Week...
... coming up here of all Boris & Ken all the time. This candidate will not get the red carpet in Beijing: "Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase... Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov. Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, although there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech... It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I'll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff." Boris Johnson, Have I Got Views for You, page 277. And he wants to bring back the much loved, double-decker Routemaster buses to London's streets. Meanwhile, this candidate can expect a warm welcome in Karachi as he is putting his weight behind a "huge new minaret" in Brick Lane.
