Daily catch-up: understanding the man who could be the next mayor of London
If only someone would tell us what they think of Jeremy Corbyn. In the meantime, here are some other bits and pieces
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Your support makes all the difference.Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the selection as Labour candidate last week of Sadiq Khan, who could be the next mayor of London, the greatest world city.
Amol Rajan, who grew up like Khan in Tooting, provides an essential profile in Politico. Khan has generally been an unimpressive performer on television and in the House of Commons, but it seems that there is more to him as an operator and organiser – although it is generous to him to attribute Labour’s better-than-average vote in London in the general election to his skills, and “he never loses” sounds to me like hubris.
• Wes Streeting is a Labour rising star with a bit more character. The new MP for Ilford North is featured in Huffington Post’s series of interviews with the new intake. Asked who his heroes are, he said Anthony Crosland and ...
“It’s worth saying now, and I felt it at the time although I thought he went off the rails a bit with Iraq, Tony Blair. I think it’s worth now saying in the modern Labour Party that he’s a hero because he won three elections. I think it’s too easy to trash his achievement when frankly the people who have come since haven’t done any better, and the people who went before didn’t do any better, so I think we’ve got to guard our legacy and our achievements a bit more than we have done.”
• A number of updates to my Top 10s. First, Laws for Life (with addendum). Tech-FAQ offers Cunningham’s Law:
“The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”
Second, Top 10 Tweets. It was a shame I didn’t have space for this one, nominated by John Peters:
“Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” @ReallyVirtual, Sohaib Athar, 1 May 2011: 3,839 retweets.
Third, Top 10 Computer Game Characters, which I did on Sunday. Union Jihack nominated Pong. “Because I own an original console,” he or she says. And Tom Doran nominated Alyx Vance, from Half-Life, who is “genuinely likeable and a huge step forward for AI characters in games”.
• And finally, thanks to Siberian Fox for this:
“I’m just sayin’, everyone that confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead.”
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