09 January 2007

Read About London... aaaarrrggg

The race to become Tory candidate for the London mayor elections in 2008 is becoming increasingly ludicrous. After obnoxious DJ Nick Ferrari pulled out of the contest last year, the names linked with the candidacy in the news have become increasingly bizarre - and none more so than ex-Radio 1 DJ and early 80s Saturday morning TV presenter Mike Read.

A Read candidacy would be preferable to ex-Radio 1 DJ and early 80s Saturday morning TV presenter Noel Edmonds, and there are some other names lower down the pecking order - Jonathan King, or Gary Glitter, for example. But that's about it.

I once had the 'pleasure' of meeting Mike Read during the recording of the one round of BBC Radio 1's 'Pop of the Form' that my two classmates and I lasted before we lost to Chingford School because a guy on the other team had a CD player at home and so knew what a song on CD fast forward sounded like, and so was able to win maximum points on the 'jumbled up CD' round. (This was the late '80s, you see.) I can't remember anything about him at all, but he had a long in-depth conversation with our English teacher, who was something of an intellectual, so maybe his public image of a dinosaur moron to be locked in the same filing cabinet as Dave Lee Travis, Simon Bates etc. isn't fair?

Read's doing himself no favours with his basic campaigning shtick at the moment, though. His reason for wanting the job is:

On a daily basis I get angry about the state of the country, the nanny state and the way things are going.


Very "Thatcher 1975", Mike. Probably still upset about punk. And Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Unbelievably, the BBC article on Read's mayoral bid says that "he had been urged to consider standing by Tory activists after he made a speech at the party's annual conference."

Presumably the activist who said Read would make a good mayor was the same person who, at another Tory conference fringe meeting I attended, said that he was "deeply worried about proposals to introduce the Sharia law in Britain." I think these people all beam in from a parallel universe or something.

Why can't ex-Runaround presenter and Eastenders star Mike Reid make a bid for the mayor as an independent candidate? I think he'd take 'em all out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there - Whilst not holding Mike Read in particularly high regard, and finding the rhetoric quoted a little unsophisticated, I'm not sure if you had the opportunity to watch last week's 'Dispatches' programme on Channel 4. You may not have seen it, as the coverage from the resolutely pro-Pyongyang BBC and its Channel 4 News stablemate was on the slight side.

I'd advise trawling the web for comments about it, as the proposals to introduce Sharia Law in the UK are being openly advocated in Mosques across the UK. You might say that UKIP/Far Right websites are discussing such issues as Reintroduction of Capital punishment/EU withdrawal and that mere discussion of these issues does not constitute a threat in itself. I wish I had your confidence in the innnate reasonableness of the 'moderate Muslim' (a figure who is beginning to resemble the 'Good German' of the thirties and forties.) but this programme was certainly food for thought.

T.N.T. said...

The point was that this Tory conference delegate thought that the current UK government planned to introduce Sharia Law. I'm not denying that there are individuals in the UK who would like to see it introduced. What's the policy solution though?