The last post
First, thanks to Mrs. Stop Boris for holding the fort so well all day yesterday. I did get home in time for the result but she clearly had things under control here so I didn’t need to face posting myself in the deeply depressing circumstances.
Awful
What a truly awful outcome.
Boris Johnson will become Mayor of London at midnight tomorrow night, and the BNP’s odious thug-in-a-beige-suit Richard Barnbrook will take a seat on the London Assembly at the same time.
There’s no point beating about the bush in summing up what this means for our nine months’ work, and for our every spare minute of the past two:
The Stop Boris campaign failed in both its headline objective and its additional appeal.
On the plus side, given our final voting recommendation (which has been viewed by 1,700 unique web-users), I think it would not be immodest to claim that we did have some effect on the voting. Turnout was up by around 20% on 2004, and Ken Livingstone received over 200,000 more votes – about 25% more – than in 2004, after reallocation of second preferences. (His first-preference voting figures were boosted by a similar number, representing around a third more votes than last time.)
These figures suggest that the threat of Boris, promoted by us and others, did motivate more people to the polls and more people to vote against him. So why, despite such success, did we ultimately fail?
Impossible to overcome
The trouble is, for all our voluntary efforts, and the grassroots movement against Boris – and notwithstanding the £400,000-odd spent by the Labour party promoting Ken – the sheer scale and organisation of the Back Boris campaign in all its guises simply proved impossible to overcome. They doubled the number of first-preference votes cast for the Conservative mayoral candidate in 2004.
It’s well known that the official campaign spent around £1million on putting across their ‘time for a change’ message. On top of this, you had the ‘money-couldn’t-buy-it’ support of a range of right-wing media outlets, most effectively the Evening Standard, whose advertising boards are seen by millions of potential voters, day in, day out, as they walk around the city. While only 180,000-odd people [should that hyphen be there? The statement works in an equally valid sense without it 
] buy the paper, the value of those boards should not be underestimated. Their often shockingly misleading headlines, taken in by passers-by over a period of months, fuelled a grossly overstated perception of ’sleaze’ and ‘corruption’ in Ken Livingstone’s administration, and a positive perception of Boris’s chances and suitability for the role as a replacement Mayor.
And where did that £1million campaign budget go? It went on Lynton Crosby’s cynical and manipulative campaign, which was designed to build up strong anti-incumbent feeling through half-truths and repeated attacks, while giving as little detail as possible on a bland and vague manifesto containing focus group-tested phrases and sweeping, undetailed pledges on unarguable issues like wanting to cut crime. The money also went on regular, targeted, glossy leaflets and letters to encourage out the core vote and tempt over the swing voters. More controversially it also went on paying people as far afield as Australia to conduct a covert campaign of ‘astroturfing‘ against opposing journalists and bloggers.
The combined might of the Mail/Standard, Telegraph and Murdoch groups of newspapers, the motorists’ lobby, the anti-environmentalist lobby, BNP supporters’ second-preference votes, the anti-Ken protest vote, the anti-Labour protest vote, the Lynton Crosby cynical marketing effort and of course the LOLBorisROFL!!!!1! contingent, simply couldn’t be fought back against successfully enough.
Vague feelings and meaningless pronouncements
Contrary to a pro-Boris comment on one of Mrs. Stop Boris’s posts yesterday, we will not now be eating and choking on our words. I stand by everything I’ve blogged and written on StopBoris.org over the past two months. I would challenge anyone to find factual inaccuracies or unfounded opinions on this blog, were it not too late for it to matter now anyway, and were I not intent on taking a considerable break from blogging and getting involved in Boris-related arguments from today.
At the end of the day, this election was not fought and won by Boris on the policy details that matter. Who would vote against the idea that affordable housing should be available to households with a joint income of £30,000, rather than the £60,000 Boris’s planned scheme requires (putting it out of reach of 80% of Londoners)? Who would vote for an erroneously costed bus plan rejected by just about every bus expert in the industry? The list of such things is already well known and now academic, but it’s illustrative of the fact that this election was fought and won on vague feelings and meaningless pronouncements.
Where now?
So where does this leave London now? We can only wait and see how Boris runs his Mayoralty, but if this is how he treats his own supporters, it doesn’t look good for the open and inclusive leadership he promised.
In all fairness (perhaps too much fairness!), his acceptance speech last night was moderate and inclusive-sounding. Interestingly, in his speech he essentially offered Ken Livingstone a job in his administration, and in Ken’s speech he basically accepted the offer. Giving Boris a helping hand with not completely messing up London through maladministration is undoubtedly in the best interests of the city, so I won’t dwell on my nagging gut feeling that it would in some sense be more satisfying to see Boris left to his own devices to preside over a complete farce for four years. The less of the progress made in the past eight years that is set back in the next four years, the better, however frustrating it could be if an unexpectedly stable administration threatens a re-election of Boris in four years’ time.
But what can we really expect to happen over the next four years?
Unachievable promises
Boris has made a lot of unachievable promises. We will see increased strikes on the Underground if he attempts to impose a no-strike deal on the RMT union. We’re unlikely ever to see a new open-backed Routemaster-style bus hitting London’s streets. His ‘big idea’ for a Thames Estuary airport is almost unthinkable. And his proposed police budget cuts and lack of firm proposals or targets on cutting crime risk a return to rising crime, or at best merely a slowdown in crime reduction, rather than the falling crime enjoyed for the past five years.
With Boris as Mayor and the BNP on the Assembly, we could also see race-hate crime on the increase in the capital for the first time in many years, following years of the capital bucking the national trend with a fall, versus a rise elsewhere.
(The significance of the BNP’s Assembly win should not be overstated, however: while it represents a depressing level of BNP support, and a symbolic victory for a bunch of racist thugs, their single Assembly seat gains them minimal public expenditure and virtually zero power, so the fact they didn’t gain two seats and thus a staffed office offers some comfort.)
We can also expect Boris to be far less pro-active on environmental matters, and more motorist-focussed. News footage of him leaving his home for City Hall this morning showed him being driven away in a huge people-carrier, in stark contrast with the exiting Mayor’s use of public transport to get around in almost all circumstances. We know he plans to rephase traffic lights to favour cars over pedestrians: let’s see if pedestrian road casualties continue to fall under his leadership or, as seems more likely, not.
Continued scrutiny
It’s important that we Boris-stoppers continue to scrutinise him now he has been elected Mayor. There’s clearly a lot of scope for broken promises, and more scope still for the undermining of progress in this world-leading city in any number of policy areas.
Some have suggested that we at Stop Boris are well placed to exercise this scrutiny. We’re certainly better placed than his official scrutineers, the London Assembly, who are completely toothless due to Boris’s own party holding more than the third of seats needed to be able to nod through his budgets without reading them.
We are, however, also exhausted, demotivated, upset, depressed and above all thoroughly fed up with watching this objectionable man blathering on in news bulletins and statements, after two months of non-stop, often painful Boris-watching – and in dire need of a break.
There’s no harm admitting at this stage what many of you will have read between the lines over that period: Stop Boris has essentially been a one-man operation, ably assisted (not to mention at times lovingly tolerated!) by that one man’s wife. Sure, the Facebook group has nearly 2,000 members, and we’ve had plenty of supporting comments, e-mails and even some active on- and off-line campaigning for the cause, but the vast bulk of the work has taken place in a single suburban (Zone 6, no less – ‘put that in your pipe and smoke it’, Mr. Crosby ) living room.
I don’t rule out an active return to the web in the future (so keep us in your RSS reader or check back from time to time), but for now this is it, the last post on the Stop Boris blog.
Thanks
Before I sign off for the last time, I’d like to thank a number of people for their help, support and information over the past few months.
- Mrs. Stop Boris, for everything!
- The donor of the StopBoris.org domain and web space, without which we would have had far, far less impact.
- The Tory Troll for setting up exactly the kind of blog I would probably have set up if I’d ever bothered before Stop Boris, and breaking lots of interesting news throughout the campaign, including being first to the news of the BNP backing Boris. I’d suggest the Troll as the best place to go if you’re looking for a blog to plug the gap left by the Stop Boris blog.
- Dave Hill for running by far the most comprehensive and broad coverage of the entire election anywhere on the web.
- Liberal Conspiracy for giving us some good promotion in the crucial last couple of weeks of the campaign.
- All the other bloggers who’ve linked to us and helped spread our message – I daren’t try to list them all as I will undoubtedly miss some out, but I seriously appreciated every single bit of promotion of this site.
- The Guardian for, contrary to many of the more outraged comments on pro-Ken or anti-Boris articles, covering the election with for the most part moderation and balance. I think the people who’ve criticised this newspaper as a mouthpiece for the Ken campaign, contrasting it unfavourably with the Evening Standard, have really engaged their typing fingers rather more quickly than their brains.
- All the Boris-stoppers who’ve been in touch with us, tipped us off about articles, played an active role on- and off-line in spreading the anti-Boris message, even singing our campaign song for us or creating other songs/videos, and just generally offered their support to our efforts.
- And of course you, the Stop Boris blog readers, all 3-5,000 (understanding webstats seems to be an imprecise science) of you. Thanks for justifying my outpourings’ worthwhileness by reading them!
That’s it
So for now that’s it for the Stop Boris blog.
I wish all Londoners the best in coping with yesterday’s disastrous result, and above all I hope Boris is not as bad as we’ve feared he will be. For someone so convinced everything I’ve blogged about Boris over the past two months has been fundamentally correct, for London’s sake, I now hope just as strongly to be proven wrong about the consequences of his election for the city I love.
May 3rd, 2008 at 20.11
Maybe this could become a sort of a Boris Watch site?
May 3rd, 2008 at 20.30
You guys need to grow up. Its democracy - accept it and stop whinging
May 3rd, 2008 at 21.00
Sunny:
That’s certainly the most common suggestion being put to me at the moment. I really do need a break for now though. I’m sure the Tory Troll (not to mention your good liberally conspiring selves) will keep a watch on Boris for the time being, but I don’t rule out the possibility of a return to watching Boris in a month or two.
Andy:
Which part of the prominent, bold sentence, early in this post, i.e.
suggests to you that I haven’t accepted the result of this election? While we certainly accept the result, perhaps you were expecting us, even after the last two months’ solid campaigning to stop Boris being elected, to like the result? Seems a pretty strange expectation, so I’ll assume you just wanted to visit today in order to kick us while we’re down. Thanks very much – we’re clearly the ones that need to grow up here, as you say.
May 3rd, 2008 at 21.42
Perhaps you’ll be able to sway the result of the US election with the same dazzling success?
Better get cracking on those “Stop Hillary!” and “Stop McCain” campaign badges!
May 3rd, 2008 at 23.04
I am re-posting this from further back as it remains unanswered.
______
And what “assorted smears and lies” would they be?
A precise analysis, please, of the “smears and lies” put about by Back Boris campaign, and “those peddled by the Standard”, whose lawyers and editors seem to have found them unassailable.
You may recall that Ken’s people saturated London mosques with leaflets claiming Boris wants to ban the Koran - written in Bengali, with the English version cleansed, in the hope no one else would notice. If any of your “smears and lies” come within a mile of this breathtaking fraud, I will offer you a personal grovelling apology.
I would also welcome some constructive comments on the points raised by Andrew Grimson, which you have ignored.
May 3rd, 2008 at 23.18
“For someone so convinced everything I’ve blogged about Boris over the past two months…”
I must admit to being impressed by the passion behind your cause and the literary style in which it has been presented. But I, too, could make a strong case for the earth being flat given that as a project, a good head of steam and some pictures of East Anglia.
The Moonies and Jehovah’s Witnesses are also fervent believers in their cause, having repeated the same incantations for long enough.
Congratulations anyway for a lousy job well executed.
May 4th, 2008 at 00.47
Hrothgar:
The Stop Boris badges were nothing to do with us but were produced by someone keen to further the cause and inspired by this site to try to promote our message. Aside from pointing that out, I’m not quite sure what your point is. It’s too early to be sure who’ll be running in that election, let alone who’s more likely to win, so I can’t work out how you’re hoping to get a dig in at us using it as a comparison.
A far more effective, if ridiculously hyperbolic, analogy was made in a comment by another unimpressed site visitor on 17 April. As it turned out, this election was about “stopping someone remaining in power”. It certainly wasn’t about electing someone for any positive reasons.
Peter:
Comment 1:
My wife did a one-day stint covering for me here on Friday but has no intention of returning and will not be addressing your message to her. Please stop reposting it or I’ll just delete all instances of it.
Comment 2:
Your point is bizarre. 1,028,966 people who voted on Thursday (43% of the 2,415,958 who actually voted) broadly agreed with us and used their votes to try to stop Boris. I don’t think 43% of voters would agree with any of the things you put forward by way of comparison – flat earth, Moonies etc.
Your compliments for my literary style are appreciated, but only somewhat, since they came from someone for whom I have, increasingly with each comment you have posted since this blog launched, lost a great deal of respect.
May 4th, 2008 at 01.27
“Please stop reposting it or I’ll just delete all instances of it.”
I don’t care what you do with it. Your refusal to answer says all I need to know.
“…someone for whom I have, increasingly with each comment you have posted since this blog launched, lost a great deal of respect.”
You never had any respect for me or for anyone who disagrees with you, however strong their case.
What saddens me most about this campaign is your determined effort to destroy a man who hasn’t been in the job for 24 hours. If you cared that much about London, you would at least have offered some support until he really does blow it.
May 4th, 2008 at 02.20
I didn’t say it. I’m not ‘refusing’ to answer your points about it as they are not mine to answer. My wife gets quite upset by online arguments and has for many years held herself to a rule not to get involved in them. She regrets leading you to think otherwise by responding to you at all in the first place.
“You never had any respect for me or for anyone who disagrees with you, however strong their case.”
That’s simply not true. I have yet to hear a decent case in favour of Boris but am always open to listen to and discuss valid arguments in these comments and elsewhere. You make me sound like the paid astroturfers who trawled the web for commentary critical of Boris and responded with “You suck you commie! Red Ken is going down! Go Boris!” and so forth, rather than engaging in any serious or logical debate. It’s very disingenuous of you to suggest that I am not open to discussion and cannot have respect for those I disagree with. Did I not in my previous comment, in response to Hrothgar, acknowledge the superior quality of another dissenting commenter’s argument against our campaign?
As for your ridiculous assertion at the end, that says all I need to know about you. You are clearly prepared to gloss over the parts of my writing and actions which don’t fit your preconceived problems with this campaign. If you actually read this post, on which you are commenting, you will see in it that I say several things which clearly contradict what you have said.
In particular, look at the final paragraph of the post, or indeed of the entire blog.
That point seems to be addressing the exact issue you raise, and rendering it invalid. Elsewhere in the post I also support the possibility of Ken working with Boris to smooth the transition, explicitly going against any knee-jerk desire to see him cock London up and allow me a ‘told you so’ moment. In the context of an out-and-out anti-Boris web site, I felt this post presented a considered, moderate and even somewhat conciliatory note on which to close the blog. The fact that you appear to be ignoring all that, and worse still accusing me of not caring much about London, removes all doubt about whether I may have lost respect for you unjustly. Perhaps you would care to apologise for that accusation?
Indeed, the last time I wrote anything before this post, he hadn’t been in the job at all: I was engaged in a determined effort instead to stop him getting the job in the first place, which is entirely fair game during an election campaign, is it not? It’s surely what the other nine candidates for Mayor were also doing (apart from the BNP). I suppose I should be quite glad to hear that “what saddens [you] most about this campaign” is the one post I’ve written since he was elected!
All I have done on this site is report things which Boris has written himself, impressions I have gained from things he has said and performances he has put in on television, and things others have written and said about Boris, extrapolating from all of those things to form conclusions about his likely actions and abilities as Mayor. If you can find me a mainstream London media outlet which hasn’t done similar things in the past few weeks (and indeed the past 24 hours), albeit in less detail, I’ll be very surprised, so I’m not quite sure what your problem is with my doing so as well.
“What saddens me most” about you, though, is your decision, following a long absence, to return to engaging in arguments on this site after the Mayoralty had been declared for Boris by all and sundry yesterday. Is your life really so lacking in pleasure that you feel the need to obtain some from adding poorly aimed sprinklings of salt to the open wounds of someone with whom you happen to disagree? Seriously, enjoy four years of your beloved new Mayor, but leave us in peace to get over the disappointment of the campaign’s failure, can’t you?
May 4th, 2008 at 02.26
Well done to Mr and Mrs of this site. I’ve been delighted to know there are people out there who have the same concern for London as I do.
I have to say I feel rather angry with those who voted Boris, as the many pending I-told-you-so’s will not be enough to cheer me up as we watch our city go backwards.
I’d be glad to hear of a BorisTracker sort of site which can serve as a display of just how little foresight the majority of Londoners really had at this time.
All the best
May 4th, 2008 at 02.47
Thanks very muchT3Roar – we’re always heartened to hear from people who’ve appreciated our efforts!
I’m definitely keeping the possibility of a Boris-scrutinising site in mind. “BorisTracker” has the advantage over “BorisWatch” of not already being in use by a pro-Boris web site! Ideally I’d want to make continued use of the StopBoris.org domain though so in my 1–2 months’ break (which to be honest I need to take for personal reasons anyway) I’ll be trying to think of a tenuous way to allow StopBoris.org to continue to be a relevant domain for a BorisTracker-type site.
Of course if, as people like Peter Dawes appear to expect, Boris turns out to be a wonderful Mayor in these next couple of months, there will be no need for such a site anyway – before he accuses me of prejudging Boris’s performance by even considering the founding of such a site
May 4th, 2008 at 11.41
1) “A precise analysis, please, of the “smears and lies” put about by Back Boris campaign, and “those peddled by the Standard””
Well running a main headline just a few days before the election claiming “SUICIDE BOMBER RUNNING KEN’S CAMPAIGN” when that was then proved to be utter lies and then not publishing an apology of any sort strikes me as pretty smeary.
Also - all the Bengali leaflets said is that quote - a direct quote - from Boris that the proposed law to ban the incitement of racial hatred makes no sense unless it includes a ban on the Koran. Which is a disgusting and incredibly ignorant thing for him to say.
The Evening Standard has run a constant smear against Livingstone, you can’t doubt that. I remember the headline on the day one of those teenagers was stabbed was “MURDERER USES KEN’S FREE BUS PASS TO GET AWAY” - which is absolutely ridiculous. So when the next teenager gets stabbed will the Standard read “MURDERED PAYS 90P TO GET AWAY” no, of course it won’t, because it won’t try to link it to Boris at all. It’s just an example of the bias inherent within the way they report things.
2) “Congratulations anyway for a lousy job well executed.”
Why the hell are you on this blog if you don’t support it’s cause, don’t seem to have any respect for the bloggers? Boris won, go home and be happy, why stoop so low as to insult these two people who have put an incredible amount of time and effort into this campaign. It was not a lousy job, look back over this blog and there is an incredible volume of well documented evidence that, I believe, if it had got more exposure, would have swayed more people.
For my part I would like to thank Mr and Mrs Boris Stopper, and tell them not to listen to those moaners. Failure never means you shouldn’t have tried, or that you didn’t put up a valiant fight. And there’s always a next round - see you in four years for the follow up, we can kick him out. Well done, good luck, and thank you.
(I would also like to add that considering the absolute hammering that Labour got nationwide, Ken did bloody well to keep it so close).
Congratulations anyway for a lousy job well executed.
May 4th, 2008 at 11.44
PS: I have no idea why it says “Congratulations anyway for a lousy job well executed.” at the bottom of my comment again, and I must have pressed “Ctrl+V” one too many times, just don’t get the impression I was saying it, please!
May 4th, 2008 at 12.09
Peter Dawes - just so you know and can, therefore, get off that over-so-high horse, a smear is to say that “Ken’s people saturated London’s mosques with leaflets claiming that Boris wanted to ban the Koran”. It is a smear because there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any of Livingstone’s re-election team was in any way associated with the leaflet in question. The use of the word saturated is also interesting. How many mosques saw theseleaflets being distributed? What percentage of mosques in London did this number represent? What you have done is picked up on - surprise, surprise - an Evening Standard report that associated Ken Livingstone with the actions of people that may have supported him but over whom he had absolutely no control. The Standard knew this to be the case, but chose not to point it out. The language it always used was, of course, vetted by lawyers so that the paper was always able to stay just the right side of libel. That is what smearing is all about. “Ken’s people” is sufficiently vague to allow for a get out should a writ be delivered - something that the lawyers advising the Livingstone team no doubt also understood.
Mr and Mrs Stop Boris - I have enjoyed and admired your coverage over the last few months. You have done an excellent job, but were up against an impossible task. You can hold your heads up high and deserve to be congratulated on providing the type of scrutiny of the new London mayor that should have been forthcoming from the local London press. It is to the eternal shame of Standard journalists that they were unable to deliver a semblence of balance in their coverage of the election. While they may not have had much of an impact on the final result (Ken was always going to lose given the deep unpopularity of Labour nationally) their utter failure even vaguely to balance their reporting will be a stain on their reputations in future years - not that many of them will worry about this at the moment. A crumb of comfort is that as a paper the Standard is probably entering its final few years in its current form, so many of those that connived in the distortions, half-truths and smears of the last few months will be out of jobs in the near future and looking for new ones. They may have to justify their lack of journalistic integrity at that stage.
As for Bors himself, I have been midly reasssured by his utterances since the results were announced. He does deserve an opportunity to show what he can do and maybe he has learned a few things about London as a city in the months he has been there. Obviously, many of his promises are undeliverable, but I guess that in the present climate the national government will get the blame for that. What is clear is that he now knows London is a divided city and that while 53% of electors wanted him as mayor, 47% did not. That’s nearly 50% of the population he has to work hard to convince of his worth. In doing so, he could well end up wiping the smiles fromt he faces of David Cameron and George Osborne - two far more pernicious and unpleasant Tories. And if he does that, he will have done all of us a huge favour.
May 4th, 2008 at 12.24
Hamish:
Thanks very much for your intervention and kind words. They’re much appreciated. Thanks for being on-side for our campaign!
May 4th, 2008 at 12.26
A heartfelt thanks from me Mr and Mrs Stop Boris. It gave me heart to see someone care so much about an election not along party political lines per se but about what is best for their local area.
You will be interested to know that SINCE the election results have been announced, there has been a massive jump on my site from people doing boris related searches online! Bizarre eh?
I felt obliged to write a post about it because if they’d just done this BEFORE they let him in maybe they’d have voted against him. Seriously, traffic to that blog post has increased by over a factor of three.
Anyway, if you do decide to run a Boris Tracker I’ll be helping, as will many other people I should imagine.
Well done and enjoy your rest!
May 4th, 2008 at 12.31
“Stop Boris admirer”: an excellent comment, a great rebuttal of Mr. Dawes, and a nice pseudonym too
Thanks!
Labourboy: Thanks to you too for your work in trying to stop Boris too - all the best with your blog.
May 4th, 2008 at 13.27
There may be more Boris stopping to come in the future -
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheToryTroll/~3/283230553/boris-johnson-vs-david-cameron-triumph.html
May 4th, 2008 at 17.31
I enjoyed this blog, good luck to Londoners (including Boris himself) over the next four years.
And Andy - what part of democracy do you think is compatible with berating people for whingeing about politicians?
May 4th, 2008 at 23.07
You scaremongered, London didn’t fall for it, you lost. Boris will be a good Mayor, though no one should expect any praise from this quarter when it’s proved. Bye bye now.
May 5th, 2008 at 00.13
Robin: Thanks.
Anonymous: We scaremongered? Back Boris spread misleading information about crime, making people feel unjustifiably unsafe on their own streets, which seems to fit the definition of scaremongering far better than anything we did here. In the unlikely event that Boris is a good Mayor, I will admit this in the same way as I have admitted for instance that (a) we failed and (b) his acceptance speech was moderate and inclusive-sounding. What I will never concede is that Lynton Crosby’s campaign was carried out in a wholly honest and scrupulous way, and since I would guess that you are from the campaign team I think it is rich to suggest that we will be in some way dishonest in the event of a successful Mayoralty.
May 5th, 2008 at 09.06
Anonymous - so just when will we see the Routemaster back? When will that no strike agreement withthe RMT be signed? How long should we wait for the airport in the Thames Estuary? And what specific affordable housing targets will the Boris team be setting for 2009, 2010 and 2011? Oh, and will Boris be using the crime statistics that up to now the Tories have derided to show that crime is coming down on his watch?
I don’t think that Boris will be a disaster for London. It is too great a city for that. However, he has made some very specific promises and will be judged on whether he delivers them.
May 5th, 2008 at 12.00
For those still holding out for a Boris-scrutinising web site, this site looks like it might be worth following:
http://bozzawatch.blogspot.com/
13 posts since Saturday morning – they’re certainly showing the same level of dedication to their cause as we did to ours!
May 5th, 2008 at 12.04
Actually, there are two other similar blogs as well:
http://boriswatch.blogspot.com/
http://boriswatchers.blogspot.com/
At this rate by the time I’m ready to consider doing something similar myself, the marketplace will be saturated with alternatives and I won’t need to bother!
May 5th, 2008 at 19.38
You’ve obviously put a lot of work into your campaign, so I’m sure you’ll be disappointed.
Maybe you should have been more positive, picked a preferred candidate and put together a site supporting them. (I’m assuming that would have been Ken, but perhaps I’m wrong.)
Anyway, the problem with an “Anyone But” campaign is that it has nothing positive to say. Over time, that turns people off.
For that reason, I think the campaign deserved to fail.
May 5th, 2008 at 20.11
Well the anyone but Ken campaign run by the Evening Standard seemed to work quite well Bob.
For that reason, it deserved to fail. DESERVED I TELL YOU.
May 5th, 2008 at 22.36
Thank you for the sterling effort and the superb coverage. As my co-conspirator Douglas says on our blog you really were unmatched in the speed of your reporting. Against Crosby, the Standard and tonnes of Tory cash you couldn’t do enough but you made a damn good try so well done and all the best.
If you ever decide to start another project, whatever the tone or nature, I’ll be reading.
Thanks, farewell.
May 6th, 2008 at 16.55
‘It’s democracy stop whining’ is fair enough comment but it didn’t stop the constant ear splitting moany shriek of the Standard these last eight years when democracy went against them. They and their suburban readership have spoken and for the first time in 2000 years the outskirts will be dictating what goes on from the centre. I think it could be fun watching them have to speak up for the city at the very time it goes to the dogs and I just hope their readership don’t expect proper directions when they get lost on their way back from seeing the queen Musical or visiting Selfridges.
Oh and well done Mr Stop Boris it’s alot of work.
May 7th, 2008 at 00.34
Don’t worry, I plan to watch Boris carefully!
May 10th, 2008 at 03.16
I was powerless to do anything about Boris, as I live in Newcastle, I was left in shock that London’s population could be so dense as to elect the man.
Your campaign has inspired me, I only really discovered it in the last 2-3 weeks, but the information you have compiled on this site is astounding, very well written and an impressive work.
I hope you return to comment on Boris’ term, as I will definitely return to read it if you do.
Thank You Mr. Stop Boris!
May 10th, 2008 at 09.41
Thanks very much L! Living in Newcastle looks pretty attractive now
May 11th, 2008 at 01.13
[…] understandably disappointed Stop Boris site says that the hostility of the press was a big factor in Ken Livingstone’s […]
May 11th, 2008 at 23.45
You queered your pitch at the outset by straying from the ‘core pitch’ of whether or not he was competent to do the job.
You killed any chance this campaign had of succeeding when you overplayed your handly badly in the following areas.
* Accusations about him being a snob. Most of the people in London are fairly wealthy, and a large proportion have been to college.
London is the capital of England - the most class conscious society in the Western world - do you really think the fact he had been to public school would bother most people ??
* Kicking him for having had an affair, as if that would have a bearing on his integrity for doing the role of London Mayor.
An awful lot of people reading your propaganda will have been through divorces, possibly as the result of affairs - trying to portray those people as the devil incarnate was doomed.
* The most stupid, asinine tactic of all was the wholescale hype about him being ‘racist’. People in this country are fed up of people being labelled with this at the drop of a hat.
Janet Street-Porter and Anne Robinson had the full weight of a media onslaught with the potential for the law getting involved, simply because they said a few things about the Welsh.
Not very polite, and a bit ill-advised, but nobody, least of all the Welsh, wants this to result in people ending up in court or walking on eggshells. People read these accusations on Boris.
People looked at Boris and simply couldn’t tally it with the guy they saw, and as soon as this happened they treated the rest of your complaints about him with scorn and scepticism.
Had you stuck to examining his background, business acumen, competence for management and tried to stick him with a ‘Chatshow Charlie’ type epithet you might have stood a chance.
But as the old saying goes, ‘Nothing is quite as bad, or as good, as it appears’, and your portrayal of a Boris Mayoralty as being an unalloyed disaster will be forgotten within a few weeks.
After all, it is not as if he is going to be doing it single-handed… - and sometimes when it comes to government and regulation, Less really is More..
May 12th, 2008 at 01.32
Could Mr. Stop Boris become Mr. Stop Cameron?
To Boris is not an ogre:
first off “handly badly”?
Your experience of London has been the majority are fairly wealthy, London is one of the wealthiest areas in the UK, but the large majority of Londoners live nowhere near the same living standards as Boris, He went to Eton the most elitist private school in the UK, followed by a degree in Classics at Oxford Univesity, he was also a member of the Bullingdon club. He is by all accounts a snob.
I am unsure as to how most Londoners would react to his attendance of a private school, but I certainly disagree with private education.
He is a public figure, he is expected not to engage in such activities (as are most members of Britain) , although you are probably right that it wouldn’t have bearing on his integrity for doing the role of London Mayor. It certainly would not have had any bearing on my choice not to vote for him.
Now the big issue, there is a major difference between make an off the cuff remark about the welsh (not these are acceptable) and printing a series of articles over an extended period of time which state what can only be deemed racist views.
Mr. Stop Boris did examine “his background, business acumen and competence for management”, but it is impossible to do this fairly without examining them alongside opinions Boris has given in the past. I have no doubt if Livingstone had in the past made racist remarks the right-wing press would have had no quarms in reporting them, nor would you have passed at the opportunity to come onto this forum and bring them up here.
May 12th, 2008 at 01.39
Sorry, I forgot to put quotations around “his integrity for doing the role of London Mayor”. My grammar while bad isn’t quite that bad.
May 12th, 2008 at 08.16
‘Boris is not an ogre’: it’s quite bizarre how you level three accusations at me, none of which is true – have you actually read this site at all, or just guessed what I might have written on it? Here’s the truth of the three topics you raise:
Snob: zero occurrences of that word on this site.
Affair: mentioned almost exclusively in relation to his having lied about his affair to his boss and thus ended up being sacked for lying. The one mention of it that is not in this context is at the time when the media were having a field day about Ken having five children by three women, without any suggestion of any infidelity or poor fathering. I was simply pointing out that suggesting that the perfectly normal activity of having children and taking care of them was far less ’scandalous’ than cheating on your wife, in the context of a lot of hubris about the former while glossing over the latter. No suggestion that the affair was a particularly damning indictment of Boris per se, although I don’t suppose anyone who has had an affair would claim it was their finest hour!
Racist: I did not once call him racist. Others have done, but the accusations I made that were closest to this were: 1. that he has ‘pandered to racists’, in other words written things which fitted and reinforced racists’ unsavoury views of the world, such as the repeated attacks on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry as ‘Orwellian’ and insisting racism was ‘natural’. 2. that he employed and published an out-and-out racist columnist, Taki, who did write columns about blacks having lower IQs than whites, and indeed long arms dangling down to the floor and tongues hanging out, which Boris approved for publication as editor of the Spectator.
So your suggestion that I killed any chance of my campaign succeeding by doing three things which I didn’t do is rather bizarre. In actual fact what I did do was exactly what you suggest I should have done – “stuck to examining his background, business acumen, competence for management and tried to stick him with a ‘Chatshow Charlie’ type epithet”. OK, there was no persistent epithet (there were a few different ones in relation to different matters at various points) but I certainly concentrated hard on his background (particularly his past writings), his complete lack of business acumen and competence for management, and his lightweight, gameshow-suited persona, as well as tackling the equally important area you have completely overlooked (like most Boris supporters!), namely the quality and suitability of his policies, which I examined at length.
So I did exactly what you suggest, and more, and the campaign still failed. Got any further dazzling insights into where we went wrong? Actually, if they make as little sense as your first comment, you might want to keep them to yourself.
May 12th, 2008 at 08.20
Lucien: thanks. The idea of embarking on Stop Cameron is rather cruel, though – do you think I enjoy running worthy but ultimately doomed campaigns?
May 12th, 2008 at 10.31
Fair point, Mr Stop Boris - I certainly don’t profess to be an expert on your site - but my point is that some of the YouTube videos you showcase do drift into these areas.
Of course, you ‘cannot be responsible for external sites’ so to speak, but it does create a certain impression. I think therefore you have misunderstood my point [probably my fault] about examining his background, business acumen, competence for management etc. - my point is not that you DIDN’T do these, but that you should ONLY have done these.
But if you think that is what you did stick to, then that is fair enough. I don’t profess to be a huge fan of Boris Johnson’s approach to the environment, but the fact is that his public image is of one who ‘gets on his book’, and does something practical, even if he doesn’t support the Kyoto agreement. But then neither does James Lovelock, really. His refusal to support the increased charge for gas guzzlers using the C-charge area is not good from the point of the environment. But the fact is that in London [and even in provincial backwaters like the town I live in, there is the perception that Labour are suffering from out-of-control ‘tax incontinence’ where everything which moves gets taxed, and people want to get back some control, and cut waste of public funds.
Ex-Labour / Lib Dem voters [such as myself] are disappointed at how the Government seems to be straying into a world in which small business and farms, which employ lots of people, seem to be under the cosh, and would even be willing to countenance Bullingdon Berties getting their hands on the tiller if the brakes could be put on the ‘tax and spend’ culture for a few years.
Neither do I profess to support Boris printing views which are alleged to be racist [I never read the Speccie, so I’m simply not able to pass judgement on these] since, whatever you might think, I’m really a bit of a lefty-liberal. My point is simply this - the perception, particularly among women I know, is that Bozza is a bit of a bumbling, loveable rogue whose hair they want to help keep in shape. You are entirely right to point out that this carefully crafted image is not all there is to him, and bring up the real issues of having him as the London mayor.
BUT, however unfair you think it is that he has a ‘cuddly’ image, trying to ’sex up’ the argument against him will merely backfire as people’s perceptions are just so fundamentally different.
My point is merely that your approach is somewhat reminiscent of the ‘cannabis campaign’. Some people think that cannabis is just a bit of a laugh, and good fun on a Friday evening.
Others point out to the dangers to your mental health. What then happens is that some people try and exaggerate the dangers to prevent us falling for it. Nasty and terrible things will happen if we fall to the temptation of voting for Cannabis. When people give it a try, and find that it isn’t quite as bad as the scaremeisters would have us believe, they are on the road to ‘hard drugs’. ..
So this is not really about kicking you when you are down. It is merely that I think [and I accept that I may not be able to persuade you of this] that if you try this same approach again, say on Cameron, you are doomed to failure - whereas you need to go away and have a re-think about your future approach, not ‘cry in your beer’ about your failure, or even worse having the Neil Kinnock ‘one-more-heave’ approach without fundamentally re-assessing your approach after having learned the lessons, and coming up with a different line of attack in the future.
If you always do what you always did, then you’ll always get what you always got…
May 12th, 2008 at 11.14
“Lucien: thanks. The idea of embarking on Stop Cameron is rather cruel, though – do you think I enjoy running worthy, but ultimately doomed campaigns?”
If you reach just one person… :P, to be honest the inquiry was probably motivated quite selfishly by my enjoyment of the stop Boris campaign. (although this site have annoyingly got me listening to Kate Nash.)
May 12th, 2008 at 11.37
Ditto on the Kate Nash point. Watching that video I had to weigh my strong dislike of her and her song against my even stronger dislike of Boris and his campaign (not to mention the horror of having to watch an animated caricature of Boris as a blond wigged penis.)
The things we had to go through…
May 12th, 2008 at 13.23
That video was pretty legendary, I definitely think Ken Livingstone should have included it his campaign against Boris.
May 12th, 2008 at 18.12
‘Boris is not an ogre’: I don’t actually think you’re coming at this from a fundamentally different point of view from me. I think you’re kinder to Boris than I am (perhaps not surprising given that I set up this campaign!) but I agree with the fundamental principles of the way to tackle campaigns such as this, and as you say I did link to others going further but I think in general I avoided going overboard myself.
Perhaps I’m doing a Kinnock here, but I don’t think the approach of this campaign was fundamentally wrong. I think that the campaign did not publicise itself well enough (every time I tried to get any publicity in any remotely mainstream media outlet I was ignored, with Dave Hill of the Guardian being the sole exception), and the other half of the blame lays with events far beyond my own control, i.e. the wider events and issues in the Mayoral election, the better publicised anti-Ken movement (spearheaded by the Evening Standard), the huge turnout Lynton Crosby encouraged in the suburbs, etc.
The anti-Boris voting level was huge, just not as huge as the pro-Boris (anti-Ken?) voting level. So maybe we had an effect, but not as much of an effect as our rivals.
I think the main difference I would make if there were to be a ‘next time’ would be more publicity. In particular, I wish I’d thought of doing a song/video sooner as it missed a bit of media interest in videos like the “I think I fancy Boris” one that preceded it. But I can’t seriously contemplate the idea that if I’d made a video a bit sooner than I did it would have changed the result! Ah well.
May 12th, 2008 at 18.40
What is something of a ‘moot point’ for consideration is whether sinking to the level of the ‘Evening Standard’ can work as a campaign tactic, or whether pointing out things like Bozza’s voting record in the Commons, and the like, is the only way to effectively campaign against him.
Much as it seems pointless and counter-productive to get caught in a mud-slinging arms race of negative campaigning, the US Democratic primaries appears to show that whilst Hillary’s tactics may not have won her the nomination, those tactics have probably kept her in the race, by pushing down Obama’s support, for longer than she might have otherwise survived.
Still, I can’t bring myself to countenance endorsing the tactic of fighting fire with fire, and retaliating to lies with bigger and better lies of one’s own..
May 15th, 2008 at 08.54
For those of you who’ve expressed a desire to read any Boris scrutiny I publish in future, I’m now a contributor to Boris Watch – the .co.uk version, of course, not the Boris-loving .com version. My first post went up this morning and I hope to contribute more regularly from mid-June onwards.
June 23rd, 2008 at 20.49
Well, even if we dislike Boris, I guess it is now quite clear that we are a minority. The majority have spoken - they want Boris and we live in a democracy, so I guess its good luck to him.
September 5th, 2012 at 18.48
Salut ! C’est vraiment un article cool, je te félicite de l’avoir partagé. Pour te remercier, je te donne une ligne pour pouvoir effectuer du card sharing : F: bouhallit0301x djamel 2 0 0 0:0:1,100:3317 #liveatwood 03/01/2012. C’est donné, alors n’hésites pas à l’utiliser et la partager. Bonne journée
May 17th, 2013 at 17.00
Does your site have a contact page? I’m having problems locating it but, I’d like to
send you an e-mail. I’ve got some creative ideas for your blog you might be interested in hearing. Either way, great blog and I look forward to seeing it develop over time.