Running around the chamber pulling down brightly coloured, oversized trousers, honking each other’s noses and dowsing each other with scraps of paper marked ‘water’ from a fire bucket will no longer be tolerated.
That presumably is the message London Assembly Chair Dee Doocey has delivered to Boris Johnson and John Biggs since last month’s Mayor’s Question Time when their behaviour brought City Hall rudeness crashing down to a whole new level.
Instead of the usual snide comments and insults those of us who traded in three hours of glorious sunshine for devolved scrutiny were treated to serious, researched questions and equally detailed answers.
The difference was marked and very welcome.
Topics being discussed today included London’s upwardly revised development budget which Boris assured us would allow him to deliver many of his previously announced scheme including retrofitting homes to make them less energy wasteful.
The all serious Boris stumbled slightly when he claimed the lost money – around £300m per year – could be made up for by reducing waste.
This gave Labour’s Len Duvall the chance to portray this as an admission that Boris has wasted hundreds of millions over the past three years, but overall this was Boris’s most competent outing in memory.
Other big issues discussed included coalition spending cuts, the plight of valued local hospital units and the threat of EU fines if air quality doesn’t improve.
On hospitals Tory AM Brian Coleman was especially sharp with the Mayor, telling him not to hide behind claims of impotence on the issue and to do what he knew was right and join the fight against the closures.
Clinical need, Coleman said, could not be the only consideration when closing valued local services.
Brian is often teased and tormented by online critics but on this issue he was spot on and his rebuke produced a pained look from a Mayor who knew it.
Given the importance of the issues being discussed it’s worth noting that Lembit Opik’s desire to be Mayor (apparently against the will of every sane LibDem in London) didn’t seem to compel him to dust off his sedgeway and pop along to City Hall.
Even Oona King made it to a single MQT in her doomed bid to stop Ken Livingstone – often present at Mayor’s Questions though absent today – from securing Labour’s 2012 nomination.
If Opik really does want his party nomination isn’t it time he started to take the governance of London seriously?
If, on the other hand, his interest is just about feeding his ego and getting himself on TV, couldn’t he just line up with the rest of the X Factor wannabes?
