Sorry, that’s an awful pun, I know.

There’s an interesting idea in today’s Guardian: Martin Kettle suggests Vince Cable would be a better Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor than Brian Paddick.

He certainly captured the imagination of the political classes during his brief temporary tenure acting as Lib Dem leader. Would he capture the imagination of Londoners more than Boris seems to be? It’s certainly food for thought.

Really we’re into fantasy territory now, I would have thought, though - it’s got to be almost unprecedented for a party to change its Mayoral candidate halfway through the campaign.

(I say ‘almost’, because who could forget the first election for Mayor of London, when the Conservatives picked Jeffrey Archer, only to have to substitute in Steve Norris when Archer was charged with perjury? Hey, there’s an idea. Does anyone have any evidence of Boris committing any crimes that might lead him to have to stand down before nominations close in a few weeks’ time? We can only hope!)

In the unlikely event you’re one of the tiny minority of Londoners to whom the type of bus operated on a small number of central routes actually matters enough to you that you agree that most of a Mayoral election campaign should be focussed on it, read on.

Channel 4’s FactCheck have had a look at one of Boris’s manifesto claims: “[Bendy buses] have twice as many collisions with pedestrians and cyclists than other buses.”

Ignoring the grammatically incorrect ’than’ (what did all those school fees buy?), you can certainly read some figures to suggest that this is true, which is why FactCheck give this claim a generous 50% accuracy score.

However, those figures compare bendy bus-operated routes against every other bus route in the entirety of London! This overlooks the obvious fact that bendy buses operate in central areas only, serving some of the most pedestrian-full streets in the city. Anyone who’s walked (or, I assume, driven) around central London will be familiar with how little attention many pedestrians pay to the red man signal and how prone they are to run out into the road to get to whatever exciting thing awaits them on the other side. Sheer volumes of pedestrians make these roads much riskier to operate any vehicle on.

When you compare bendy bus figures with a selection of non-bendy routes operating along similar roads in similar conditions, lo and behold, the figures become more or less identical (and certainly the difference is statistically insignificant, given the low overall numbers of accidents involving any types of buses).

And I’m delighted to see that those mischievous FactCheck researchers aren’t content to leave it at that, but instead deliver one final twist:

How do bendy buses score in contrast to accidents involving the old Routemaster?

Changes in routes mean that data isn’t directly comparable, but according to other figures TfL gave FactCheck, between January 1994 and September 2007 there were 0.05 fatalities per million km operated by bendy buses and 0.08 fatalities per million km operated by Routemasters.

For every dodgy use of statistics to support Boris’s bizarre obsession with abolishing bendy-buses, there’s an equally dodgy way to use statistics to prove his policies woefully misguided - hurrah!

Just seen a great report on Channel 4 News (I assume the video will be added to that rather thin page at some point). The Daily Mirror filmed David Cameron cycling through red traffic lights and performing various other misdemeanours.

Quite amusing (not to mention annoying for those of us who obey the rules when we cycle but are given a bad name by the minority who don’t!), but Boris got himself a bit tangled up when Channel 4’s reporter caught up with him at Borough Market.

He said there should be zero tolerance for cyclists breaking the road traffic regulations, slipping into one of his plethora of pre-prepared bland lines (which seem to be his main tactic against the risk of coming out with a blunder - well, that and the fact that he’s been ordered to stay off the drink for a couple of months).

For once (good old Channel 4 News), the reporter actually followed up on what he’d just said, asking what his zero tolerance approach meant he thought about his party leader’s misbehaviour. For the first time in a while (thanks to a combination of the aforementioned tactics and hitherto woeful journalistic scrutiny), Boris was visibly flustered, and paused for a moment, before coming out with the hopeless riposte: “Show me the evidence!”

The report immediately cut to the Mirror’s footage again.

I do hope Channel 4 News does a lot more coverage of the Mayoral election in the coming weeks.

Last night’s edition of This Week has an interesting little discussion starting 26-and-a-half minutes in. Prominent former Conservative minister Michael Portillo, regular guest pundit alongside Diane Abbott, struggles to reply to questions about whether Boris is now a serious politician, or just a joke - indeed, he is completely lost for words for some time!

Eventually he goes as far as to state that, prior to a clip they’d just shown of Boris moaning about crime, Portillo hadn’t seen Boris talking about any serious areas of policy at all - and that even in the clip he wasn’t actually putting forward any proposals to indicate how he would actually deal with the problems he was describing.

Portillo is speaking here as someone who’s obviously a Conservative through and through, but has stepped down from party political activity so is freer to speak his mind than most Conservatives. How many other Conservatives are sitting on similar views, keeping them to themselves?

As Portillo also pointed out, if Boris wins this election, he will become the most powerful Tory in the country for over a decade. “He will be in power over 7 million Londoners while Cameron is still just talking about power - which would be quite an extraordinary situation!”

Extraordinary indeed - can fellow Conservatives really afford for Boris to be their figurehead?

On a related note, this week’s Guardian Politics Podcast has some discussion about the Mayoral election contest (about 14-and-a-half minutes in), and it’s well worth a listen. The related point is made by their correspondent Allegra Stratton, who’s seen Boris in action on the campaign trail.

I’m not saying I think it’s a good thing, but I think he possibly can [stay more serious/bury his buffoonishness] for the election campaign; I think over the period of a year, to a year and a half, to two years, that would see us go from the London Mayoral election to the probable general election, I think that there is a question mark over whether Boris wouldn’t become the biggest problem for the national Conservatives.

If I were a Conservative supporter, I’d want to keep Boris as far away from City Hall as possible, so as not to damage Cameron’s chances in couple of years’ time. And, of course, I’d start by downloading the Conservatives against Boris poster…

Tonight’s London news programmes’ election coverage was centred on Gordon Brown’s unsurprising endorsement of Ken Livingstone, what with him being in the same party and all. (They have ‘history’, of course, but some of the coverage would make you think Brown would seriously have refused to endorse him, which hardly seems likely.)

Both ITV and the BBC made reference to Metronet (which will bring me to Boris shortly, don’t worry). One of the most ill-informed questions I’ve seen on the news in recent memory was put to Brown by Alistair Stewart, whom I think I’ve mentioned my dislike for before, but really, this was just amateur. He said, “Do you really think Londoners can trust Ken Livingstone with a £5bn budget [don’t know where he got that figure from - I’ve always heard of it being £9-11bn] after the Metronet fiasco?”

Seriously. A supposedly respected veteran news broadcaster asking Gordon Brown whether Ken Livingstone could be trusted with big budgets after Metronet!

(For anyone as unenlightened as Stewart appeared to be, Brown forced the Metronet Tube deal on Livingstone against his loudly publicised wishes - and against a legal challenge Ken brought against the government in the courts to try to prevent them pushing it through.)

Anyway, this site is called Stop Boris, not Stop ITV’s London Tonight Being So Atrocious, so you’ll be pleased to hear that when I switched over to BBC London I was soon presented with The Blond himself, putting across a point about Metronet so convoluted that it must have taken quite some time for his campaign team to dream it up.

Apparently the current Mayor is indeed to blame for wasting money in relation to Metronet. Boris declares that Ken wasted the money he spent taking the government to court in the early days of his tenure to try to prevent the whole Metronet debacle from ever happening!

Now, StopBoris.org is already under enough suspicion of being a front for the Ken campaign (a commenter on PoliticalBetting reckons we’re Ken’s £100k-salaried ‘cronies’ - not a figure I’m ever likely to see on my payslip!) without me doing too much defending of Ken, but honestly! Boris has come out with some rubbish in this campaign, and this can certainly join the heap of nonsense. Had Ken been successful in the courts, he’d've saved many times over the money he’d spent on legal fees. And perhaps if he hadn’t opposed it, Gordon Brown wouldn’t have coughed up the £2bn to bail out Metronet from central government funds quite so readily, risking Londoners having to bear the whole bill themselves instead.

More evidence that Boris will say anything, no matter how illogical or downright nonsensical, if he thinks it will add to his chances of winning.

Needless to say, by the way, his point wasn’t challenged by anyone on BBC London. This is becoming a regular and worrying feature of the election coverage in all media. (Except StopBoris.org, obviously.)

I’d forgotten about Boris’s rampant homophobia, which has seen him write such gems as:

If gay marriage was OK - and I was uncertain on the issue - then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.
Boris Johnson, ‘Friends, Voters, Countrymen’, HarperCollins, 2002

Not to mention writing in the Spectator when the government were repealing Section 28 (the legislation forbidding the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools) that they had an “appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools”. This was swiftly followed in the Telegraph with this:

It is more sensitive to spare parents’ anxieties than to allow left-wing local authorities to waste taxpayers’ money on idiotic and irrelevant homosexual instruction.

One of the greatest things about London is how anyone can come to this city and be whatever they want to be, act however they want to act, and as long as their behaviour doesn’t have a negative impact on others, nobody minds what they do. And certainly the gay scene in London is one of the most thriving and vibrant in the country, if not the world. The annual Pride march is a highlight in the capital’s calendar. It seems Boris would rather the march was called Shame.

I think I may have to come up with another poster to cover this issue…

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…)

(more…)

Interesting to see that the Green Party and Ken Livingstone have joined forces to oppose Boris Johnson.

In a joint statement they said: “Tackling climate change and creating a fairer London must be at the top of any serious mayor’s agenda. Boris Johnson, who supported George W Bush in opposing the Kyoto treaty and would scrap the CO2 charge on gas-guzzlers, cannot be trusted with London’s environment.”

A cross-party pact opposing the election of Boris, eh? If only there was some sort of snappy name for such a campaign, and perhaps a web site, logo and posters…

This is the new Stop Boris blog. What better impetus to start a blog than the news that the latest opinion poll suggests that Boris will easily win the election to become Mayor of London on 1 May. Not so funny now, is he?

Anyway, strangely there doesn’t appear to exist a WordPress theme which looks like the Stop Boris web site, so I’m having to invest rather too much time in attempting to convert the default theme.

Normal business will get underway as soon as that’s sorted out…