Well, as expected, the elections were awful. A wipeout of Labour nationally, a resurgent Tory party riding high, but worst of all (to me) is Ken losing to Boris. I have such a keen sense of the last great survivor who we've lost. At least with no chance to screw up a third term we can step back and admire what he did for London - and there's a lot that Boris owes to him, because he was London's first mayor and made the job what it is. Independent of New Labour, the number of people who showed up on Thursday to support him prove that he was one of a kind, and it's anyone's guess when we'll see another like him. One day.

And worse that Boris - much, much worse - is the fact that the BNP candidate won a seat on the Assembly. Powerless, sure, but what a symbol: a great world city elected a nasty man from a viciously racist party as one of its representatives. It certainly makes Boris looks harmless in comparison, I suppose, and we should give him the benefit of the doubt now. He won the election fair and square - though with a little help from the wretched Standard - and I hope he makes the best of it.

Anyway... I've bought myself a new phone as a treat of distraction and Lucy came to visit, which was lovely! We had a mini-picnic with Joe, Sophie and a duck (with little ducky feet) this afternoon; Sophie, this photo's for you!



Stay strong, London. We'll get through this (Oh, and congrats to Brent & Harrow for bucking the trend! Knew my homeland would come through!)

As this post publishes the polls in the London mayoral elections will have just closed, so if the tone is a bit defeatist at least this is coming out safely after every last vote has been cast! Hopefully tomorrow evening will have a surprise to celebrate about, but who can say...? Thanks to everyone who tried to stop him!


Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Facebook recently threw open the floodgates for the 'political views' listing, which had hitherto been restricted to a bland spectrum from liberalism to conservatism, but can now be anything a user's heart desires to display to the world on his or her profile. I settled on 'optimistic liberal' in the end, not wanting to launch into a fully fledged speech with about the same number of characters to use as a single text message. Andrew - a kindred spirit from Peterhouse - kindly asked me to elaborate, allowing me to set out my stall brimming with optimistic spirit about how far humanity has come, and how far we might be able to go, despite all the challenges, all the setbacks, and all the ugly realities. And in general, I fully believe it.

But there are moments.

On Wednesday I spent the early part of my evening stood outside King's Cross tube station, handing out election fliers for Ken Livingstone to anyone who might mistake it for a freebie paper. The occasional nutter was pleasantly mild, and I was rather fond of the elderly avuncular Tory - and I'm making an assumption he was a Tory out of a very strong sense of instinct - who merrily put his arm around me and declared that he was awfully sorry but had already declared for another man. As a reward for my brief moments of sacrifice, I was given a free ticket to the Time Out mayoral hustings by the two Ken organisers, who were, incidentally, the kind of blokes you know are decent, hard-working and thoroughly good people within a fraction of a second.

Boris was skipping the hustings, so it was left to Ken, Brian and Siân (for the Greens) to produce a panel essentially united around progressive politics. So not terribly good argument, but uplifting all the same. If these are the people running, you can't go wrong, right? Well wrong, of course, because of the looming figure of Boris. But y'know, it's not even bloody Boris which dents my optimism. Nor even the swarm of loud-mouthed supporters who hung around outside in matching Back Boris shirts chanting various pieces of nonsense. No, because it's a democracy and they represent a legitimate viewpoint, so let them have their piece. The depressing thing is knowing that Lynton Crosby is hanging around backstage, managing it all, out of sight and out of mind to most of us.

But even this pales into insignificance when I come home to read of the BNP's candidate forced to withdraw after writing that rape is "simply sex" and "cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal". This man was second in line in London: if the BNP won two Assembly seats, he'd have been there, drawing a salary from us as a spokesman for London. I think I can be forgiven for letting that dent my optimism just a little bit - though, on the other hand, it heartens the spirit to see the Boris folk singing from the same hymn-sheet as us when it comes to the BNP.

Having said that, I cannot ignore the people who are "not racist" and "not sexist" and "appalled" and "shocked" and "sickened" and all the rest of it, yet spout regressive beliefs as if it were a natural reflex. Lynton Crosby plays the politics of fear and division to put people into power: for every hardening of people's attitudes towards 'others', he should feel ashamed, though of course he never will. Columnists from Richard Littlejohn to Peter Hitchens attack the BNP, yet all the time make it more and more likely that people will turn to them. And to you, JF, to you who casually sneer at the 'feminist left' and blog in what I can't quite decide is mock or real ignorance: be honest with yourself, for you could so easily have been the one to write - without thinking, but with a casually different contextual spin - "I've never understood why so many men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth".

I'll calm down now Sincere apologies to my sister who sensibly wrote that "I way prefer bullet points of what you've done then long theoretical debates or Ken propaganda!"

Sorry Abbi, but I'm going to have to pre-empt your feature on the London Mayoral elections. Then again, maybe it may help to influence you!

The London Mayor is a funny institution, but it's also tremendously accountable. You're voting for a single individual, not a broad coalition of MPs, and they are thus empowered to put forward policies which are more original, more daring, then a party ever could be. It hardly has to be said that Ken Livingstone played an important role in shaping the post: as an independent in his first term, he defined the office as being more than a puppet spokesman for party, and given the state of party politics in Britain today I think anyone should be grateful for that! But the flip-side is that if we as voters get it wrong, we get it very wrong, because we've put one person in charge of vast swathes of London's services, so they better be able to handle it.

This election will come down, ultimately, to Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson. According to a recent Evening Standard opinion poll - and yes, the Evening Standard have hardly been the most impartial of observers - Boris is currently soaring ahead with 49% of first-preference votes. If he got 50%, he would win outright. Less than 50% and it comes down to second-preference votes being added to the final two candidates.

As funny as he undoubtedly is, Boris is at heart a right-wing Conservative. This is a huge problem given that the most important area of control for the Mayor is transport. However you feel about right-wing Conservatives, I believe they are at their worst when it comes to transport.

But what's Ken Livingstone's record on transport? Well, as much as Londoners enjoy complaining about it, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it hasn't improved. The Oyster card. 90p buses, and many more of them. Free bus travel for children. A seventh carriage on the Jubilee line. Siverlink taken back into public control with London Overground, which will result in new trains over the next few years. Crossrail given the go-ahead to be built. For god's sake, the other day TfL even nationalised Croydon Tramlink - the type of headline you really don't get very often.

Compare this to the £1.50 paper-tickets of buses in Birmingham (sorry) and elsewhere. Compare this to the privatised train companies in London, who have taken years and years to accept Oyster and are still dragging their feet on it. These are reflections of what happens when you let the Conservatives run transport: sold off to the highest bidder, split up and run for profit in natural monopolies which you can't do anything about. These are Boris Johnson's core instincts. Would he keep trying to persuade the government to give the Southern franchise to TfL in the next stage of London's integrated transport? No, of course not - he'd be too busy faffing about with spending hundreds of millions of pounds replacing bendy buses and posing as tough on crime. He hasn't a clue.

So essentially, I am hopeful that people who value London's unique transport - and the improvements going into it - turn up to support Ken Livingstone, the man with the track record of change for the better. And I also hope that those who aren't willing to vote for Ken as their first choice - possibly to support the Lib Dems, for example, who have an excellent candidate - consider at least putting Ken Livingstone as their second choice, to help fight off a Boris victory.

I don't think Rowan Williams should resign as Archbishop of Canterbury. He is certainly a thoughtful, intelligent man who is a far better Christian leader than many we could imagine. I don't even think he should apologise, because why force someone to apologise for opening a debate? Having said all that, I do think people should feel justifiably angry with what he's done.

Let's start with what he actually meant: that civil Sharia law courts (notwithstanding the complexity about what 'Sharia' actually means) should receive some sort of official recognition within the British legal system. Naturally, this doesn't mean a lot of the nonsense which has been talked about in the juvenile press. But it is still fundamentally and absolutely unacceptable. The law must apply to everyone, equally, end of. To the extent that people can unofficially and voluntarily agree to be bound by separate codes, as long as it doesn't involve a breach of the law, this is already the case. If two Muslims who are divorcing wish to abide by Islamic custom, they already can. To suggest that this needs to be integrated into the national law is just utterly wrong. Not surprisingly, the majority of British Muslims agree.

The real problem, of course, is that through wilful misinterpretation Rowan Williams has now unleashed a tremendous backlash against Islam which will be felt hardest by the British Muslims he was attempting to help. That may not be his fault, but it's breathtaking that he doesn't even seem to have considered the possibility.

But the underlying cause of all this nonsense is that the Archbishop - for all his intelligence - is simply incapable of understanding what a secular state means in the 21st century. He doesn't get that religion does not belong as an arm of government, or the legal system, or anything else that isn't entirely a private, voluntary association, with no special favours from the law. I suggest the following remedy to help him learn: strip the Archbishop of his legacy role within the secular state, kick his bishops out from the Lords and put the Church of England on an equal footing with everyone else.