This was the first of a number of televised three-way debates in the coming weeks, including a BBC London one next week and culminating with a Question Time special the week after that.

Boris’s opening speech was read out fairly competently, but he did keep having to suppress that smirk of his.

It was all downhill from there for him though, once the debate proper began.

Slippage

He did his best to hold in place the mask that Lynton Crosby has worked hard to cultivate on Boris over the past few months – the mask of a proper, competent politician – but there was no way this idiot could keep it in place over the course of a full half-hour.

So we saw it slipping to reveal parts of the old, bumbling Boris, who had no grasp of the figures, and indeed barely any grasp of how to construct a sentence: for instance, he told us that if issued with an ID card, he would

grind it up and eat it on my children’s cornflakes

which seems a bit mean to his children, who will presumably be left to go hungry. (Not to mention hazardous to his health – although he’s more renowned for snorting ground-up hazardous substances than eating them, of course.)

Boris also informed us that the people watching Newsnight are its “readers”.

Experience

One of the early wins for the other candidates was when Brian called his bluff on his much-trumpeted line about being the only one of the three with any experience of running a private organisation: Brian got his retaliation in first by turning it round on Boris, saying that the only management experience he had was managing a tiny organisation of about 20 people! Boris stammered his way to a mumbled correction of this but could only take it up to “at least 50 people”, which didn’t exactly make Brian’s point any weaker, when the job of Mayor involves managing 105,000 people!

Bus black hole

It was, as expected, his grasp of figures where Boris really came unstuck, though, particularly in relation to the legendary bus black hole.

Jeremy Paxman became increasingly frustrated by Boris’s apparent attempt to filibuster away the question of the cost of his hare-brained bendy-bus replacement scheme, by simply talking on, and on, and on, and on, and on, without really saying anything informative at all.

(In fact, Paxman gave him one minute and 47 seconds to come up with a figure, which is quite some time on live TV. In total, Paxman asked Boris 15 times to clarify his policy in this area, and in fact the last 12 of those times are straightforward pleading for the cost of the buses. It was like that classic Michael Howard interview – “Did you threaten to overrule him?” – all over again!)

Essentially, we were back to the good old days of the Andrew Marr Show interview, when Boris simply couldn’t answer what he was being asked and Marr literally found himself on the edge of his seat with exasperation at trying to get him to finish a sentence (preferably by actually answering what he had been asked).

Likewise, Paxman moved ever closer to the podium on which the three candidates were standing, begging Boris to give him a figure, but none was forthcoming. For a moment I thought Paxman might mount the stage and give him a slap, but sadly it didn’t quite come to that!

In the end, with extraordinary cheek – not to mention a revealing implicit admission about his arch-rival’s superior grasp of figures – Boris turned to Ken and asked him how much Ken’s bus plan would be costing, on the basis that he thought his own would cost a similar amount!

Spoilt

Even after all that, Boris still wouldn’t shut up, suddenly interrupting Brian (who had moved on to talking about trams) to ask to be allowed to say one more thing about his beloved uncosted buses. Paxman slapped him down thus:

No! No you can’t! You’ve said quite enough without enlightening us with a figure! You have a think about it: give us a figure and you can talk again.

Boris still continued to try to make his point as his microphone was faded out, providing evidence of the spoilt temperament that Janet Street-Porter hints at in her Marie Claire interview with him.

In that interview she suggests that people never say ‘no’ to him, and he is very uncomfortable and unsure how to respond. Tonight we saw the result of someone who’s spent his life surrounded by yes-men, underlings and hero-worshippers: a tendency to interrupt and talk over others repeatedly, and to assume that he was the most important person in the room.

This was clearly noticeable at the very end of the debate, when the debate’s allotted time on the programme had expired. Paxman held up his hand to signal to them to stop whichever bit of bickering was ongoing at the time.

Boris: Can I just say…?

Jeremy: No, I’m afraid, I’m very sorry, you can’t.

Boris: Why not?

Jeremy: [Somewhat taken aback by the question] Because we’re out of time!

“Why not?”? What kind of question is that? It was obvious to everyone else that their time was up, but apparently if Boris thinks what he has to say is important, it won’t do for anyone to try to stop him saying it.

A vote for Boris is a vote for a spoilt, incompetent and bumbling man with no relevant experience or grasp of the figures. For London’s sake, please vote for someone else.

This entry was posted on Tuesday 8 April 2008 at 22.33 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under BBC, Buses, Events, Incompetence, Lynton Crosby, Media, Other candidates, Transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.