Boris Johnson, that accidental subversive, has been bemoaning the lack of "counterculture" in London, but it's hard to guess exactly what he would like to see going on that isn't already out there.

My initial reaction to the mayor's complaint, voiced on a radio programme about the modern city, was to assume he was having a semi-political dig at New Labour's funding of more marginal artists and art forms.

Perhaps Boris was obliquely suggesting that there is now so much avant-garde work going on, and so very many outreach schemes supported by our national cultural institutions, that the creative fringe no longer has anything left to kick against. Or perhaps he just feels there could be bigger outbursts of dissent, both political and creative. I don't know.

But then, against my will, I began to wonder if the mayor was on to something. London now is so culturally confident that everything creative is efficiently branded and sold to the public, no matter how offensive it aims to be. So possibly the city has developed a deaf ear to, say, provincial talent and trends. Do people who live in the regions think there is a counterculture in London? Or just one vast, liberal, metropolitan project?

Barry Miles's book London Calling made the point earlier this year that, even in the capital, countercultural explosions are always highly localised. In the 60s, the outburst of samizdat activity only really took hold in corners of Soho and Chelsea. Listing some of the stars of the "scene" back then, Miles comments: "Naturally there was a strong old Etonian contingent." So probably alumni of Johnson's old school have always liked to get down and dirty with a few radicals in their spare time.

Moving from one politician seamlessly on to another I should point out, further to my last blogpost, that the Daily Mail is now suggesting Blair's publishers tried to stop a broadcast of extracts from Mandelson's new book on Radio 4. (Though Blair's office assures me that any current suggestion that the former prime minister himself tried to delay the publication of Mandy's rival book is "unfounded".)

In my list of forthcoming political memoirs I forgot one, by the way. Giles Radice, an old timer who knew Blair, Mandy and Gordon Brown long before they came to power, is bringing out a book too, which the publishers promise will be reliable because it has no axe to grind.