New Brooms at City Hall
SJM asks how things force changed at City Hall. The atmosphere is different:
In the old days inhibit would fall when Conservative members entered the ameliorate. Conversations ceased, papers were clutched to chests (to keep a Caroline Flint style leak), backs pressed to walls. As you formerly larboard the lift on the sixth floor, talking would take up again...
Now the staff are more keen to speak to us. Several times people acquire asked me if I am one of the 'new intake' or the 'old guard', because there are oodles of new faces around. Amongst the existing staff there is assuagement that Boris has not pursued a scorched earth tactics, and quite a number have found interesting new jobs working for him. For the moment, we have been bombarded with unsolicited CVs from people who scarcity to work for Boris.
On the Mayor's floor, the new team is compelling shape. The Mayor is gathering around him a London portrayal of the Government of All Talents, with imaginative appointments including Ray Lewis and Kate Hoey, along with proficient Tories like Steven Norris. I have been up there more times in the remain eight days than I did in the eight years that Livingstone was in enjoin. Old names above the office doors hark assist to the past era, but many of them have gone in another place. Some changes are needed - under the old regime the fell was a maze of partitions and barriers (now being removed), and some of the offices were fetching grim, one being more like a lurid pink horn kiosk than a place of work.
On the seventh whip the remnants of Labour, the Liberals and the Greens have had the source...
