Will this put an end to the idea that the Stop Boris campaign is in some way endorsed (or even run, or funded – as if we even have any funding!) by the Labour campaign?

Andrew Rawnsley’s filled a large column in today’s Observer with a mixture of pro-Ken and anti-Boris commentary.

So, concentrating on the half which falls within our remit here at Stop Boris, here are some choice extracts:

The Johnson campaign has come to resemble that chilling 1962 movie, The Manchurian Candidate. The presidential candidate, you will remember, is the brainwashed puppet of a foreign power.

In the case of Boris, the foreign power is Lynton Crosby, the right-wing Australian strategist who has taken over his campaign. The Antipodean’s primary task is stopping his candidate from being his real gaffe-prone self. ‘Boris has been bound and gagged for the duration,’ says one senior Tory. […]

Boris spouts crack-down slogans about crime put in his mouth by his Antipodean hard man. They fall unconvincingly from the lips of Boris, because the words are not his but those of his Aussie ventriloquist.

The true Boris, as opposed to the bogus Boris who has been sanitised for the campaign, is the one who randomly insults other cities, countries and races, and thinks he can clown his way through any misadventure. There was a priceless moment at the last Tory conference before his minders had got him under control. As Boris was pantomiming from the platform, he was being watched over a video link by the next speaker to the conference, Arnie Schwarzenegger. The governor of California could not believe what he was hearing, muttering to his aides: ‘Who is this guy? He’s fumbling all over the place.’ Clowning that may come over as endearingly eccentric to British audiences does not translate so well to the rest of the world to whom the mayor is London’s face and voice. […]

Boris is feared by his own colleagues. Much as they want to win London, many Tories are extraordinarily anxious about what will happen if the famously chaotic and ill-disciplined Boris becomes mayor.

Should he win London, he will be the most powerful Conservative in Britain. He will be looked to as an example of what a Cameron government might be like. If he screws up the capital, he will not be able to laugh it off with a shake of his blond mop and a gasp of: ‘Oh, cripes!’ The prospect of Mayor Boris scares many Tories even more than it does Labour people.

‘Have you ever seen his room?’ one senior Conservative asked me recently, before going on to describe in aghast detail how Boris’s quarters at the Commons were a smelly anarchy of papers and old gym shoes. ‘It’s like the worst sort of student dig.’ David Cameron, who was three years behind him at Eton, is intimately acquainted with the weaknesses of his fellow Old Bullingdonian. Tellingly, the Tory leader feels it necessary to keep issuing reassurances that Mayor Boris would be swaddled in a protective blanket of expert advisers to keep him out of trouble. In other words, even David Cameron doesn’t think his candidate can be trusted to run London.

So in summary:

• Boris isn’t being himself in this campaign. What you’re being asked to vote for is not what you’d get as Mayor.
• Boris is gaffe-prone and liable to insult other cities, countries and races, seemingly at random.
• Boris’s gaffes will make London look stupid the world over if he is the city’s elected face.
• Even many Conservatives don’t want Boris to be Mayor because they fear the damage his behaviour in office – as the most powerful Conservative in Britain – would cause to their party.

We can only hope Andrew Rawnsley will continue to cover the issues we’ve been raising on StopBoris.org and the Stop Boris blog in the run-up to the election – it’s nice to see them taken to a wider audience than our web stats suggest we are managing (by a factor of about 10,000)…

Our old commenting friend Zach has put in another appearance on the Stop Boris blog today, flooding us with 13 illogical, error-ridden pro-Boris comments in a half-hour period earlier.

Interestingly, these were all posted via an Australian internet service provider. Could he have been brought along for the ride by Lynton Crosby, by any chance?

Apparently this bloke’s persistent trolling has forced a number of other anti-Boris blogs to switch to moderating their comments in an attempt to keep the debate operating at a sensible level.

Ideally we don’t want do this ourselves but really, if he keeps up the rate of one comment every two minutes for much more than half an hour next time, we might have to have a rethink.

I’ve just received a very interesting tip-off about Boris’s Epping Forest canvassing gaffe.

The source of this story, it seems, was an article on the Epping Forest Guardian newspaper web site:

[Boris] may well be ahead in the latest opinion polls in the mayoral race - but we can tell him that he is targeting the wrong electors!

He has written to the Epping Forest Guardian - which covers the entire local authority district, and no part of any London borough - seeking voter support.

In a letter emailed to Epping Forest Guardian editor David Jackman, for inclusion on our letters pages, Mr Johnson wrote: "Last week the contest to become Mayor of London Mayor began. A contest that will make a big difference to your lives in Epping Forest." […]

When contacted by the Guardian, Mr Johnson’s campaign office issued a statement saying it was aware that "many" residents of Epping Forest were not eligible to vote - yet the facts are that NO residents of Epping Forest district are entitled to vote in the London mayor elections.

All good stuff of course – a nice illustration of Boris’s incompetence and how poor his grasp of even the most basic information about London really is.

However, the story has since taken a rather sinister turn. This is a link to the article – and this is what the page now says:

The selected article was not found.

Who has got to them, and how did they persuade them to erase an embarrassing piece of history in this way?

And in the light of today’s Boris campaign material masquerading as front-page news in the Sunday Telegraph, just how many favours can Boris call in via his powerful media cronies?

Fortunately, Google’s cache has retained a copy of the original article.

And when that eventually disappears (when Google notices that the article has been removed), all will not be lost: we’ve saved our own copy too. We’re too good to you, Boris-stoppers, we really are.

As I tried to get to sleep last night, the penny dropped about just how calculated today’s Sunday Telegraph front page and accompanying interview really are.

These are no ordinary articles. To call them journalism would be insulting to reporters up and down the country who spend their days trying to get to the truth.

What these articles give is a carefully calculated platform in which to rebut – sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously – all the most serious allegations raised by campaigns like ours at StopBoris.org over the past few weeks and months.

Once you start analysing it, it’s clear that the writing of this article was not approached as an opportunity by a journalist to profile honestly a candidate their newspaper’s readers might have been thinking of voting for. This article was approached with a checklist of points to rebut and suggestions of how to rebut them.

Can this really be true, I hear you cry. Yes, it can: Lynton Crosby leaves no stone unturned in his campaigns and will manipulate every last detail of his candidates’ media coverage, if the media let him. Of course, Boris worked for the Telegraph for 20 years so there’s no doubt he’d be able to call in a favour or two there if he wanted to. On today’s evidence, he wants to.

So let’s have a look at a likely checklist of things the article needed to rebut, and some quotes from the article which by an amazing coincidence address those points perfectly.

The right-hand column of the above table contains about 75% of the main interview article.

And of course, don’t overlook how little truth the Telegraph’s lawyers think they have any evidence of there being in these allegations of "dirty tricks" and "lies". Having given the nod to the article being published, in which the clear implication in e.g. the last quote above is that Ken Livingstone is personally involved in lying, they then insisted on the following being tossed into the mix in the summary article on the front page:

There was no suggestion that Mr Livingstone was in any way involved in the dirty tricks campaign.

Apart from the suggestions throughout the rest of their coverage, of course.

As I wrote last night, this article represents a huge step up in the level of media manipulation and cynical electioneering by the Boris campaign. Don’t fall for it. Look for yourself at the things Boris has written in the past, the positions he has consistently held on things like the environment and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and the racist articles he paid Taki for and published in the Spectator.

And I have no idea if Ken’s campaigners are lying on the doorstep, but Boris’s were certainly lying on the doorstep of the Time Out hustings. Strangely, the Telegraph have overlooked that.

I’m gobsmacked by what I believe is now today’s Sunday Telegraph front page article, Boris Johnson: I’m the victim of dirty tricks in London Mayor race.

The amount of cheek present in anyone whose campaign is being run by Lynton Crosby accusing anyone else of dirty tricks is staggering.

The Telegraph even states as a matter of fact (without offering any evidence) that Boris’s opponents have used "push polling", which is a well known favourite technique of Mr. Crosby himself.

Boris also accuses his opponents of "sub-radar stuff", despite it being well documented that Crosby’s own strategy for Boris is specifically known as an "under-the-radar" campaign.

He continues:

They’ve read every column I’ve ever written to see if they can find something to turn into a smear about a position I don’t hold.

It’s extraordinary that Boris would suggest that simply by highlighting things that he himself has written, we opponents of his (I assume StopBoris.org counts as an opponent, even though we don’t have our own Mayoral candidate) are somehow misrepresenting him. If we mention that he thinks gay marriage is in some way comparable to a union between "three men and a dog", or that he spent column after column repeatedly attacking the Stephen Lawrence inquiry as unnecessary and "Orwellian", it’s unbelievable that his response is to say we are smearing him, and that he doesn’t hold positions that he himself has written that he does hold.

This is the man who was happy to employ and publish outrageous articles by out-and-out racist Taki; the man who’s taken six years to appreciate that "piccaninnies" might be an offensive word to ethnic minorities; the man who supported George W. Bush’s election and re-election; the man who strongly opposed the repealing of Section 28 because he thought it would lead to enforced "homosexual instruction" in the classroom; the man who promised to help an old fraudster friend track down and beat up a journalist; the man who is in the tiny minority of politicians in the developed world who still opposes the Kyoto protocol to tackle climate change (Bush being the only remaining developed world leader not to sign up to it); the man who opposed the National Minimum Wage; the man who claims he did or didn’t snort cocaine based on who’s listening at the time, and did or didn’t have an affair based on what evidence has so far emerged.

With so much evidence that Boris is an untrustworthy charlatan at odds with the vast majority of Londoners’ views, why would anyone need to make anything up to ’smear’ him?

And meanwhile, a single recent appearance of the Back Boris team involved them issuing outright lies on crime and likening Ken Livingstone to mass-murdering dictator Robert Mugabe. Do these things not count as ‘dirty tricks’?

The Sunday Telegraph’s front page article represents a desperate escalation of tactics by Lynton Crosby, attempting to deflect attention away from his own campaigns lies, smears and deceptions by screaming blue murder about vastly exaggerated ‘dirty tricks’ being used against him.

As Boris-stoppers we must do all we can to help our fellow Londoners cut through this thick layer of meta-lies, and see Boris’s campaign for the cynical charade it really is, yet again trying to keep the spotlight off Boris by pushing it back towards his opponents, and raising the dishonesty and bluster levels higher than ever.

As promised, we’ve got some audio and photos from the Time Out hustings on Wednesday.

The audio is not exactly of brilliant quality (it was recorded from quite near the back of the room) but if you’re really determined to hear what you missed, it’s just about listenable:

Time Out hustings full recording (MP3, 1hr20, 27.5MB)

The pictures are behind the cut:

(more…)

The Tory Troll has written a good post about the Boris campaign’s use of fear to try to divide and win votes from frightened Londoners.

The post includes a scan of one of the leaflets Boris’s team were giving out at the Time Out hustings on Wednesday. The leaflet has been created by Photoshopping a genuine yellow Police witness appeal board, which presumably marked the site of someone’s real personal tragedy.

The Boris-stopper who took issue with the Boris team’s lies about crime ‘going up’ also took issue with the tastelessness of adapting this symbol of someone’s individual trauma to turn it into a cynical and scaremongering piece of campaign material, but of course they didn’t care – they’d just refused to back down over undisputable crime figures, after all, so listening to reason wasn’t their strong point.

Of course, Lynton Crosby is behind this nasty campaign, the Troll points out.

Crosby won elections by driving wedges between refugee and resident communities in Australia. Fears were deliberately stoked up and false horror stories circulated at a time when community relations were already at a low.

Now in London we are seeing the same tricks played again. Bad cop’s threats are scaring us into good cop’s arms. Already fearful people are encouraged to be even more fearful still. And once they’ve all run in to hide, a new fresh blond guy pops up and smiles.

Londoners, don’t let Boris and Lynton divide us: instead, let’s unite against the common enemy – by voting for anyone but Boris on 1 May!

The Mirror covers Boris’s lying about cocaine today, but includes a paragraph at the end that I hadn’t heard about before:

Last night it was revealed that Boris has been campaigning in areas which are not even eligible to vote for him. He has been urging bemused residents of Epping Forest in Essex to back his bid for mayor - despite the whole area being OUTSIDE the capital.

He’s been focusing his campaigning on the outer London boroughs, where the Conservatives traditionally do better (although voting Conservative is no excuse for voting Boris), but this is going a bit far. Perhaps he thinks his support is literally proportional to his distance from Trafalgar Square, but canvassing outside London won’t do him much good on polling day. Long may it continue!

At long last, we’ve published a poster highlighting Boris’s homophobia.

The ‘Gay Shame’ poster includes a quote from Boris stating that gay marriage is comparable to a union between “three men and a dog”, and a reminder of his strong support for the anti-gay Section 28: he said its repealing would “allow left-wing local authorities to waste taxpayers’ money on idiotic and irrelevant homosexual instruction”.

A miniature version of the poster has also been added to the Stop Boris application on Facebook, so you can add this to your profile to help spread the message about Boris’s appalling record of pandering to homophobia via your Profile page and Mini-Feed.

In the past few days, from time to time – including in an e-mail today, thanks – people have been asking us if we can produce some Stop Boris leaflets to distribute.

We are now looking at the feasibility of providing something a bit more textual than the posters, for people to download, print/photocopy (we could make it black and white to assist!) and distribute, but one thing that has made us not prioritise this too much is the fact that really, fifteen different leaflets are effectively already available: the campaign posters.

These posters don’t contain too much text, so are likely to be read in full (unlike an overly wordy leaflet), but do cut straight to the point of a number of key issues, explaining the reasons why Boris needs to be stopped.

I think perhaps the ‘missing link’ has been that the posters are A4 PDFs, whereas leaflets would usually be A5. While it’s technically possible to print two to a side of A4, thus making them A5, it isn’t always easy to set up your printer or software to sort this out. (If your printer takes A5 paper, though, you can choose to fit the poster to the page size and that should work fine.)

So we’re going to sort out some copies of the posters that are laid out two to a sheet of A4 in the PDF, so you can just print it out and cut it in half. Hopefully that’ll do for now, but we will continue to look at the possibility of more textual leaflets covering more of the issues too.

Will anyone actually want to print and/or distribute any leaflets though?

And if so, would you rather we prepared them in black and white, colour, or a choice of each?

According to a quick item on the BBC News 24 newspaper preview just now, tomorrow’s (well, today’s now) Telegraph has a lengthy profile of Boris which doesn’t sound like it’s the glowing praise-athon you might expect from his former employer.

It’s not online yet, but what I could glean from the television was that part of its headline was “Running for Mayor… and running from the Press?”, which is a nice gaffophobia reference, illustrated by a photo of a journalist (the author of the piece?) trying to grab him as he walks away.

Apparently the piece also focusses on some of his gaffes and some of the racist articles published in the Spectator when he was editor of it – which he issued another apology for this week, having previously only apologised for the things he’d written himself, rather than the out-and-out racism from the pen of Taki, which he waved through to the newsstand countless times during his editorship.

I don’t suppose even a StopBoris.org-worthy hatchet job would change some Telegraph readers’ minds about the columnist they lapped up for two decades until last year – and however surprisingly negative this article might be, it’s probably not that harsh – but you never know, it might just make some of their readers think twice about backing him.

We look forward to seeing the article when it appears online.

Update: It appeared while I was writing that! I’m a bit confused because although I think this must be the article they were referring to, I can’t see any references to the Spectator racism in it. Indeed, it’s one of the milder articles I’ve read - exactly as one would expect from his former employer.

It’s not without its revelations, though. Did you wonder what the underlying motivation for Boris to become Mayor was? What incident had propelled him to do all he could to get into City Hall? Was it his passion for the city’s diverse population? Perhaps his desire to dream up exciting policy plans to improve the city? Or some overarching vision for the greatest capital on Earth? Er, no. It all dates back to one brief encounter on his bike:

I was almost killed by a bendy bus and can remember pulling over, shaking, to the kerb and thinking, ‘Who did this? It must have been Livingstone, it must have been that man.’ And I remember thinking I would do anything I could to secure his removal from office.

Knowing that that was the real motivator explains rather a lot about his ridiculous campaign, actually.

When Boris’s team decide to change their strategy, they certainly do change it: it’s just been announced that BBC Newsnight will host the first televised debate between the three leading candidates next Tuesday, 8 April.

Submit your questions for Boris now on this page, which contains one of the most enticing invitations I’ve ever seen:

What questions would you like Jeremy Paxman to ask Boris Johnson?

Goodness me – where does one begin?

A couple of good e-mails have come in from readers this evening - thanks!

First up, someone chasing us up on the homophobia-highlighting poster I said we’d have to sort out some time ago. I think that might just have to be put onto this weekend’s to-do list.

The same person wants to see the web site and blog getting more promotion on other blogs and web sites. So do we, so if you run anything you can put a link to us on, please do!

In the second e-mail, journalist David Wearing points out an article about Boris he wrote last July, when his potential candidacy was first announced, and the general consensus was that he was nothing to worry about; David’s article clearly shows he was a rare dissenting voice.

(Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, July last year is actually also when the Stop Boris campaign kicked off too, over on Facebook - great minds think alike! Oh, and in collecting the Facebook link I discovered that the group there has passed the 1,000-member mark today - it’s really shot up in the past couple of days, from about 860 mid-week.)

Anyway, David’s article is an excellent analysis of so many of the underlying reasons why Boris shouldn’t be Mayor of London. It would be impossible to edit it down into a few select quotes so instead I shall link to the whole article, The Liberties of Boris Johnson, but spoil it slightly by cutting straight to his concluding remarks:

In 2008, London may find itself, as a city comprising hundreds of ethnic groups and nationalities, run by a Mayor who displays, at best, an unthinking attitude to race relations. It may find itself, as a city which will both effect and suffer from the effects of climate change to a serious extent, run by a Mayor who fails to grasp environmental issues at even the most basic level. It may find itself, as a city of over 7 million people, run by a Mayor whose stunted view of politics contains little room for the legitimate rights and needs of others. At that point, Johnson the Libertarian, Johnson the character, may, for some at least, lose a good deal of his entertainment value.

Got anything to point out to us? Campaign ideas? Events you think we should try to be at? Get in touch!

Where Richard and Judy and Blue Peter led, the Tory Troll has today noticed that Boris has followed.

It appears he got some figures wrong in his video, so they had to cut away and overdub him later giving the correct figures.

Hard to believe that Boris would ever get any figures wrong though, isn’t it? Er, no.

No wonder they wanted to keep him off live TV.