Paris and Rome show Boris the way

Boris Johnson, newly elected Mayor of London, got down to work this morning at City Hall and was given a first date for his diary - a visit from Mayor Bloomberg of New York who will fly in on Friday with some words of advice on how to run one of the world's largest cities, and how to avoid pitfalls in the first few early weeks.

It seems Boris will have to move fast if he is not to be outshone by two of his European big city counterparts in Europe. Gianni Alemanno, the right-winger elected mayor of Rome last week, has just issued an extraordinary edict - that Hollywood stars are banned from attending his city's film festival. He wants Rome to concentrate on the promotion of Italian cinema.

Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio were mentioned as two visitors in recent years who will no longer be welcome. George Clooney, who has a home on Lake Como in the north of the country, is likely to be particularly
unwelcome: he publicly supported Alemanno's predecessor, left-winger Walter Veltroni, the man who took on Berlusconi for the presidency and lost.

Alemanno is far to the right of Boris - his followers greeted him with fascist salutes and shouts of 'Duce! Duce!' in memory of Mussolini when he won the mayoral election.

In the French capital, Boris's competitor is a left-winger, Bertrand Delanoe, the 'Red Ken' of Paris, who was recently re-elected mayor on the back of several successful populist initiatives. Among them is the Velib, reported by The First Post when it was launched last July. This is the self-service bicycle scheme which has caught on fast and is now so popular that it is to be followed by Autolib, a similar service for cars.

Delanoe, who takes his green politics seriously enough to drive an electric car, is also pushing through plans for a new 'metro fluvial' - using the Seine as an extra 'metro line' with a fleet of 200-seat ferries and 35 specially constructed jetties. Boris has his work cut out.