On last night’s BBC London news I witnessed what must surely be a conscious tactic being adopted by Boris Johnson’s campaign: soundbites which are not just putting a spin on the issue at hand, but actually make no logical sense in response to the subject at hand.

This post is rather long so I’m going to make use of the ‘More’ feature on this blog. (You’ll have to excuse my lack of brevity - I’m new to this blogging business…)

The item in question (which can be viewed on the BBC London Player) covered a story which began earlier this week when Boris released one of the most ill-informed press releases of his campaign so far (no mean feat when it’s up against the ridiculous calculations in his transport manifesto).

The press release responded to head of Transport for London (TfL) Peter Hendy’s statistically supported statement that buses are reasonably safe places. Boris’s ranting press release attacked Hendy personally, and made the jaw-dropping suggestion that Hendy “clearly doesn’t take the bus”.

Hendy has lived and breathed buses all his life - I think that red stuff running through his veins is London Buses paint - and he’s held nearly every job going in both public and private sector bus companies, from conductor to head of London Buses, before his promotion to head of TfL. He’s also renowned for travelling by bus regularly, catchingthe 436 from Paddington to Victoria on most days, at the minimum.

Ludicrous press release aside, things have deteriorated further with accusations of politicisation being hurled at TfL by Boris, and the latest news was that one of Ken Livingstone’s advisors had briefed the press that people like Peter Hendy and Tim O’Toole (head of London Underground) would quit their jobs if Boris became Mayor. Presumably that’s if he didn’t sack them first for being ‘politicised’, or for having picked huge and independently confirmed holes in his bendy-bus replacement costings. Either way it sounds like London would lose some world-renowned experts in their field from their jobs, which doesn’t sound like a recipe for success in transport, which is one of Boris’s biggest policy weaknesses anyway.

A reasonably interesting story, and some fairly decent coverage by the BBC, who at least show some commitment to public service in their news; ITV’s London Tonight is atrocious by comparison, not carrying even a headline relating to the election in last night’s show despite a number of interesting developments during the day.

But aside from the news story itself, it was interesting to view the tactic I mentioned in introducing this post. Towards the end of the item, they went to Boris for a comment about the situation. Remember, this is a situation where he dragged TfL into an argument by putting out an entire press release solely to condemn the head of TfL; not to mention a situation where senior TfL staff are rumoured to be threatening to quit their jobs if Boris becomes Mayor. Boris commented:

I think it’s quite wrong for the Mayor to try to drag into the debate impartial civil servants. I think that the emergence of these e-mails shows that there’s real discontent in Transport for London with his way of running London, and there are loads of people who want a fresh approach to running London’s buses.

This takes spin to a whole new level. People threaten to quit an organisation if its chair (the Mayor) changes, and that is presented as them essentially being desperate for, er, its chair to change. Perhaps Boris supported the Iraq war so vociferously because he saw two million people on the streets shouting ‘no war’ and thought they must want a war really badly.

The sad truth about what he said here, and in other statements, is that I think his campaign has chosen to take spin to a new depth of cynical media manipulation. He knows no-one’s planning to subject him to a Paxman-like grilling. He also knows most of the people considering voting for him aren’t the type to examine the details of any ongoing political debate in any depth. (If they were, they would surely have come across the type of information about Boris that we feature on StopBoris.org by now, and realised he’s a walking disaster not to be trusted with the Mayoralty.)

So his strategy is simply to say anything tangentially related to the matter under discussion which can first paint Ken Livingstone as the root of all evil, and then claim that there is some kind of mass popular movement for change and a fresh approach, as if he were some sort of British answer to Barack Obama.

The trouble is, it’s working. For all its national ramifications, this is a local campaign being covered by local journalists, and they don’t give him the rigorous questioning he would experience as, say, the national Leader of the Opposition being interviewed on the Today programme. So he can say what he likes and it will be broadcast unchallenged, and the viewers and listeners who are only half paying attention to the details (the vast majority, surely) will just hear their old affable TV chum Boris accusing his opponent of skulduggery and inviting them to join a fabricated uprising for change, with him leading the charge.

So look out for more of this, Boris-stoppers, and try to challenge it wherever it appears. Write to the organisations spreading his unchallenged falsehoods pointing out the errors, for instance.

If you thought traditional spin was bad, this new, even more dishonest strand of logic-free, non-sequitur-based spin is going to make you fume.

This entry was posted on Thursday 20 March 2008 at 18.32 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under BBC, Buses, Getting an easy ride, Media, Transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.