Even this isn’t as amusing as Guido’s piece on how to manipulate the street sign elsewhere on the site (it’s very easy).

“I swear to God I heard someone moaning low.”

The new London Mayoral Candidates Booklet is full of hidden messages. Here’s the third in the series.

Lindsey German: Vote for me and I’ll overrule Parliament by bringing our boys back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The bourgeois capitalists in their plush palace at Westminster will of course tell me to f*ck off, but that won’t stop me. Why should I have to settle for the limited powers of the London Mayoralty when revolution is just round the corner? I’ll gather whatever comrades haven’t that day stomped off to form their own ideologically-discredited, Leninist-Stalinist, or Trotskyite-Kalininist-Galwegian splinter group, get them behind the wheels of Leninstone’s exploding bendy buses and go and pick our brave, brainwashed troops from the Middle East. At least, we would if any of the troops wanted to come back. And if we could convince the RMT’s members not to strike over the additional duties of training us to drive. Traitors. When the troops do get back, the RMT will be first up against the wall. Though we’ll need some of those troops to help us in our armed struggle against capitalism defend civil liberties. Vote for me. It’s time for me to have a massive ego trip equality.

The new London Mayoral Candidates Booklet is full of hidden messages. Here’s the second in the series.

Ken Livingstone: “I might fancy newts, swig whisky during the working day, have told a Jewish reporter he’s behaving like a concentration camp guard, accuse Brian Coleman of behaving like Goebbels, insist that Ariel Sharon was a war criminal, be embroiled in allegations about Lee Jasper’s alleged mismanagement of funds and dismiss media coverage of 27 teenage murders in a year with the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads”; BUT, if anyone realises that I belong to the same party as Gordon Brown, I’m completely f*cked“.

The new London Mayoral Candidates Booklet is full of hidden messages. Here’s the first in the series.

Richard Barnbrook (BNP): “Vote for me. Tall bigots are better than short bigots. At least I don’t have to get photographed whilst standing on a box of bananas. Just look at that bloke in the dark suit - he’d never have got his elbows in the picture if he hadn’t been standing on a box of Doles. Even so, we believe white people shouldn’t be on the Doles. Oh feck, it’s my party leader Nick Griffin… Why does no-one else in this booklet have to stand next to their party leader? He couldn’t be more disastrous if he appeared in a dirty film. Oh. Erm. Did I ever mention I used to be a teacher?”

Tomorrow: The Christian Choice explains why shed loads of money and a younger wife will help Londoners pass through the eye of the needle.

Whether you lean left or right, if you’re interested in politics or history you’ll adore this new online archive of Conservative Party posters, stretching back to 1886. I, for one, can’t look at the image above without thinking “Northern Rock.” Plus ça change, eh?

When Tory peer Lord Mancroft criticised the standard of care he received at Bath’s Royal United Hospital, he not only stuck a rusty scalpel in the nursing profession, he twisted it:

The nurses who looked after me were mostly grubby — we are talking about dirty fingernails and hair — and were slipshod and lazy. Worst of all, they were drunken and promiscuous.

Until he emerged as a nurse basher in this way, hardly anyone had heard of Mancroft; and the fact that he turned out to be a former junkie and - worse - one of the ninety remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, meant that it was too easy to dismiss his point out of hand, and too politically dangerous to defend him.

That’s why, with barely moment’s delay, the Royal College of Surgeons lost all sense of proportion and accused Mancroft of hurling a “sexist insult about the behaviour of British women”; why Health Minister Ben Bradshaw used the episode to trot out a lot of statistics; and why Tory leader David Cameron quickly lanced the abscess in his party by asserting “My experience of the NHS is 100 per cent completely different”.

Personally, I’m quite certain in my own mind that there are plenty of nurses who (like doctors) drink too much, and probably more than a few who have dirty fingernails and poor hygiene. But I also think that the wider point of Mancroft’s rather ill-judged outburst was contained in this explanatory remark:

You see, if you are a patient and lying in a bed and being nursed from either side, they talk across you as if you’re not there.

In that, he’s absolutely spot on. Frankly, I wouldn’t care less whether the nurse giving me a bed bath had a hangover (though I would prefer her nails to be clean); but I would have little faith in any carer who treated their patients as though they didn’t exist.

It sounds prissy, but I’ve seen what such attitudes can do. Back in the mid-1990s, during some of my university vacations, I used to work as a care assistant in various old people’s homes. In the best-run one, staff would have been genuinely shocked if you accused them of not giving being up to their jobs; but the fact was that almost all of them routinely treated residents as though they were invisible, almost never used quiet periods in the day to talk with the people they were supposed to care for, and always - always - assumed an exaggerated and (sometimes) false veneer of concern and affection whenever a relative showed up to visit.

Worse still, staff would take shortcuts and - more dangerously - make decisions on behalf of residents who were powerless to resist them. Carers would pretend not to hear old people they regarded as ‘troublesome’, and would even quicken their pace in certain parts of the building to avoid encountering them. I remember one old man who could walk perfectly well with a zimmer frame one week, and who had been taken off his feet the next - never to walk again, and soon to die.

Those carers weren’t bad people: they just worked in a culture that placed more value on appearances than on the best interests of vulnerable people. The manager was keener on making sure the beds had valences (a sort of linen pie-frill that hangs off the base) than in making sure her staff learned to take pride in improving every aspect of residents’ lives - not just in keeping them fed, warm, dry and as compliant as possible.

Under such conditions, it was little wonder that most staff took the easy option and put their own interests ahead of those they were supposed to be looking after; and it was massively to the credit of the small number of carers who did the opposite.

Where you have a culture in which staff inclinations take precedence over patient care, then the quality of that care is bound to suffer. After all, Lord Mancroft isn’t the only person to have witnessed this (however clumsily), as this succulent quote selected by NHS Blog Doctor, Dr Crippen, shows:

A nurse who wanted to see her cardiologist gets fobbed off by a nurse:

A very rude nurse- who was all dressed up in a suit, decided she would speak with me, but refused to answer any of the questions I had other than “its not dangerous,” and then make assumptions about my mental state. “You’re a bit stressed aren’t you, Love. Maybe thats why it happens eh?”

Piss off- you’d be pissed off if you’d travelled half way across London for an appointment to discuss results and not only have they cancelled your appointment without telling you but the consultant who fucked it up isn’t even there to take a battering!

Turns out the receptionist had taken it upon herself to cancel my appointment based on the consultants letter to my GP which said that I don’t need anymore follow ups. Yes- follow ups after we’ve been through all the results and my questions you fucking… monkey.

Faith Walker at The Oracle

A classic example of I-know-bestism that reduces the patient to nothing more than a target, to be disregarded at the earliest opportunity.

I’ve seen it at first hand too. In the months leading up to the birth of our son in late 2006, my wife amassed an impressive collection of forms and paperwork, including a detailed birth plan. This bit of paper details all the mother-to-be’s preferences about the manner in which she wants to give birth, the pain relief she will accept and so on. The idea is that, when you arrive at the hospital in labour, the midwives, doctors and others can see at a glance what the plan is and act accordingly.

At least, that’s the idea.

When my wife and I rolled up to Homerton Hospital in Hackney at 1.30am and handed over the birth plan to a midwife, we might as well have handed her a piece of paper reading “do whatever the fuck you want.” Because that’s pretty pretty much what she and her colleagues did.

First choice in the plan was a water birth. We assumed that, on reading this, someone would have started running the taps. That was foolish: the Homerton method was to wait until labour had progressed exactly far enough to say “There’s no time to fill the birthing pool now.”

Other choice moments included the midwife pissing off for an hour-long break and leaving us alone, telling us to let the deeply uninterested woman in the corridor know if we needed anything; me fetching the deeply uninterested woman, who put her head in the door and said: “She’s not pushing hard enough, is she?”; the original midwife realising she was way out of her depth, and fetching the doctor; the wonderful rigmarole as they strapped my wife to a machine that monitored the baby’s heartbeat, only to send her into a complete panic every few seconds as the beeps continually flatlined; and the refusal to give her any pain relief when asked because it would “make the birth even more difficult”.

Within three hours we had seen our agreed plan of a supportive water birth exchanged for a get-on-with-it-and-do-as-you’re-told procedure, which ended up with the baby nearly strangling on the umbilical cord, foetal distress, epesiotomy and a newborn who needed to stay in hospital for 24 hours’ observation.

That was the easy bit. At 3pm the following afternoon, we were told we could get packed and get ready to go home. It then took me nine hours of pleading with the ward staff before mother and child were finally discharged half an hour before midnight. We walked off into the night anonymously - another statistic heading for the safety of home.

Of course, it would be as unfair for me to complain as it was for Lord Mancroft to grumble about the care he received. Crap service doesn’t - contrary to the evidence of my own eyes - translate into poor standards of safety. When maternity services at Homerton Hospital were recently slammed as being amongst the worst in the country, the Healthcare Commission Chief Executive, Anna Walker, reassured us all by saying:

“Being put in the least performing category does not mean that a service is unsafe.”

Yet another healthcare professional who knows best. Quite how her remarks square with the fact that infant mortality is significantly higher than it was ten years ago is quite beyond me.

So, what to do? When it comes to medical matters, I can’t pretend I know best. But from my observations of how organisations are run, how they prosper and how they fester, surely some of the following points are worth considering.

1) Nurses, as individuals, are no more beyond reproach than anyone else. If someone says they have not been treated as well as they hoped by one or more nurses, this does not constitute an attack on an entire profession.

2) Many human beings have a tendency to go with the flow, and to take the easiest options. If the culture of a hospital allows nurses to get away with putting their own preferences before the needs of their patients, then some nurses (though not all) will do exactly that.

3) Targets need to be qualitative as well as quantitative. If a hospital is penalised for failing to meet targets, and those targets can be more easily achieved by providing sub-standard care, then they need to be scrapped and re-thought.

I certainly believe that nurses, midwives, care assistants and the rest all have to do a very difficult job, for relatively little pay, and in difficult conditions. We just need to recognise that things won’t get any better for them until we can accept that no individual is beyond reproach, simply by virtue of their profession or standing.

And that goes not only for nurses, but peers, MPs and even the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Yesterday in Camden, campaigning for Boris. I approached the bloke on the right of this picture.

“Have a Back Boris badge!”

“Boris Johnson?”

“Yes.”

“He’s here?”

“Yes.”

“I like Boris. But I wouldn’t vote for him. He’s a… bit of a clown, isn’t he?”

“Would you like to meet him?”

“No, it’s all right…”

“Go on,” I said, backed up by a friendly councillor. “Why don’t you meet him?”

So they met. Boris turned out to be a good listener, the stallholder - I bet - saw far beyond the clowning. They talked quite like old friends: I was impressed.

Still, if you do want a laugh there are plenty more photos of the day here.

Given that I’ve recently spent a fair amount of time sticking pro-Boris leaflets through my neighbours’ letterboxes, I thought it might be a good idea to go and listen to the man speak. If nothing else, I was pretty sure I’d get a good laugh.

And so I did. This morning I rolled up to The Gymnasium, Pancras Road, to lend an ear to Boris as he launched his transport manifesto.

It’s a nice venue, where 19th-century Germans used to have fun wrestling, fencing and doing various other physical jerks. That meant there was plenty of space for all of Boris’s supporters, chums, journalists and PR people, not to mention all the folk from Hackney I spoke to or saw there. The first people I spotted were my friend Graeme and his partner Keith: local activists who were celebrating the first anniversary of their civil partnership (there’s dedication for you). I also spotted fellow Hackneyite Dave Hill, who is busy blogging the mayoral campaign from an anti-Johnson, though not necessarily pro-Livingstone perspective.

It’s not an approach that has endeared him to Boris. After the launch, the candidate selected Dave to give the last question.

“My name’s Dave Hill,” said Dave Hill, quite reasonably. “I’m a contributor to the Guardian and I write an independent blog on the mayoral campaign.”

“Oh yes,” said Boris, with the air of one who has trodden in something. “I’m familiar with your work.”

Dave asked a good question about how much it would cost to put conductors on uber-modern Routemaster buses. Would it be £8 million, or £80 million as Ken had claimed?

“What did you call him?” began Boris, disarmingly. “King Newt?”

“I called him Ken Livingstone,” said Dave.

“Oh,” said Boris, before launching into a wonderful spiel about why he needed to improve the buses for mayor Livingstone, the only one of the three candidates who will be eligible for an OAP’s Freedom Pass on May 2nd.

Anyway, I digress. As always with Boris, his transport speech was a cheerful mixture of the sensible and the hilarious. Perhaps his best laugh came when he told us with great gravity that London enjoyed the same amount of good weather as Paris.

“In London,” he said, “it rains 94 per cent of the time. Just like in Paris.”

Howls of laughter.

“I mean. In London it doesn’t rain 94 per cent of the time. It rains just six per cent of the time. Just like Paris, where it rains only six per cent of the time. Not 94 per cent of the time.”

Luckily, although he invoked the weather, he didn’t claim to control it. And he did have some serious planks to his transport strategy. The anoraks amongst you can find them here, but the ones that struck the greatest chord with me addressed things I have experienced a lot, and written about both here and on my earlier blog. Sure, I haven’t a clue what to do about the Blackwall tunnel (Boris wants to “reinstate the tidal flow” and oppose toll charge increases at the Dartford crossing), but I sure as hell agree with these ideas:

1) Spending less on press officers and more on police officers to patrol the network - increasing their presence on buses and station platforms in outer London.

I’d rather have had a couple of coppers than any number of press officers when I took this journey:

I hopped in the sliding doors of the 149. Straight ahead a mother, with child in pushchair and friend at her side. Sitting nearby, facing the side of the bus, a woman of about my age. She was wearing a baseball cap, emblazoned with English national flag, and she was wearing slip-on shoes with a puckered elastic rim, which made it look like a toothless witch was trying to swallow her foot.

Not that there was much chance of that. As I got on, baseball cap was kicking her shoes on and off and intonating in a voice that sounded like a cross between a Whoopee cushion and that bloke with a strange, pent-up voice who used to be in the Police Academy films (no doubt someone incredibly famous, but it’s been a long time…)

“Iyyyymmmnnn airline piiiilot, dontchano..?”

Then, getting up and staring at the mother.

“How dare yyyyyou call me nnnn alcoholic? I PITY you. Yyyyou shhhould just FUCK off. I dnnn’t drink. OK, I knnow what you thinking. I DO drink. I drrink maybe. Maybe. I drrink maybbe, oh, four bottles of wine A YEAR! I bet yyou are n alcollic. I bet you go home with your FUCKING baby and ddrink yoursel sstupid. You fucking MAKE ME SICK.”

At which point she sat down again.

“I DON’T FUCKING DRINK”.

2) Introducing ‘Payback London’, a scheme that will require under-18s who abuse their right to free bus travel to earn it back through community service.

Excellent idea, provided it’s not used as an excuse to crack down on kids who are guilty of being in possession of a 14-year lifespan. It needs to be used against teenagers like these ones:

Back on the 253 today, this time from Euston, up to Finsbury Park and beyond. A bunch of teenagers got on at Holloway with one of those dogs that looks like a pitbull, thinks like a pitbull, menaces like a pitbull - but isn’t. After all, no one round here would dare own a dangerous dog, would they?

They slobbed out (where else?) on the back seat of the upper deck. I was three seats in front. A Jamaican woman with her toddler sat on the seat, back one row, to my left.

So the teens give the toddler a quick speech lesson. The only phrase of which I understood was:

“Say gangsta.”

After a while they get bored of that and realise the dog has zonked out. Trying, largely unsuccessfully, to bring it round by shouting loudly in its ears, one of the more enlightened zit-heads says:

“He ain’t ‘ad mushrooms on the bus before.”

Quite.

Or, even more in need of sorting out:

Only a few months we got on it at London Bridge. A big group of teenage girls got on at Dalston and, a few stops later, dragged out a female passenger (whom they had been baiting) and started laying into her. More a brainless pack injuring one person’s dignity than definite bloodlust, but I got on the phone straightaway and rang 999. Most of the other people on the bus sat still or evaporated into the night. When I was connected, the operator said nonchalently, sounding not a little bored, “Yeah, we’ve had quite a few calls about that already.

3) Getting rid of bendy buses.

A must. Life has been dull ever since they were introduced, as I’ve said before:

I used to catch the double-decked 149 bus from Stamford Hill to Shoreditch, read the paper on the way, shore up the morning brain with a bit of Lucozade. Sure, it was never the best part of the day. It would be all quiet to begin with, slightly more rowdy as you hit Stoke Newington High Street and, in an uncomplicated and predictable way, the nutters would get on at Dalston.

I didn’t like it at the time, but I find myself looking back with sentiment. The sort of lunatics you got then were the ones that needed the full space of a two-tiered bus to give of their best. What’s the point of bringing a bottle of Lambrusco on the bus at 9am if you can’t throw it down the stairs, getting the full, exploding-TV effect on the lower deck? Why bother smoking dope if you can’t do it on the upper back seats, a sort of no-man’s land the driver would never even try to police? These are just few of the things I’ve lost since the new bendy buses took over the 149 bus route. These things are so dull they go up in flames quite spontaneously. I mean, what’s the point of being a Dalston arsonist if your bus is going to do all the work - and snatch the credit - for you? Instead we’ve been given the sort of low-level, grumbling dissatisfaction of people crammed onto an almost-seatless bus, a sort of tube with no tracks. The mode of expression has been lost.

Take today for example. A stinking tramp could only think of offering me his seat in his quest to make a public nuisance of himself. I grouchily refused. A hugely fat woman apologised as she sat next to and partly on top of me. And the nascent heroin addict opposite could merely whisper in a low voice that “that fat cow has got dust all over me fackin’ trousers”. I mean, where’s the fun in that? At least in the old days people would pick on someone much harder and not just bigger than themselves.

Anyway: go Boris. I don’t know how much better you’ll be than King Newt, but it’s certainly time the latter retired to his pond.

UPDATE: Dave Hill has posted an audio transcript of the morning, so if you want to get Boris’s exact words rather than my memory of them, this is the place to go.

I wouldn’t. They can’t even get Number 10’s database-driven petition website to work properly.

Link here. Screenshot above accurate as of 16:25pm, 1st February 2008.

I haven’t drawn anything for 22 years, ever since I chose Woodwork over Art. Nor is a laptop trackpad the best doodling implement to use. But the scene above popped into my mind, vis-à-vis some the recent financial shenanigans of our politicians, so I thought I’d have a go at scribbling it down.

Peter Hain, who forgot about the small matter of a hundred thousand pounds, and whose political career expired horribly.

The chief defect of Peter Hain
Was trous’ring cash for his campaign
To fill John Prescott’s roomy shoes
As Labour’s hapless Number Two.

Donors (who must have been insane
To pay for Peter, not champagne)
Gave him thousands, and told him “These
Will help you, so declare them please.”

Alas, poor Hain: his omission
To tell th’ Electoral Commission
About a hundred thousand pounds
Did not impress boss Gordon Brown.

Cried Hain: “My friends, be warned by me,
That financial transparency
Was all that my career requir’d:
It had it not: so it expired.”

Maybe the BBC is finally wising up to the probability that, come the next election, Gordon Brown’s government will be toast. Either way, if it continues to publish photos like this one to your left, it will pretty quickly rid itself of the stain of pro-Labour bias. Gordon Brown looks less Mr Bean and far more Bond villain, deranged beyond reason and bent on world domination. Certainly, last autumn’s “will he, won’t he?” debacle over the general election showed his willingness to toy with his prey, right up to the point where it escaped from its shackles and took a pop at him with a Walther PPK 7.65 mm sloppy great custard pie.

Sadly we can’t put our great, clunking fists in the ballot box for some time yet, so why not amuse yourself by typing “Brooding Scot” into Google image search. The first page of results is an eye-opener and a delight in so many ways.