Following my discovery that the mayor filed his copy too late yesterday to be published in at least one early edition of the Telegraph - those delivered to Guardian HQ lacked his column, I learn - Hopi Sen makes much the same argument on his blog as in a comment under my post:
Boris Johnson is the mayor of London. This weekend, while London was trying to prepare for and deal with it's biggest weather crisis for decades, he was busy writing a column for the Telegraph. Leadership?
The Troll takes a similar angle:
Perhaps the more important question is whether Boris Johnson should be writing this stuff at all...there's nothing wrong with him keeping his skills honed and doing the odd bit of paid writing when he has the time.
But when he's flitting between dealing with the worst economic crisis for seventy years and the worst municipal crisis for twenty, should he really be taking time out for this?
Fair points. For me the wider issue is one of striking the right balance and having the right attitude. I'm OK with his writing a weekly column as long as it doesn't distract from his mayoral duties and as long as he's fulfilling the terms of his (extraordinarily lucrative) Telegraph contract as other writers are expected to - especially when so many Telegraph staff have been made redundant recently.
These seem to me the minimum requirements for Boris's journalistic arrangements to be honourable and acceptable. I'm not convinced they're being satisfied.
