From the Evening Standard:
Boris Johnson will this week announce a complete root and branch restructuring of City Hall in order to deliver on his urgent agenda of tackling youth crime.
Entire departments are to be renamed, shaken-up and radically refocused and will be told to allocate leadership, funding and resources around the Mayor's top priority of reducing youth and knife crime, according to Deputy Mayor Sir Simon Milton, the man charged with cracking the whip in the wake of Tim Parker's controversial departure last month.
In his first interview since joining City Hall, Sir Simon, 46, the former leader of Westminster Council, says he hopes the restructuring will mark the end of the chaos that has dogged the new administration's first four months.
I await the restructuring with interest. In the meantime we can savour Sir Simon's interview for its recognition that the opening four months of Johnson's mayoralty have been a mess and for its elegant if, frankly, implausible denial that Team Boris has been a bit of a blood bath so far. So much for the invigorating virtues of outsiders. With Sir Simon as, "In reality...Chief of Staff," the local government establishment is now taking command. Things can only get better. After all, they couldn't have got much worse.
