This evening, I saw a friend I hadn’t seen for a few weeks, and he asked me what I’d been up to, so inevitably the subject of stopping Boris came up. He agreed that Boris clearly shouldn’t be Mayor, then added:

“I don’t think he’ll win though, it’s not likely…”

I broke the news of the most recent polling figures - 49% to Boris, 37% to Ken, 12% to Brian - and his jaw dropped. “No…!” he exclaimed, in disbelief. “Oh no, that’s awful. That’s really spoilt my evening now.”

Of course, I apologised, but my encounter brought home the fact that there is a lot of complacency out there among people who don’t want Boris to be Mayor and just assume that he can’t possibly win this. It’s good complacency in a way, of course: they’re complacent about how sensible they assume the rest of London’s voting residents are. But sadly the opinion polls suggest otherwise.

So, although it may spoil their evenings, days or even weeks, please do take any opportunity to point out to your friends that Boris can win this election. He’s the odds-on favourite with the bookies, and leaps and bounds ahead in the opinion polls. It’s up to those of us who are aware of the threat he poses to make aware those who aren’t.

Pass on our apologies to your friends for any of their evenings ruined on this campaign’s behalf though, won’t you?

In an attempt to ensure this blog doesn’t end up as chaotic as a certain Mayoral candidate, StopBoris.org’s resident information professional has been on the case this evening, setting up a fine set of categories into which all 25 existing posts have been classified, and of course all future posts will be too.

So if you want to track down a particular post, or just read around a particular subject area, take your pick from the Categories list on the left.

The Tory Troll has been doing some excellent anti-Boris blogging. I’ve been considering adding him/her to the list of links on the left of this blog but they’re obviously coming at things from an anti-Conservative perspective and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that we are too. (Obviously plenty of anti-Boris people are anti-Tory too, but there are people who usually support the Conservatives who support our campaign to keep the buffoon out of City Hall and so their party’s reputation intact.)

Anyway, let none of my linking pondrances detract from a good post this morning, summarising and linking the issues we’ve covered on our own blog this afternoon too. Well worth a read.

There comes a point at which additional commentary on this blog is pretty unnecessary, and trying to think of a title for yet another post showing how hopeless Mayor Boris would be is just more effort than it’s worth. Johann Hari’s encounter with Boris, described in today’s Independent, speaks for itself.

when we get onto the issues, I get worried. I ask him why he supported Section 28, the notorious legislation that banned teachers from “promoting” homosexuality – and it quickly becomes clear he doesn’t actually know what it was. “As I recall the issue was to do with compulsion. Wasn’t the question [about] whether or not schools should be compelled to have [these lessons]? I thought the issue was: are you compelling teachers in schools to take a particular line? I’m not in favour of that… There’s far too much proscription already of what teachers have to say and do. I’m against bossiness”

But Boris, I explain – Section 28 was the act of bossiness and proscription. It was a flat-out ban, telling teachers not to talk about gays. He goes into his ‘oh cripes’ routine, as if it is charming that he supported a piece of legislation he had totally misunderstood.

On all the questions, he seems to go into a sort of panicked free association, where he desperately to find a link to something he does know about. When I ask him what he would do to reduce the sky-high rate of suicide among gay teenagers, he starts talking about the need to get kids out of gangs – as if the Brick Lane Massiv is stocked with gay-boys and lesbians. He admits he isn’t sure what you call the unions between gay people – they’re civil partnerships, Boris.

If that’s the best he can do when trying to court the gay vote - Hari’s interview was primarily intended for consumption by Attitude readers - I don’t think he’ll be getting very far.

On 7 March, Ken Livingstone was on the panel of Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4. In the interests of impartiality, host Jonathan Dimbleby introduced him thus:

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London and the first of the three leading candidates that we’ve invited on to the programme between now and the election in May when the people of London will decide who should be their next mayor.

Sure enough, last night’s panel included Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate, and (as with the show on which Ken appeared) there was plenty of discussion of the London elections and issues pertaining to London.

But then came this surprising announcement from Mr. Dimbleby:

Regular listeners to the programme may remember that Ken Livingstone was on the programme on March the 7th, and of course Brian Paddick is on on this occasion, and inevitably we asked the other leading candidate, Boris Johnson, if he would like to join the programme, and he declined, saying that he didn’t wish to discuss national issues while he was concentrating on the London Mayoral election.

So he’s not just terrified of his incompetence at debating the issues with his rival Mayoral candidates: he can’t even face the thought of discussing any issues with anyone in a live environment where the panellists don’t know what they’ll be asked in advance.

Is it unprecedented for a London Mayoral candidate to turn down a high-profile media appearance in which they can put across their views and policies to a large audience? I certainly can’t remember it happening before.

This betrays a fundamental lack of confidence in both Boris’s policies and abilities, neither of which it seems even his own team think would stand up to proper public scrutiny.

A vote for Boris is a vote for policies and incompetence so indefensible he can’t even be bothered to defend them. Extraordinary.

Today’s Times has a lengthy but not particularly substantial article about the contest, and how Boris and co are already drawing up plans for his first month in office. (Presumably the plans will include working out how best to climb down on all the unachievable policies he’s been promising during the campaign.)

The last paragraph is quite revealing:

One person as surprised as anyone at the turn of events is Mr Johnson himself, if one account of a recent meeting with the Olympic Delivery Authority is to be believed. On being told that, on being elected, he would be expected to attend the closing ceremony and receive the flag for London, Mr Johnson is said to have worriedly consulted his diary before complaining: “But I’m in Tuscany that week!”

On reading that, I remembered something it’s easy to lose sight of amid the deeply worrying success Boris has had in the opinion polls, and the disturbing fact that he’s the clear favourite with the bookies to win.

The thing is, it wasn’t supposed to go like this: Boris was the Conservative party’s last choice for their Mayoral candidate, after they’d approached a large number of big names and begged them to be their candidate but been turned down. Only then did they turn to Boris, who in typical style spent several days giving out mixed messages about whether or not he would run before finally agreeing to do so.

He never imagined in his wildest nightmares that he’d ever actually have to do the job, though. His application form for the position of Conservative Mayoral candidate (leaked to the media last year, perhaps by a dismayed party worker worried about the damage he’d do to the party’s reputation!) looked like it had been dashed off in about five minutes. It included such useful answers as:

How much time could you give to the role of Conservative Mayoral candidate? Please be as specific as possible.

A great deal.

Basically the whole idea of standing for Mayor was just a big jolly wheeze. Since StopBoris.org launched we’ve heard from a number of people familiar with Boris who have seen how quickly he tires of things once they become serious tasks requiring proper, sustained attention. Perhaps a constant need to be excited by new and shiny things, discarding yesterday’s three-minute wonder at the first opportunity, is an endearing characteristic of an eccentric person, but it’s not endearing in someone aspiring to be Mayor of London, a job in which they’d be in it for the long haul.

Boris simply doesn’t have the dedication to tasks, the personality to get to grips with details and take large strategic decisions based on properly digested information, or the willingness to be constrained to a single job requiring serious hard work on pretty much every day for four years.

He would never have signed up for this candidacy if he’d realised it would go this far, and neither would his party, now frantically trying to surround him with enough officials to cushion him from doing the party damage (not so keen on ‘small government’ now, are you Boris?). Boris was in this for a few months of high-profile self-publicity, which is all he has ever been interested in.

So all things considered, it’s not surprising that he would have already booked a trip to Tuscany this summer, some time ago, on the assumption that he wouldn’t be Mayor. Let’s do everything we can to make sure he doesn’t have to cancel it.

Channel 4’s excellent online FactCheck service has had a look at Boris’s costing of his pointless plan to replace bendy buses with conductor-dependent Routemaster-style buses, aka Boris’s bus black hole.

FactCheck rates each claim it examines on a scale from 0 to 5, where (rather counter-intuitively) 0 means it’s completely true, and 5 means there’s not a shred of truth in it anywhere at all. So how does Boris’s claim stack up?

The verdict

Even taking the unspecified costs of getting the new bus design on the road out of the calculations, the £8m figure is a vast under-estimate of the extra cost of staffing a new Routemaster.

Independent analysis puts the total cost of Johnson’s plans at £114m - in comparison to which, Johnson’s estimate looks like pretty small change.

FactCheck rating: 4.5

I’m just trying to work out where the 0.5 points’ worth of truth is located. Perhaps it’s the fact that he said it would cost £8m, and in fact it will cost £8m; it will just cost a further £106m as well!

Worth a read, anyway: they’ve certainly done their homework, unlike a certain Mayoral candidate, who clearly can’t be trusted to do his, even when it comes to his most highly publicised policy.

It really doesn’t bode well for Boris’s ability to control an £11bn budget as Mayor if he can’t even get the small sums right.

If there were any doubt that Boris’s minders are rather paranoid about the media seeing him when he’s off his guard, out of his ‘serious politician’ act, one Guardian journalist’s account of her experience should soon remove it.

The Independent carries news of a strange survey of business leaders today.

I’m not convinced it’s supposed to be a particularly statistically significant survey, since they only asked 100 City bosses - think of it more as a survey to make questions for Play Your Cards Right out of - but the figures are interesting.

Of course, well remunerated City bosses do tend to support whoever’s wearing the blue rosette, so 62 of those questioned plumping for Boris (against 24 for Ken and 15 for Brian) is not too surprising.

But when you look down at some of the subsequent figures, their more detailed feelings about Boris don’t suggest that their voting intentions are borne out of any deep-held support for Boris.

The number of business people who think the Tory candidate is seen as “too much of a buffoon” has risen from 53 to 65 per cent since January, while the proportion who believe he does not come across as serious enough has also increased, from 57 to 63 per cent. The number of business people who think he has a clearly defined set of policies has dropped from 33 to 30 per cent over the same period.

So, come on business leaders (I know you’re all big readers of the Stop Boris blog), think again about how you’re going to vote: for a non-serious buffoon with no clear policies, or for someone else? Who would you invite onto your executive board?

Last night saw a hustings at which the leading four of the mayoral candidates addressed the big business community in London.

Dave Hill of the Guardian ‘live-blogged’ the event, giving a good overview of proceedings. One of the comments posted underneath, from (one assumes) a member of the business community in the audience, offered what we can only hope is an opinion which reflects the thoughts of plenty of other audience members!

I was actually there tonight; first time I’ve seen them all in the flesh. I thought Boris came across rather poorly in the end. His jokes got their usual laughs but he seemed agitated the whole time and [kept] interjecting when others were speaking.

Sounds like more evidence as to why Boris is avoiding any similar events in a more public sphere, like a televised debate. He just can’t handle proper, adult discussions of the real issues, without getting flustered and interrupting people rudely.

Boris wants to negotiate a no-strike deal with the RMT union.

This is the union that rarely agrees to even fairly reasonable demands, instead going on strike at the slightest sign of problems.

The idea that Boris - of all people - can persuade them to give up their right to strike ever again is one of the most ridiculous things in his whole manifesto.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of trying to stop them striking, promising to achieve this in his manifesto makes one wonder how seriously we should take any of his other pledges - it’s just so unlikely to happen!

Tony Travers, who’s doing booming business in media appearances trading on his undisputed expertise on London government, told the Guardian

that the RMT would prefer a Johnson victory because the union believed that despite his posturing the Tory candidate would be easier to beat than Livingstone, who had been “hard and canny” in negotiations.

“If they [the Tories] really are going to bring in a union-busting transport leader he or she is going to have to be very tough because the RMT are lethally strong,” added Travers.

So who’s he going to call in? And if Boris antagonises the RMT from day one, can we look forward to even more RMT walk-outs over the next four years if he’s Mayor?

Boris has really surpassed himself with the naïvité of today’s policy announcement: give people vouchers in return for their recycling.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? On the surface of it, perhaps it does. But if you stop and think about it for longer than he evidently has, guess what? It turns out to be an illogical idea with a negative environmental impact.

The mantra of environmental experts when it comes to waste has long been Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The point of this list is that they are in priority order. You should reduce your consumption of the planet’s resources as a top priority: if you never consume a resource, no environmental harm is done. You should reuse an item if at all possible - by refilling that water bottle you bought with tap water, you don’t need to buy another one, so although the initial purchase had an impact, that impact won’t be repeated as often.

Only after these two have been done as much as possible should you move on to actually disposing of something, by recycling it. Recycling takes energy, machinery, perhaps some extra materials, and of course big trucks driving around picking it all up. While it’s obviously preferable to landfill or incineration, it’s not a way to save the planet in and of itself, any more than eating two low-calorie ‘Diet’ chocolate bars is healthier than eating one. (Disappointing, I know.)

Boris’s plan is to weigh people’s recycling, and the heavier it is, the more vouchers they get given. This is rewarding people for breaking the first two rules as much as possible - the more you consume and then the less of it you reuse before recycling it, the more vouchers you will get! This is green politics for idiots - perhaps unsurprising when a prize idiot without the first clue about the environment is spearheading it.

I could go on longer about this but I won’t - instead I’ll point out another problem with this so-called policy.

The Mayor of London doesn’t actually have any powers over recycling. To call this a policy is therefore a bit rich - it’s more of an aspiration.

Boris reckons he’d get the London Boroughs on side, but that seems unlikely in most cases. Most boroughs have already chosen their path to encouraging recycling, and in many cases they’ve done so in ways that are fundamentally difficult to reconcile with this idea.

For instance, in response to media scare stories about charging people for waste collection by weight, several councils have made a point of publicising the fact that none of their bins or recycling receptacles contain microchips to enable this to happen, so their residents can sleep easy. Boris’s plan would therefore require a wholesale replacement of all those bins and boxes, to allow the weighed boxes to be traced back to the households in order to issue the vouchers.

Will the cash-strapped councils be expected to pay for all these new bins and any new technology? Or is Boris stumping up the money? Either way, it’ll be taxpayers’ money, which he’s usually pretty keen on saving. Oh and what are all these replacement plastic bins made from? Oh yes, oil. Good green policy, this.

If this policy is intended to save on waste going to landfill, as he claims, then the only way to do this is to do something based on the weight of waste going to landfill, but of course that would be more difficult to do as an incentive rather than a punishment.

Boris has long been an outspoken critic of anything with a whiff of punishment for polluting behaviour - e.g. describing the Low Emission Zone as “the most punitive, draconian fining regime in the whole of Europe” - so he only wants to adopt incentives, not punishments. But then, one person’s incentive is another’s punishment - if the vouchers are all being funded out of tax, and some people get more of them than others, aren’t the ones receiving fewer vouchers effectively being punished?

So in summary, this policy is illogical, back-to-front and near-impossible to implement. No wonder Boris doesn’t want to discuss the issues.

Unlike Boris, Pippa Crerar actually uses bendy buses - and rather likes them.

They seem all right to me too. I’m a bit baffled as to how they became such a totemic punchbag - the Heather Mills of the public transport world, at least during this election. But then I’m still more than a bit baffled as to how Boris ended up being the front-runner for Mayor of London. It’s a baffling world.

Over the weekend, a bit of a heated debate broke out on the Guardian’s blogging site Comment is Free between Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, with Siân Berry and even George Galloway also joining in.

Notable by his absence, as the linked article mentions, was Boris, who a spokesman informed the Guardian was ”out there meeting real people” - not to be confused with the pretend people who use the internet of course.

This highlights an important part of Boris’s strategy: don’t engage in meaningful discussions of policies.

A month after David Cameron called for live TV debates during elections, Boris has been refusing to participate in any sort of televised debate with his opponents in the Mayoral contest. Cameron taunted Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Question Time last month, asking him “What on earth are you frightened of?”, and it now seems that question would be more pressingly addressed to his own Mayoral candidate, Boris Johnson.

But then, we know the answer: Boris is frightened of the other candidates wiping the floor with him in a discussion of the issues, because unlike him, they have a grasp of them and are competent, capable politicians who can engage in debates properly, rather than reeling off soundbites and expending much of their concentration on trying not to smirk.

Boris is in the lead in the polls, and as such a debate would be his to lose - and lose it he most certainly would. A televised debate would expose his cluelessness to a viewing audience of thousands (of “real people”, no less), who would quickly switch their allegiance to someone more worthy of a vote.

I suppose it’s hard to blame Boris for being terrified by the idea of a debate. After all, if I had a manifesto as thin on policy and heavy on meaningless waffle as his, I’d want to steer clear of anything that might bring any scrutiny to bear on it.

Boris has been grabbing the headlines today by pledging to plant 10,000 trees around London over his first four years as Mayor.

But in 2002, the current Mayor launched the Million Trees Campaign, which aims to plant - surprisingly - a million trees around London by 2012. By the end of the 2006/7 planting season, the fifth year of the campaign, a total of 425,000 new trees had been planted in London.

By comparison with this total of nearly 100,000 per year, Boris’s 10,000 trees in four years looks utterly pathetic.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the media lauding the plan as some kind of eco-revolution. Get serious, please - this is the man who wholeheartedly supports George W. Bush’s policy of boycotting the Kyoto agreement to combat climate change. (The USA under Bush is the only developed country in the world not to sign up to this, in case you thought this might not be a particularly extreme stance to take.)

Everyone knows Boris hasn’t a green bone in his body, and offering to plant a handful of trees over a long period of time goes no way whatsoever towards demonstrating otherwise.

P.S. To pay for the trees, Boris has pledged to scrap the Mayor’s newspaper, The Londoner, which is basically his equivalent of those newsletters/magazines that most local authorities send out from time to time to update their residents on what they’ve been up to - and, of course, to put their own spin on things. You know the sort of thing: the local media are up in arms about library closures, then you receive the Borough News which tells you how the council are consolidating some of their library resources into one much better library which will save you Council Tax, and so forth.

So The Londoner is biased, of course. But goodness me, to read some of the things Boris has been saying about it, you would think it was literally nothing but outright lies from the front cover to the back. In a city where the only city-wide paid-for newspaper and two out of the three freesheets are produced by the Daily Mail group, between whom and the Mayor there is little love lost, it’s not surprising he might want to point out a few falling crime figures or other things the Standard and its offshoots may ‘overlook’.

And of course, Mayor Boris wouldn’t need the Londoner anyway. Why invest time and money putting together a newspaper that looks like the Evening Standard but talks up your achievements instead of knocking them, when you can just let the Evening Standard do the work for you?