By Brian Nicholls

Last updated 11:36, Thursday, 08 May 2008

It’s official! London is an idiot city. I have suspected it for years, but I thought I was alone in my low opinion of a population which travels underground like moles in total isolation from their fellow men despite being squashed together like the proverbial sardines.

They never smile and they look as if they live in constant fear that meeting the eyes of another human being will somehow steal their souls away. It must be this hurly-burly lifestyle combined with their personal loneliness, despite living in Britain’s most crowded city, which has turned their minds and made them vote for Boris Johnson as the capital’s mayor.

It’s true they didn’t have much of a choice, Ken Livingstone or Bo-Jo, but they still managed to make not just the wrong choice, but the weirdest one. Perhaps it’s the old cockney humour coming through; ‘You’re ‘avin a larf intcha dahlin?’

Not that there are many cockneys left in the place and Boris certainly ain’t one.

Cor strike a light gov, they’ve gorn and elected a regular toff they ‘ave. Johnson is an old Etonian just like Cameron and almost every other prominent Tory in the new Conservative party elite.

Maybe London likes that kind of thing but it does seem strange that a city which markets itself as one of the world’s leading modern, forward-thinking cities should go back to the 19th century and elect a public school-educated rich boy as its leader and figurehead.

It must be the huge foreign portion of the London population which have been impressed by Boris. Perhaps they still believe that a public school/ Oxbridge-educated accent is a sign of intelligence and a good education when, in fact, it’s often is a disguise for being as thick as a plank.

Some forelock-tugging country bumpkins might still go weak at the knees when people like Boris Johnson substitute ‘Om, om om, yes well, precisely, om, om,’ for a coherent answer to a question but we shouldn’t expect it of the population of a modern capital city.