A.A. Gill is not impressed with New Boris. Example:

“This is the best job in politics, isn’t it?” he says. “This is the really big one.”

And you might get it, I say. “Yes, yes.” He has a nervous, concentrated look, as you might have while waiting for the all-clear siren to sound. “I might – it’s very close, isn’t it?” He flicks me a sideways glance. Yes, I think it is quite close. What are the three things you’ll do when you take over City Hall on the first day: what’s at the top of your agenda?

“Um, um.” He’s plainly never considered this; like the Americans in Iraq, there is no plan for after victory. He searches the horizon for inspiration: “Um, well, put conductors and policemen on buses. Yes, and take away free passes from children.” That’s my son you’re taking about, I point out.

“Only if they’re naughty – your son isn’t naughty, is he? Um, er, give pensioners 24-hour travel passes. Er, stop Tube workers going on strike, bring in legislation to, oh, er.”

Allowing octogenarians travel passes to go clubbing doesn’t quite have the ring of a mission statement. Tell you what, Boris: have a think and call me tomorrow.

We subsequently learn that this was the day of what Gill calls his "ghastly, unfocused, underprepared, stuttering and blustering factless rant" on Newsnight.

Of course, we’re not impressed with New Boris either. Nor Old Boris, nor anything to do with Boris, in fact; except the idea of his defeat in the Mayoral election.

I suppose we couldn’t consider ourselves truly Web 2.0 without being able to dump some videos onto YouTube, so now we have a page (or is it a ‘channel’?) over there for that purpose.

(For some reason, someone decided 18 months ago to set up a user account called ’stopboris’, upload nothing, watch only 52 videos and then never log in again for at least the past year, so unfortunately we’re stuck being called ’stopboris2008′. It’ll do.)

The Stop Boris channel includes some good clips from elsewhere on YouTube in the Favo[u]rites section, plus any videos we upload ourselves.

First up on that front are two clips from tonight’s Bremner, Bird and Fortune from Channel 4.

The first highlights the lack of deep substance in Boris’s campaign: Boris Boris Boris.

The second features the regular middle-class dinner party characters discussing the Mayoral election.

I don’t like the homophobic stuff around Brian Paddick in that latter video. I’m sure they’d defend it as ironic or as representing the homophobia inherent in the middle classes or whatever, but it seems that the only laughs you could get in that part of the sketch would come from laughing with, rather than at, the homophobia. On the plus side for Brian, if the best satire they can manage against him is that, I suppose he can’t be doing anything particularly bad in his campaign!

The Boris material is better, anyway, but hopefully there is better still to come in the remaining two programmes before the election on 1 May.

And on a related note, Have I Got News For You? returns in the nick of time at 9pm this Friday on BBC One, giving them two weeks to try to put the monster they’ve created back in his box. Given Paul Merton’s comments in the Guardian last year that he didn’t think Boris would be any good at being Mayor (culminating in "Boris can’t look after his bike properly – how’s he going to look after London?"), here’s hoping the topic comes up.

A new series of Channel 4’s satirical show started this evening, and had some good Mayoral Election material in it, particularly a bit emphasising the sheer frothiness of Boris’s campaign strategy, which I’m contemplating attempting to get onto YouTube in some way.

In the mean time, here’s a reminder of one of the highlights of their previous series, after Boris had become the Conservative candidate for Mayor, which someone else has already posted on YouTube, so I don’t have to (fortunately, since I don’t have a recording of it any more anyway):

We keep hearing how the candidates in this election (and others in the UK) could or should learn a lot from the US presidential election.

Well, it looks like someone on YouTube has decided to try to help them out with that:

Via the Tory Troll.

The Tory Troll’s on good form today, with a great analysis of Boris’s contradictory positions on different types of unnatural deaths.

On the one hand, we hear over and over again about how concerned he is about the high levels of fear about crime, particularly in relation to the 27 young people murdered with knives and guns last year. He claims he’ll somehow be able to do something about this better than anyone else, which is a laughable suggestion given how completely out of touch he is with the poorer communities in which these tragic but rare incidents tend to happen.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, he proposes measures to tip the balance between the priorities given to cars and pedestrians back towards the cars, which can only increase the higher, but reducing, levels of pedestrian casualties and deaths.

There’s a pelican crossing near my workplace which is very much biased towards cars. It will only ever let pedestrians cross after a particular one of the two car directions has had its lengthy turn; and if you don’t press the Wait button by a certain surprisingly early point in the sequence, you have to wait for the whole process to go around again. So of course, what do I see as I await the green man? People of all ages getting bored of waiting and taking a chance on it - dashing across when the red man’s on display, despite the fact that there’s no way of knowing what’s coming round the corner or how fast it’s coming.

The simple fact is that the more you tip the balance in favour of traffic, the more pedestrian deaths there will be. Funny how Boris’s voters in their 4×4s aren’t portrayed as posing a greater threat - as they do, statistically - than young people, even the minority who carry knives or guns. Doesn’t quite fit the narrative, does it?

Jonathan Freedland writes in the latest Jewish Chronicle:

As for Boris Johnson, suffice it to say that the BNP is so comfortable with his politics — his leisurely branding, in writing and in documented conversation, of black people as “piccaninnies”, his claim that Africa’s problem is that it’s no longer ruled by the British Empire — that they are urging their supporters to use their second preference votes for Johnson.

That’s right: the BNP is backing Boris.

Second, we can use a bit of Jewish empathy. In the week after the July 7 bombings, Johnson wrote a piece which described the Koran and Islam itself, not merely Islamic radicalism, as “viciously sectarian” and “medieval”, accusing it of “disgusting arrogance”, and adding that Islamophobia was a “natural reaction” to Muslim holy texts.

Now ask yourself, as a Jew, how you would feel if someone who wrote that way about Jews and Judaism was leading in the polls for the London mayoralty. Then ask yourself, as a Londoner, whether that was the message we needed to hear in the immediate aftermath of 7/7 when every other public figure, including our own Chief Rabbi, was urging people to come together and not to turn on a religious minority because of the wicked actions of four murderous individuals. Do all that — and then vote.

Joanna Blythman blogs about Boris for the Scottish Sunday Herald. A sample:

His minders keep him on a short leash, for fear that Boris’s shallow grasp of the myriad complex issues that the mayor has to deal with will show through. He plays to the gallery, promising to scrap bendy buses and phase lights so that traffic moves faster. Next thing we know, it’ll be "Collect a free Dinky toy when you vote for me." Boris isn’t even undergraduate level. A bright kid from a secondary school debating society could match him on the policy front.

Every election blogger worth reading has linked to Vote Match, so why should we be any different?

In principle, we shouldn’t be. I think sites like this are a brilliant idea in any election, and always use them to check my voting intention against my beliefs and ensure I’m not backing the wrong horse. Vote Match is easy to use, presents the results clearly, and works really well.

But in the context of the Mayor of London election 2008, I think there is one problem with Vote Match: it’s built on the assumption that candidates’ stated policies are all that matters.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they don’t matter, but the problem is that this approach overlooks some of the most important reasons not to vote for Boris.

Boris is renowned for his unreliability, his lack of commitment and his liability to commit offensive and embarrassing gaffes which (unlike rival candidates quoting things Boris has written back at him) would demean the office of Mayor.

He also has a history of saying whatever he thinks will get him elected, regardless of what he really thinks or will really do when in office: in his university days, to get elected as Oxford Union president, he pretended to be a supporter of the then fashionable SDP, rather than declaring his true allegiance to the Conservatives. This leaves a large question mark hanging over anything he says now.

But it’s that unreliability, that buffoonishness, that is the main, clear reason why the Stop Boris campaign’s recommendation about using Vote Match is as follows: use it by all means, but if Boris comes out on top just ignore him and vote for whoever came next.

Whichever statements Boris claims to agree with – and he was the third most dithering candidate, answering ‘neither’ to five of the questions on big issues like Council Tax and unemployment – it’s important that we don’t allow people to forget that he fundamentally can’t be trusted to represent our great city or do a competent job as Mayor. It’s the idiocy, stupid!

Yes: the Tory Troll has sent me a link to details of a precedent, where students campaigning against Boris with their own posters managed to defeat him in the battle to be Rector of Edinburgh University.

So, Boris-stoppers, don’t feel disheartened in the face of Team Boris and their bags of money spewing out t-shirts, leaflets, posters etc: we can beat them, and hopefully will!

I hadn’t spotted this before: an independent analysis from TAS, "the UK’s leading specialist public transport consultancy", of "why Boris’s policy for buses in London is wrong".

I’d seen the Guardian quoting this independent organisation saying he had his figures wrong, but this article demolishes his entire policy, regardless of the figures.

Ask average Londoners to name one of Boris’s policies and most will remember the bendy-bus-scrapping policy as his totemic pledge. But on Newsnight it was clear he hadn’t thought the policy through properly at all, and now I see that TAS think the entire policy is simply "wrong".

What kind of indication is this of the reliability of his other policies, which one assumes will have had even less thought put into them than this, his first and most famous one?

Yesterday, Boris was campaigning on an issue which, if I recall correctly, actually amounts to a complete misunderstanding on his part: Boris vows to fight closure of Tube station ticket offices.

The Tory mayoral candidate warned that passengers would be put off using the Underground if stations were unmanned […]

Mr Johnson pledged to halt TfL’s proposals to close around 40 offices and said: "They do provide a great deal of reassurance to people late at night if something untoward happens, if they’re scared, or if there is an affray.

"It’s good to at least have a human being there to give a sense of security. That’s why I think we should fight to reverse this programme of closures."

The ever-reliable Evening Standard reports the story entirely from Boris’s side without approaching TfL for a statement about Boris’s claims, so they don’t shed any light on the real situation, but if my memory serves me correctly, the whole idea of these ticket office closures is to free the staff up from their enclosed ticket booths so that they can be a more visible presence within the station.

It’s certainly my understanding, which no-one’s ever challenged in relation to one of the Stop Boris posters, that TfL specifically have a policy of never leaving any of their stations across the entire Under- and Overground network unmanned during their hours of operation.

So for Boris to suggest that the closures of these ticket offices will result in the loss of the "human being there [giving] a sense of security" is ridiculous: if the closures proceed, the human being in question will be released from his or her enclosure and be able to be far more visible around the station, providing a much better "sense of security" – for the people scared into thinking they actually have something to fear by Boris and his Evening Standard cronies in the first place.

Whenever the national media covers the London Mayoral election, a handful of complaints from people outside London arrive to protest that “it doesn’t affect 90% of the UK” (not strictly true, when about one in every six people in the UK lives or works in London).

The media respond along Westminster-focused lines, about this election setting the scene for future General Elections, and so forth, but are they missing a trick? Could it actually be that the outcome of this election would have a serious impact on not just London, and not just the UK, but the very future environmental sustainability of the entire world?

It’s an argument that is gaining ground among environmentalists at the moment, and it runs like this.

Setting aside whether or not you like Ken Livingstone, and whether or not you agree with any of his other policies, no serious environmentalist disputes the fact that – at least in comparison with the vast majority of other politicians in positions of genuine power – the current Mayor of London has a good record on the environment.

London is now recognised around the world as the city that has gone furthest to address climate change, and Livingstone’s manifesto plays on his record. It is the only major world city, he says, to shift from private car use to public transport; it is setting standards in the UK on renewable energy; it has led the way on the congestion charge; it is forcing all buses, heavy lorries and cabs to improve air quality, and he claims an 83% increase in cycling.

Livingstone promises new green-belt protection and a £25-a-day congestion-zone charge on gas guzzlers, and offers a £500m set of bike corridors, a bike rental scheme with 6,000 machines and free passage for the greenest cars, with a London-wide low-emission zone to keep the worst polluting lorries out. “As for tree planting, we already plant more than Boris promises and we will plant more,” he says.

The Guardian’s John Vidal

Of course, some of the details can be argued about, but on the big issues – a firm, environmental lobby-approved target for reducing London’s CO₂ emissions, for instance – it is broadly agreed that the current Mayor is heading in the right direction, more so than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Boris, on the other hand, has still not withdrawn his support for President George W. Bush over the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. In other words, Boris agrees with Bush that we should not be doing everything we can to curb our emissions and so prevent catastrophic climate change causing death and destruction the world over. In the emotive terms I’ve arguably slipped into, Boris is a climate change denier.

Johnson effectively passes on climate change. He opposes the CO₂ charge on gas guzzlers within the congestion zone and calls the new low-emission zone “the most punitive, draconian fining regime in the whole of Europe”, and aims to scrap it. Instead, he says he would “work towards” the 60% cut in the city’s emissions that Livingstone has pledged to reach by 2025 by incorporating the Tory party’s plans for more microgeneration and decentralisation of electricity, combined heat and power plants and energy saving. His critics point out that he is one of the few people in the developed world who still oppose the existing Kyoto climate change agreement and question his commitment to tackling climate change.

The Guardian’s John Vidal

In political terms there is a big difference between a firm commitment to 60% cuts in emissions and agreeing to “work towards” it. Essentially, the latter is the way you cancel the former in a political climate [no pun intended] in which an explicit commitment to cancel it would not go down well with the majority of the electorate. Boris knows that Londoners are too committed to tackling climate change to elect someone who admits he wants to do nothing about it, so instead he conceals his true intentions with that meaningless phrase: “work towards”.

The argument you hear against a city like London taking a lead on climate change is that it’s like creating a no smoking area in an open-plan room. If London stopped emitting overnight, climate change would not suddenly be averted. Of course, this argument is true, but only if taken at its literal face value.

The key thing overlooked by those making this point is London’s international influence.

In October 2005, representatives of 18 leading world cities met in London to discuss joining forces to tackle global warming and climate change.

The representatives saw the need for action and cooperation on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pledged to work together towards achieving that goal.

At the end of the conference, a communiqué was signed which recognised the need for cities to take action and to cooperate on reducing climate emissions.

C40 Cities web site

The Mayor of London is Chair of C40 Cities – Climate Leadership Group, and it’s pretty clear from the Londoncentricity of their News page that London is leading the way within this group.

The result of this is that around the world, London is known as a world leader in pushing ahead with policies to address climate change. And as policies become proven in our city, other places around the world begin to gain in confidence to implement them there too.

It’s here that we return to Boris. If Boris, a renowned opponent of Kyoto, is elected Mayor of London, by the time George W. Bush leaves office in January Boris will be the most powerful, highest-profile climate change denier in the English-speaking world.

And within C40 Cities, and in the wider world generally, politicians will see that the electorate in trailblazing London, previously thought to be years ahead of the rest of the world on dealing with climate change, have thrown out of office the man largely responsible for that work, in favour of someone elected on a platform of undoing and freezing what’s been done.

“Aha,” worldwide politicians will cry in unison. “Here we have hard proof that the electorate simply isn’t ready for the policies needed to tackle climate change. If we put our heads above the parapet with anti-emissions policies, we’ll be the next to lose an election to someone whose only nod to the environment is a few ‘green-lite’ gesture policies from the 1980s about parks and dog muck.”

The work of the Greens, of Ken, of the Stern report and of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be discarded, as will the planet’s prospects for long-term sustainability, as the idea that green policies can be an election-winner is sent straight to landfill.

This isn’t – or, re-reading it, isn’t just – a puff piece for Mr. Livingstone’s environmental policies. The real point here is that replacing Ken with Boris would send the worst possible message to the rest of the world. For instance, there’s a good case to be made that the Liberal Democrats are a greener party than the Labour party on a national basis, and I’ve no reason to suppose that Mayor Brian would damage the green cause to anything like the extent Mayor Boris would. And clearly if the environment is your number one concern, a certain Ms. Berry might be hoping for your first preference vote, and in the unlikely event she can overturn the polls in the coming weeks, Mayor Siân would presumably boost London’s environmental credentials still further.

The key thing to remember next time someone claims the result of this election doesn’t affect them as they live outside the capital is that this election has the potential to affect everyone outside the capital. A Boris victory would be a disaster for the planet.

Further reading and listening

• John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor, assesses the eco-credentials of London’s mayoral candidates
• Jonathon Porritt on the battle for London Mayor
• C40 Cities – Climate Leadership Group
• Greenpeace UK’s executive director on “Why blond isn’t green”
• Ken Livingstone on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast (general studio discussion covering some of the issues raised in this blog post fairly early on, then interview with Ken towards the end)
• Brian Paddick on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast (Brian’s in the studio throughout the podcast)
• Boris Johnson on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast… “coming next week… if we can persuade him to break his silence to the national press… we phone him every morning…”

This week’s set of If… cartoon strips by Steve Bell drew to a close today:

I don’t know if he’ll have changed anyone’s mind about voting for Boris, but he’s certainly kept those of us who already weren’t voting for him entertained all week.

This morning’s LBC debate wasn’t worth getting up early for.

There were one or two good moments, like the opportunity to remind people that not only would Boris be bumbling and incompetent in a crisis, but also in the immediate aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings, he wrote a piece criticising Islam and stating that the Koran was inherently violent.

This reminder sent him off into the most over-the-top display of mock outrage, accusing Ken, who’d quoted him, of "demeaning the office of Mayor" by issuing such a "smear". Once again, Boris claims that it’s a smear to simply read back what he himself did genuinely write.

But overall, this morning’s debate did little to further the Stop Boris cause. That’s not to say Boris performed brilliantly – obviously, that will never happen because he is incapable of doing so – but there were no quotable gaffes or idiotic cock-ups.

Being on the radio presumably helped, as it meant he could read from whatever notes he wanted without having to look away from the viewers’ gazes; undoubtedly what also helped was the fact that the show was hosted by Nick Ferrari, the right-wing talk radio host who was David Cameron’s first choice for Conservative Mayoral candidate, before he worked his way through several other people who rejected him and ended up scraping the bottom of the barrel by begging Boris to take on the job.

Ferrari is a militant motorist who loves taking his 4×4s around London, and has a history of falling out with Ken Livingstone. As such it was pretty hard to see how he would be unbiased, and certainly he didn’t hold back: when the subject of apologising for London’s role in slavery came up. Ken famously did this last year, and Brian Paddick agreed that this was right, he incurred instant strong scorn from Ferrari. Naturally Boris didn’t think an apology was necessary for decades of treating ethnic minorities as a secondary race – hardly a surprise given his own record in the area of race relations – and there was no disputing this from Ferrari.

So basically Boris got an easier ride here than the others, because the show’s outspoken host is just the kind of reactionary that Boris’s campaign is targeting. Indeed, it sounds like Ferrari spends much of his time on air ranting in an effort to bring his listeners around to his right-wing way of thinking about the world, so he might just have created some Boris voters over the years!

Even in a friendly environment, though, Boris still kept interrupting and talking over other people. He just can’t control his manners.

Roll on the next few televised debates, when we shall hopefully once again see the real Boris slipping out from behind the façade!

The closer the election gets, the more shockingly biased Associated Newspapers’ propaganda pamphlets – printed with ink that won’t rub off onto your bum-cheeks – become.

Dave Hill’s been behaving like a thoroughly professional journalist throughout this campaign, giving each candidate a fair hearing, carefully weighing up their policies’ pros and cons and reporting things as he finds them throughout. He certainly hasn’t come to his blog with any particular axe to grind, unlike, say, a certain blogger sitting very near my computer at this moment, who’s only too happy to grind an axe (or preferably to bury it in Boris’s head) at any opportunity.

But even non-partisan Dave lost his rag with the latest Evening Standard bias yesterday; I say ‘lost his rag’, but that is perhaps overstating things somewhat, given that the title of his article is merely "Tut, Tut, Evening Standard". (Mind you, I’ve just noticed that his permalink, i.e. the link I just put in, gives away that that wasn’t the title of his first draft!) But it’s clear that the Daily Mail group of newspapers, for so long desperate to be rid of Ken Livingstone, are hell-bent on getting their crony Boris [who, don’t forget, saved Andrew Gilligan’s career when he was sacked from the BBC by offering him a job at the Spectator] into City Hall, no matter what the cost to their journalistic reputation.

So, how would they cover last night’s Newsnight debate, which by common consent no-one did stunningly well in but Boris definitely lost, in their evening freesheet, London Lite?

The answer is that they:

• freeze-framed through the debate to find a still where Boris looked serious, Paddick looked reasonable and Ken looked a bit silly;
• mentioned, for the headline and opening, that (unlike a certain other candidate) Boris has pledged only to serve two terms as Mayor (which is irrelevant anyway when he couldn’t possibly get re-elected after four years of incompetence and gaffes);
• spent two-thirds of the article bigging up the pledges Boris has announced, which are a checklist of the things the Evening Standard has been moaning about in relation to Lee Jasper etc.;
• mentioned one single topic from last night’s debate, namely Ken’s promise to resign if he breaks his word by putting up the Congestion Charge for sub-band G cars if re-elected;
• somehow managed to segue this into a reference to a poll finding that Ken is the candidate considered least honest by the Londoners questioned;
• er…
• that’s it.

Seriously. No mention of Boris’s bus-based blathering, when Jeremy Paxman had to ask him the same question 12 times and still didn’t get an answer. Nothing. No coverage of the debate at all. This is a propaganda effort the Chinese government would be proud of.

They claim to be "London’s Quality Newspaper", but on the evidence I’ve been seeing, even despite its lightweight content and short articles, the only one of the big four to come close to deserving that title is thelondonpaper, which is at least even-handed in its treatment of the candidates in this election. Better to have one or two fair paragraphs about each candidate than 20 grossly distorted ones, after all.

Mind you, even thelondonpaper is short on coverage of last night’s debate. It goes some way to making up for this with an intriguing nugget of information about Boris’s fundraising:

It has emerged Johnson met up with old pals from the Bullingdon Club—an exclusive Oxford University set which includes Tory leader David Cameron—to appeal for funds for his campaign.

The Bullingdon Club, lest we forget, is renowned for its members’ disgraceful behaviour in Oxford. David Cameron and Boris Johnson were in the club together, and essentially what they did was:

• Book a posh restaurant, using an assumed name (their reputation preceded them);
• Turn up to dine – and get completely and utterly drunk;
• Smash up the place, causing as much damage as possible;
• Ask your rich parents to foot the repair bill to appease the distraught restaurateur;
• Repeat at will.

Another famous Bullingdon alumnus is Darius Guppy, by the way: a lovely bunch, all in all.

So now it sounds like Boris has been catching up with his fellow Bullingdon thugs to try to get cash out of them. Makes sense: after his woeful performance on Newsnight last night, his campaign is looking pretty damaged, so I’m sure they won’t mind throwing money at it to try to restore it. What’s good enough for a restaurant…