Boris is at it again, slagging off the Unions in the Mail on Sunday saying that 50% of members balloted rather than 50% of those who bother to vote should be in favour of a strike in order for it to be legal, happily ignoring the fact that only 16.8% of Londoners eligible to vote made him their first choice for Mayor in May.

Somewhat bizarrely he claims that ballots "put a terrific psychological burden on people who don’t want to take strike action” though what can be so intimidating about getting a form through the post, putting a cross next to "yes" or "no" and then sticking it in a pillar box is beyond me. He went on to say that his proposals would “take away unions’ power to cause endless grief and stress by threatening strikes and causing endless disruption and buggeration”.

It is true that strikes have been mentioned on the Tube and in a few cases ballots have been held but most of the stress has been generated by the Tories and their supporters in the media. ASLEF have only held one strike in the last twelve months, our traditional Boxing Day walkout, while apart from a bit of trouble over at Tube Lines earlier in the year and a strike by the cleaners RMT haven’t done much since 2010.

To me it seems that all of our problems could be settled around the conference table but obviously Boris is trying to portray himself as the man to carry on Maggie Thatcher’s anti-Union policies in his poorly disguised effort to oust his fellow Old Etonian and Bullingdon Club member from the party leadership. Sadly it will probably work, the voting public seem to have reduced politics to a sub-X Factor celebrity contest and in ten years’ time I will not be surprised if the General Election debates included a swimwear section.

At next months’ Tory Party conference Boris will address a Conservative Home fringe meeting to divulge how we won the Mayoral election; I’d be fascinated to know just how he drove the people of London to such a level of apathy that the turnout dropped from 45.33% in 2008 to 38.1%.