Jason points out in a comment on the previous post that Janet Street-Porter was taken aback when Boris turned up to be interviewed by her for Marie Claire, accompanied by a nanny figure, sent to ensure he didn’t put his foot in it.

he arrived with a female minder in tow, who wanted to sit in on our interview and record it - something that none of the stars I have interviewed for Marie Claire - from Annie Lennox to David Walliams to Dawn and Jennifer - have ever requested. I refused and sent her off for a coffee; she was obviously there to make sure Boris didn’t put his foot in it. He was unbelievably cautious… and kept saying there were personal things he couldn’t talk about!

The Boris campaign is pursuing a deeply cynical strategy, masterminded by Lynton Crosby, the Australian specialist best remembered in the UK for his particularly nasty 2005 election campaign for Michael Howard, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” (Fortunately, most of the electorate weren’t: the campaign focussed on irresponsibly increasing fear of crime, among other unsavoury methods.)

The strategy here is to ride on a wave of anti-Ken sentiment (primarily whipped up by Evening Standard journalist Andrew Gilligan, whose career was saved by Boris offering him a job at his magazine when Gilligan left the BBC in disgrace) by doing two simple things:

1. Being the most likely candidate to have a chance of deposing Ken (inevitable when you’re both the joke/protest vote receptacle and the candidate for one of the two main parties);
2. Making sure that no serious analytical attention is focussed on your own candidate at all, and your candidate doesn’t say or do anything offensive or controversial.

Of course, I say these are simple things, but number 2 is pretty difficult when your candidate is Boris, one of the most gaffe-prone politicians in living memory. So they’re just keeping his profile as low as possible, avoiding any public appearances that aren’t carefully stage-managed.

Hence the no-shows for Any Questions? and Time Out, the repeated refusal to take part in a TV debate between the main candidates, and the ‘nanny’ accompanying him to interviews to hold his feet firmly out of his mouth.

London is in grave danger of sleepwalking into a Boris Mayoralty. Wake up and smell the whiff of fishy campaign tactics, fellow Londoners!

This entry was posted on Monday 31 March 2008 at 21.00 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under Gaffophobia, Lynton Crosby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.