I’ve just had the pleasant surprise of receiving an e-mail from a creative Boris-stopper who has taken the trouble to produce some Stop Boris pin badges:

I trust he won’t mind me quoting from it:

In a fit of creativity, I’ve made some Stop Boris pin badges that I’m distributing via eBay.

I say ‘distributing’ as I hestitate to say ’selling’ – after all the materials, postage costs, PayPal and eBay fees I’m not even breaking even (!) – this is not for profit! – but I wanted to make something to take the Stop Boris campaign further – and, well, offline!

I’m happy to send badges out for free to anyone who can’t afford to pay or doesn’t use PayPal – they should just email me (I’d just ask them for a stamped SAE).

So if you’d like to grab a badge or two, head over to his eBay Buy It Now listing!

End time: 30-Apr-08 21:26:48 BST (9 days 22 hours)

Election end time: 1 day, 33 minutes and 12 seconds after that. We really don’t have long to stop Boris now, you know…

Further to my previous post on the subject, The Tory Troll has an interesting update.

I’m just calming down after 50 minutes of non-stop Mayoral fun on BBC One’s Politics Show.

The first half-hour national segment was a discussion between the presenter and the three main candidates, which was actually rather good.

One highlight was Boris claiming his writings in the aftermath of 7 July 2005 were being taken out of context, whereupon the presenter said, OK, here’s the context then, and proceeded to read back a huge extract of Boris’s appalling, divisive, anti-Islamic blatherings, which made it perfectly clear that the context was at least as bad as the individual quotes. These are the quotes about Islam being "the problem" and Islamophobia being "a natural reaction" to reading the Qu’ran, which Boris was spouting while the current Mayor and every faith leader and politician in London were frantically encouraging people of all faiths to stand together against the terrorists who they made very clear did not represent any faith.

Extraordinarily, after sitting looking extremely uncomfortable as his column was read back to him on national TV, Boris made no apology for anything he’d written, instead trying (and failing!) to justify what he’d said but in the process showing how he simply couldn’t be trusted to lead and unite London’s diverse communities.

This segment was followed by the London regional opt-out section, where this week it was Boris’s turn to be grilled by the local host.

This was also a satisfyingly thorough interview, in which we again saw Boris coming unstuck on his Routemaster costings: he’s clinging to his new-found £100m figure with the same illogical desperation that characterised his previous clinging to an £8m figure, despite the fact that even the new £100m price clearly doesn’t cover the cost of conductors or drivers, as the presenter made clear.

He was also caught out on his oft-repeated bleating about the Mayor’s council tax precept being too high: the presenter pointed out that 80% of that is spent directly on extra police to go on the beat, so there is very limited scope for cutting it without also removing police from the street.

Anyone, like me (oh how I long for May), who follows Boris’s media appearances very closely will have found much of what he bumbled on about in this interview familiar: his usual tactic of scrambling to reach one of his pre-learned lines was very much in evidence.

Particularly revealing was towards the end of the interview, when the presenter said that one thing the current Mayor had done early on which was a big, bold idea which separated him clearly from other politicians and the government, and had broadly been successful, was the introduction of the Congestion Charge. He then asked what Boris’s "big idea" would be, that would mark him out as an original and new Mayor and make his mark on the capital in a noticeable way.

First, Boris undertook the usual tactic, ignoring the question and leaping on the words "Congestion Charge" to cough up some scripted statements on "payment on account", "reform", and not introducing the £25 CO₂ charge.

Fortunately the presenter didn’t settle for that, repeating his question and insisting on a proper answer.

Boris bumbled a bit more before finally striking gold. His "big idea", he revealed, was a new airport in the Thames Estuary.

Seriously: Boris’s big idea for London is to put an environmentally damaging airport into an area which is pencilled in for a nature reserve. The Mayor doesn’t have control over building airports. The Mayor also doesn’t have control over the Thames Estuary, which is outside Greater London.

The chances of Boris getting such an airport built are even lower than the chances of the RMT agreeing to his promised no-strike deal. The fact that he can seriously put this forward as his main "big idea" shows just how short on ideas of all sizes he really is.

• You can watch the whole of today’s Politics Show, including the London opt-out, here (until next Sunday lunchtime).

Who’s the slightly scary chap on the right?

Find out in the video accompanying the new Stop Boris campaign song…

I’ve had a listen to the recording Dave Hill posted and it makes interesting listening, if you’ve an hour and a half to spare!

Oh, alternatively, he’s since updated his post and it now contains some excellent videos of the highlights that he’s posted on YouTube. The third video there is particularly relevant to what I’ve written below.

I was a bit worried that they were giving Boris a bit of an easy ride considering what an integral part of the bitterly fought campaign against gay rights he played with his Section 28-supporting, gay marriage-bashing, widely read columns in the national media.

Fortunately, they did actually move on to his past proclamations on homosexuality and gay marriage, and they certainly didn’t let him gloss over it, but he really didn’t answer them satisfactorily at all.

For a start, an audience member asked (triggering the discussion) why his views on gay matters had changed since he wrote his columns – and he actually rejected the “hypothesis” of the question, saying his views had not changed!

He also refused to apologise for any of his past writings, when asked if he would like to do so by the chair.

So remember, everyone: Boris’s view hasn’t changed since he wrote the things quoted here. A vote for Boris is a vote for homophobic outpourings like those.

Might as well embed Dave’s video, actually:

The Tory Troll was also at the hustings, and was surprised by the lack of effort put in by Team Boris.

Sadly we were unable to attend this morning’s hustings, but fortunately Dave Hill was there and has posted an audio recording, which I’m just listening to now.

Apparently Boris was challenged about his outrageous support for the anti-gay Section 28 legislation and gave an utterly illogical and nonsensical response about believing in liberty – why censor teachers from discussing particular issues with their pupils if you believe in liberty?

I’m delighted to see (on Dave’s blog) that there was a particularly excellent protest outside, by three men and a dog:

That is of course a reference to Boris’s writings on gay marriage a few years ago, when he said that if it was acceptable (and he was "unsure" about that), he could see no reason why we shouldn’t "consecrate a union between … three men and a dog". Well done to those three – and the dog!

It seems that the YouTube user who posted that previous video has been very busy. He’s also posted a genital-free video for a rewritten version of a Kate Nash song, which admittedly does still contain ‘Parental Advisory’-worthy lyrics. It’s a great piece of work though. Enjoy (under parental supervision…)!

Or indeed the not-so-easily offended, but who might still be offended by animations featuring prolonged and sustained charicatures of Boris as a set of male genitalia.

This video (which does include some excellent clips and great Boris quotes, not all of which I had heard before) has appeared on YouTube today and was brought to my attention by The Tory Troll. Thanks – I think.

Update: This video was deleted from YouTube on Thursday, but we’ve since been sent the video so it’s now available on StopBoris.org instead.

(No, not Boris for PM, like those terrifying Facebook groups.)

I’ve just heard that Boris will be interviewed live by Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM at some point in the next hour. Could be worth a listen, or a Listen Again if you’re reading this after it’s been on.

À la ITV London Tonight ‘debate’ yesterday, I’ll give you my thoughts on the interview after it’s been on.

Update: Well, that was rather good. Eddie Mair is a formidable interviewer and gave Boris a real grilling, with which he could barely cope.

He was really on edge throughout, and following his usual tactic of desperately trying to find a way back to one of his ready-prepared lines: in a discussion about his smoking gaffe he somehow tried to steer the conversation onto making the streets safer; and while covering his laughable policy on Tube strikes (which has already been dismissed by the RMT as being the stuff of ‘cloud cuckoo land’), he tried to steer things around to the debatable statistic he keeps chanting about relative mugging likelihoods in London and New York.

I recorded the exchange on DAB, so it’s in MP2 format at the moment, which most computer-based media players should handle, not sure about portable ones though. For a highlight, skip forward to 2:58 and you’ll hear Boris apparently coming rather close to losing his rag with his interrogator over the question of the great Bus Black Hole:

Eddie: At a cost of?

Boris: [finishes his meandering sentence, then] At or about £100m.

Eddie: Why did it take so long to get that figure out of you? Because you’ve said [Boris tries to interrupt – a common feature of this interview] all through the campaign it was £8m.

Boris: [Cuts his interruption short and draws breath, perhaps counting to ten very quickly in his head] I’m sorry – pay attention if you don’t mind!

You have to hear the way he says ‘mind’ - the amount of fury and frustration pent up in it is a sound to behold!

What we hear in this interview is yet more confirmation of the picture we’ve been building up throughout this campaign, of a self-centred man who’s been brought up to think he’s the most important person in any room and anyone questioning that is treated as astonishing or plain rude. Not to mention of course the usual picture of a man incapable of engaging on any given issue but instead hell-bent on returning to the handful of topics he’s learnt his lines on.

He’s a selfish, lightweight buffoon, with unimplementable, poorly thought-out policies, who couldn’t possibly cope for four years as Mayor.

Update: an extremely kind Boris-stopper has gone to the trouble of transcribing this interview!

Yesterday saw the Evening Standard running a number of anti-Boris articles, primarily the two referred to in my previous two posts.

It could be that the editor and/or Andrew Gilligan had the day off so the journalists who’ve managed to hold on to some integrity felt able to try to do some proper election coverage for once.

It could also be that they’re starting to get a bit nervy about how desperate they’ve been sounding. Certainly the Guardian’s Michael White picked up on this the evening before in his blog, suggesting that they’re hell-bent on a Boris win now not least because they have invested so much of their reputation in ousting Ken Livingstone.

Some newspapers take pride in backing honourable losers. Others only like winners.

It’ll be interesting to see how balanced their coverage continues to be, or not to be, in the remaining couple of weeks of this fierce election campaign.

Boris continued his record of blundering racial offence yesterday by telling an Asian presenter on BBC radio: "You can’t out-ethnic me".

Unfortunately I hadn’t heard that there was to be a three-way debate between the candidates on the BBC Asian Network yesterday morning (perhaps because I’m not Asian and their station advertising is very well targeted? ), but apparently there was, and the relevant part of the transcript reads:

Boris Johnson: Almost 100 years ago my Turkish great-great grandfather came to London and I’m very proud of that.

Presenter Nihal Arthanayake: What part of your Turkish culture do you maintain?

BJ: A lively … interest in Turkey.

NA: How often do you go and see your family?

BJ: It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London.

NA: Did you just find out when you needed it to get the ethnic vote?

BJ: I’m happy to say that lots of Turkish relations have been coming and going in our family for a long time.

NA: Are you down with the ethnics?

BJ: I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me Nihal.

NA: How many bhangra gigs have you been to over the last few years?

BJ: I can’t remember. But my children are a quarter Indian so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

NA: Okay, let’s not try to out-brown each other.

(I’ve taken that from the Evening Standard, which ran a surprising number of anti-Boris pieces yesterday (i.e. any). Their full article on this is here.)

As well as the obvious ‘out-ethnic’ gaffe, and his obvious complete lack of interest in and knowledge of the culture he claims to be so integral to him, I find the comment "It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London" particularly interesting, because of those first three words: "It turns out". That doesn’t sound like the phrasing of someone who’s taken a keen interest into his ethnic heritage throughout his life: it sounds very much like someone who has paid a lackey to do a quick bit of research to try and get more votes.

And of course the most laughably ridiculous bit is him saying "I can’t remember" when asked how many bhangra gigs he’s been to. I’d be prepared to place a large bet on the answer being an all too memorable zero. Strange that that should slip his mind so easily.

Yesterday saw Boris’s minders again having to try to conceal Boris’s real position after he let it slip in a web chat. This time the subject area was the smoking ban.

Surprisingly, the Evening Standard actually ran with this story (did the normal editor have the day off yesterday or something?) pointing out that he was paid £5-10,000 by the Association of Tobacco for a speech last year and now is coming out against the smoking ban – what a coincidence!

His minders have since issued all kinds of twisting ‘clarifications’ trying to mop up the mess. Paul Waugh – again at the Evening Standard! – has a good summary of how the events unfolded.

Brian Paddick has a good turn of phrase:

First of all Boris Johnson says that he will overturn the smoking ban. Then he issues a press release denying that he ever meant what he said. As with his comments on whether or not he snorted cocaine, Johnson continues to drop himself in it and his team have to follow him with a bucket and shovel.

How can Londoners trust someone who has received money from the tobacco industry to be objective about the smoking ban? Most Londoners agree with this initiative. There are two possible explanations for Boris wanting to overturn it: either he is out of touch with Londoners or he is in the pocket of the tobacco industry.

I love that bucket and shovel image. Spot on.

Did I know this was happening? It’s all a bit of a blur. Well, anyway, it is, right now, on ITV1 London.

Review: Well, that was a bit of a waste of time. All previous half-hour debates have been too short to do justice to the issues, so why on earth did the London Tonight team, who had only 25 minutes’ air-time (including a summary of other news), decide that even that wasn’t short enough, and so include a pointless voters’ panel segment?

It was particularly ironic that one of the most vocal people they spoke to on the voters’ panel said that none of the candidates had convinced her at all because "there wasn’t enough detail" about any of their policies. Perhaps if they hadn’t wasted a chunk of their air-time speaking to people like her, the candidates could have fitted in some more detail!

Serious Boris just about held it together. He’s getting slightly better at resisting his selfish urges telling him to interrupt everyone. There was a strange moment when the presenters were throwing to clips of voters in the street asking questions (another time-wasting device) and Boris turned to the camera looking rather annoyed and muttered something, but sadly his microphone was off so I don’t know what that was all about.

But it was basically a rushed mess, so if you missed it through lack of warning from this blog, I make no apology, because you didn’t miss anything worth seeing!

Soumaya Ghannoushi writes on Boris and race relations in yesterday’s Guardian.

What a difference a mayoral race can make. Only two years ago, Johnson’s writings – readily available in the online archives of the Spectator and Daily Telegraph – were peppered with talk of the "paranoia of the Muslim mind", of Islam’s "medievalism", "heartlessness" and "disgusting arrogance". Islamophobia was, he maintained, "a natural reaction" to "any non-Muslim reader of the Qur’an". We must, therefore, dispose of the "first taboo", he counselled, and accept "that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem."

This article gives yet more evidence that Boris is completely inappropriate to lead a multicultural city like London.

Here’s one particularly interesting fact (my emphasis):

Given Johnson’s record on minorities, his endorsement by the far right as a second-preference candidate seems understandable, shocking though it may be. This signifies a worrying precedent in the history of the BNP - notwithstanding Johnson’s claim that he has no wish "to receive a single second-preference vote from a BNP supporter". Never before has the BNP felt sufficiently fond of a mainstream mayoral candidate to lend him or her its support.

And for those who think quotes from Boris on race are ’smears’ being taken ‘out of context’, someone has compiled a load of links to some of the original articles the quotes come from and posted them into the second comment under the article, so you can see for yourself that there’s no contradictory context for them at all.

The choice before Londoners could not be more serious. What is at stake on May 1 is the spirit of this vibrant cosmopolitan city with its unique mix of races and cultures and its vision of itself – nothing less.

For most of the campaign, Dave Hill has been pressing repeatedly for Boris to name the key members of his team if he becomes Mayor, so that people can better judge whether or not he will be sufficiently cosseted by advisers for his managerial incompetence not to be too damaging.

Sadly Boris waited for Dave to go on holiday this week, then on Tuesday finally did announce one person:

A city banker who earned £36m last year will become the first member of Boris Johnson’s team if the Tory is elected mayor of London on May 1. Bob Diamond, who runs Barclays Bank’s investment banking arm

The thing is, this announcement completely negates Boris’s previous claim that he would ‘definitely not’ be naming his team prior to the election (as it would be ‘presumptuous’). By naming one member of the team, he has completely broken his word (hardly a new experience) on this.

Most interesting, though, is the fact that he has gone back on his pledge to keep quiet while only actually naming one member of what would be a large team.

Reading between the lines, what this suggests is that the real story is that for all the time Dave and others have been calling for him to name his team, Boris simply hasn’t been able to find anyone willing to commit to supporting (or rather doing all the work for) a renowned incompetent. So as soon as Mr. Diamond agreed to help, the team were so excited and astounded that they forgot their previous promise not to reveal anyone – despite its most recent airing being only the previous evening at a BBC London debate which didn’t even air until after Diamond’s involvement was announced.

And of course the obvious corollary of this interpretation of the situation is that Bob Diamond is the only person who has so far agreed to be in his team.

He certainly has a dream team all right: that’s ‘dream’ as in ‘imagined, hoped-for fantasy’.

Coming soon to a Jobs page near you…