Sadiq Khan on the back foot, Tower Hamlets on Lockdown

London mayor Sadiq Khan was completely absent from the TV and radio studios yesterday, and it wasn't because he was visiting crime scenes or consoling bereaved relatives. It emerged he was hiding in his City Hall office. At the moment when London needed resolute leadership, the little man had locked himself away from view.

It would be foolish to suggest the Mayor is responsible for a dramatic spike in violent crime that has seen London's murder rate exceed that of New York for the first time. But for a mayor who spends the bulk of his time and effort self-publicising, with a thumb in every issue from global warming to meetings with the EU's Brexit team, his lack of engagement with the death and bloodshed on his own streets makes him look silly and trivial.

Back in November he made what looked like a state visit to India and Pakistan, a tour that involved several changes of local native costume each day, with internet bandwidth straining to convey the tsunami of publicity pictures sent back to London. It was all intended to sell Khan to every south asian community in London, and all at the taxpayer's expense. However, Khan's vanity, his overweening narcissism, his ambition and his high opinion of himself aren't helping him; though his ratings in London appear high, I suspect this is artificial, and that his true support is a thin shell. People expect officer-like responsible behaviour from their leaders, not craven excuses and hiding from view.

It is encouraging that despite the mayor, rather than because of him, the London Assembly has taken full charge of arrangements for the May 3rd elections in Tower Hamlets. Following the crook Lutfer Rahman's defenestration as London's most corrupt mayor and the borough being run from Whitehall under emergency measures, the GLA is determined not to allow any repeat. The transcript of the March meeting of the Police and Crime committee is here - detailing measures that include

•  A ban on the use of any language other than English in polling stations
•  Police guarding every single polling station
•  Staff & Police with body-worn cameras to record breaches of the RPA
•  Taped 'no go' areas marked outside stations to exclude Muslim intimidators from getting too close to voters
• Training in election law / RPA for all 620 Tower Hamlets officers
• A specialist election law squad to tackle VIP and high profile Muslim intimidators (imams etc)
• All police leave cancelled for May 3rd
• Electoral Commission have carried out special checks on the Electoral Register
• IVR making good progress, all HMOs scrutinised

It's all generally good stuff - they're clearly determined to run a British rather than a third-world election this year in Tower Hamlets, even if they don't hit the right note all the time:

Chief Superintendent Sue Williams QPM I have also invested in my Faith Officer, who in the last election, the general election, went around to all the different faith establishments and talked about spiritual influencing, talked about electoral fraud, and was able to give people a little bit more information about what is right and what is wrong, because a lot of the general public do not understand. What we have said is we would be happy to repeat that process with the Faith Officer leading up to the mayoral election as well.

So, a useless mayor on the back foot and being exposed for what he is, and Tower Hamlets being recovered for democracy with a strong pushback against Bangladeshi electoral fraud and intimidation. Reasons to be cheerful.

Praying for a second term? Khan affected a variety of native costumes on his tour

Alison Saunders - a vile monster who should never have been appointed DPP

There was a degree of celebration yesterday at the defenestration of Alison Saunders, the most vile, unsuitable and disastrous DPP in living memory. The woman is a monster, driven by a bigoted ideology that has led to gross injustice and a neglect of police time spent on rapidly increasing crimes in categories other than the targets of Saunder's twisted zealotry.

As Allison Pearson writes in the Telegraph (£)

What the CPS statistics did not reveal was the embarrassing number of men brought to trial for rape on wholly inadequate evidence, and swiftly acquitted. Saunders wasted huge resources on her hobbyhorse, particularly high-profile campaigns relating to often imaginary historic sexual abuse.

Meanwhile, the crimes most people care about – burglaries, stabbings, shoplifting, public disorder - were booming. Home owners were told that they should not expect to have break-ins investigated, as the police were too busy (quizzing schoolboys who had shared photos of their genitals on Snapchat, no doubt.) At the weekend, it was confirmed that the unthinkable had come to pass: London now has a higher murder rate than New York.

and

The worst DPP in living memory, a person who politicised and poisoned the criminal justice system, seemed to regard trials as an annoying impediment to locking up the accused, causing untold misery to innocent men and their loved ones.

Good riddance to utter rubbish - but she should never have been appointed in the first place.

And not for the first time the probity of the members of the Electoral Commission has been called into doubt after four of them were caught making public anti-Brexit statements. The role of a Commissioner requires absolute public political neutrality. 

Again, perhaps not a surprise - these key quangos are still packed with Neolib ideologues spreading their poison long after their political and professional death. 

There needs to be a mass cull of all vile monsters, the placeholders, the has-beens, reptiles, dinosaurs and saboteurs still crowding our national institutions. They will hold this nation back, stuck in a state of monstrous injustice, bias, vile prejudice, establishment self interest and corruption. More than ever we need fair, balanced, open, equitable, democratic and representative appointments to these posts and these bodies. This old dross must be culled.