock & Roll was before my time, as was the British Beat Boom of the early 1960s, but I was excited, moved and inspired by Peace, Love and Hippydom, which I was getting tired of when the Punk and New Wave movement started up in 1976. I was into punk months before the Sex Pistols signed to EMI and I desperately wanted to be part of it. And I was, in my small way. The same went for several other, smaller movements, such as pub rock, Indie Rock and the Irish/ Country-punk explosion of the early 1980s that blew the Pogues out to an unsuspecting world.

The small independent promoter has to make his or her money by selling crumbs from what the people in the loop don’t want – most likely what they don’t yet know exists. Because I have always promoted in small venues, I tend to be part of the grass-roots and I get to see new acts coming up. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a couple of shows out of them before they get snapped up by those ‘in the loop’. You’ve got to get in there quick, before the company-guys see what’s happening and kick sand in your face. But every year, it’s getting harder and harder to grab even a small slice of the pie.

The trend these days is to move acts to bigger – and more profitable venues– way too soon, before they’ve had chance to learn their craft and iron out their bumps. The Rolling Stones are the Rolling Stones today because, when they started, they were allowed to hone their craft in hundreds of small gigs before stepping up to play dancehalls, theatres, town halls, then to arenas and finally, when they were ready, into huge stadiums. The same went for all of the true greats: Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, etc, etc… That’s why witnessing an 81-year-old, arthritic, part-deaf Chuck Berry play a gig in London’s 300-capacity 100 Club, as I did recently, was an exciting, uplifting experience that totally beats going to see the latest manufactured stars play in a stadium or in a field in Somerset.

As they used to say: ‘That’s rock and roll, man.’

Boris Johnson is Mayor of London. Yippee!/The End is Nigh* (*delete as applicable)

Post image for Boris Johnson is Mayor of London. Yippee!/The End is Nigh* (*delete as applicable)

In hindsight, it seemed inevitable that Conservative Boris Johnson would defeat Labour’s Ken Livingstone and be elected Mayor of London.

Although the Member of Parliament for Henley-on-Thames was initially perceived by some as a joke candidate, in reality Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had everything going for him. For a start, the media was rabidly on his side.

The sole London-wide newspaper, The Evening Standard, a hot-bed of right-wing intolerance at the best of times, could never allow a week to pass without throwing up an anti-Livingstone headline or five. Two high profile journalists, Paul Waugh and Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC journalist forced to resign after the Hutton Enquiry, were put on the anti-Ken detail full time and didn’t bother to try for anything like a balanced coverage.

In April, The Standard ran the headline: ‘Suicide bomb backer runs Ken campaign’, only to reveal (in far tinier print) that the ‘backer’ in question runs an unofficial website called ‘Muslims 4 Ken’ and the suicide bombers he supposedly supports are in Palestine.
On top of the media onslaught was the backlash against Ken of what is often called ‘Middle England’ or ‘The Silent Majority’. London’s vast army of middle class and white collar workers like a few quid in their collective pockets and generally rate their own convenience above piddling matters like air or road pollution and parking restrictions. To them Ken was the man who gave them both the dreaded bendy-bus and the congestion charge and who was threatening to tax the SUV.

In the eyes of these inhabitants of Bromley, Croydon, Hamstead, Putney and Hounslow, the incumbent mayor was a threat to their standard of living and must be got rid of. Boris, on the other hand, that nice chap off the telly, knew what Suburban Man (and Woman) wanted, which was to be left alone, and he could be relied on to oblige.

When he turned up at the hustings, which was increasingly rare, Boris pledged to halt gun-crime, disband gangs and get rid of the bendy-bus. He very wisely didn’t say how any of these things could be achieved. All Ken could do was to repeat that crime had fallen under his administration but, as the Evening Standard repeatedly pooh-poohed the figures, no one believed him.

It didn’t help Ken that Gordon Brown’s Labour government was becoming more and more unpopular by the day. Although the two of them obviously didn’t see eye to eye on most things, a vote against Livingstone also served as a mid-term kick up the backside for the Labour administration.
The recent election results, coming as they do after a string of Labour PR disasters, the near collapse of the banking system and in the wake of a much-forecast recession, point to a right-wing resurgence on a par with the wave that swept Margaret Thatcher to victory in 1979. Callers to radio phone-ins are starting to come out of the closet and proclaim: ‘There’s nothing wrong with being right-wing; I’m right-wing and proud of it.’ And let’s not forget that for the first time, the neo-nazi British National Party gained over 5% of London votes and secured themselves a seat in the London Assembly.

Which brings us on to the so-called ‘race card’. For a while now, the press has been whipping up hysteria against immigrants. First came the claims that the lazy blighters didn’t work, more recently that has spun around to ‘they’re nicking our jobs’. Although born in the USA, with an immigrant Turkish grandfather, Boris neverthess managed to portray himself as a true blue Englishman and as much part of London as Trafalgar Square and Harrods.

Of course, Boris managed to get himself accused of racism although, to be fair, most of the evidence was taken from satirical articles he had written with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Even so, it would be a brave or foolish man who would send Boris Johnson into a room full of immigrants and second generation Brits and not expect him to make the odd gaff. Usually we would hope that this would count against him at election time, but not in the current climate.

Only time will tell. I’m prepared to give Boris the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not full of confidence that he’ll do a wonderful job and that everyone will live happily ever after.

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