I’m delighted to see that the Guardian have given over the whole of page 3 of today’s paper to the ‘Bottler Boris’ story, calling it “A diary clash, a prior engagement, the wrong issues. Boris Johnson shuns mayoral hustings“. It begins:

It is a crude, if effective, campaign strategy for a frontrunner. Keep your candidate on a tight leash, stop him saying anything controversial and avoid the opposition.

That, it seems, is the theory behind Boris Johnson’s bid to become the mayor of London. Yesterday it emerged he has failed to appear at a series of clashes with rival candidates Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, raising suspicions that the famously gaffe-prone Tory is being protected from himself.

And so it continues, covering the issues involved perfectly. Boris’s team get a couple of lines to restate their strongly disputed reason for his absence from tonight’s hustings, but their words sound just as hollow in print as they did in the light of Time Out’s rebuttal yesterday.

The piece also carries an interesting profile of Lynton Crosby, Boris’s campaign strategist, who’s even more objectionable than I thought (which takes some doing):

He was accused of running “wedge” campaigns which divided voters by focusing on emotive issues such as abortion and immigration. A 2001 campaign advert suggested, falsely, that a shipload of refugees had thrown their children overboard in an attempt to enter Australia. He is said to advocate “push polling” - phoning voters on the pretext of conducting a poll and then spreading damaging rumours about a rival candidate.

Sounds like he’d be quite at home campaigning with the BNP, given his favoured tactics and indeed issues.

So, read this article, enjoy it, then click “Send to a friend” to pass on the news. The anti-Boris backlash, after weeks of him getting an easy ride in the media, starts now!

This entry was posted on Wednesday 2 April 2008 at 08.39 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under Gaffophobia, Guardian, Lynton Crosby, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.