Sky News are really going to town for what will be the final televised debate of the campaign, just three days before the polls come to a close:

Decision Time: The London Debate will see Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick slug it out live from 8pm just three days before polling.

Sky’s political editor Adam Boulton will chair the debate, and more than 500 people will be at Cadogan Hall in central London to watch the action first-hand.

Coverage begins at 7.30pm with Decision Time: The London Debate Unplugged.

Sky’s Martin Stanford and a panel of experts will let you know what to look out for and size up the campaign so far.

Unplugged will continue on Sky News Active and online during the TV ad breaks and for an hour after the end of the debate at 9pm.

The panel will include a range of political bloggers, sadly not including me. I mean, I’d've worn a disguise and asked for my voice to be digitally altered, so perhaps their budget wouldn’t have stretched to it, but really, you’d think they’d've asked, wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately some personal and family commitments may well mean I won’t get to watch this until late Tuesday evening, which is rather frustrating, particularly as I’m not sure how easily I could record the ‘Active’ stuff. Hopefully Dave Hill and the Tory Troll will be able to sort you out with some coverage of the debate in the mean time.

Dave agrees, in some detail, with our assessment of the Times’s unconvincing pro-Boris leader.

He also agrees with us about the Sunday Times’s similar leader today.

Martin from Mayorwatch’s comment about the Times one is also good:

I love the subheading

"Two terms is enough for Livingstone. Johnson should be allowed his chance"

it’s just insane to suggest that democracy is best served by voters being told they can’t elect the same person person three times (not sure that was the Times line when Maggie won three elections) and that offices should pass to new holders on a ‘his turn now’ basis.

Absolutely. Please, for goodness’ sake, this Thursday, think about how you’re voting and use your votes in a sensible way, not based on ridiculous statements like "time for a change"!

Over on Dave Hill’s blog, Tom from Blairwatch has exposed a couple more ‘astroturfers’ working for the Conservative party, trying to spread pro-Boris sentiment around the blogosphere by pretending to be ordinary members of the public talking him up in comments. Their mistake there was to post pretty much the same ‘on-message’ material to more than one blog, and elsewhere to have rather different positions on things in different contexts.

We had our own plague of these dishonest idiots ourselves a while back, of whom the Tory Troll chronicled our exposure.

It’s hardly a surprise that someone called ‘Labourboy’ should suggest Boris would not be a good Mayor, but it is an interesting point he makes, that the media appear to be setting the bar far lower for Boris the clown than they would be for anyone else.

Of course it is a minor miracle that he’s managed to go so many months without any major gaffes, but he has said a few moderately ill-advised things, and more to the point he certainly hasn’t said anything that would qualify anyone else to be taken seriously as a Mayoral contender. Like, you know, some properly thought-through policies, or evidence of relevant experience for managing an £11bn budget and 105,000 staff.

There’s a general consensus on a large number of blogs that last night’s Question Time debate was a huge let-down. As Dave Hill says:

I was disappointed. Several policy areas fundamental to the mayoralty - housing, transport and the environment - went completely unexamined. I sincerely believe we’ve gone over the Al-Qaradawi and "watermelon smiles" territory quite often enough and there were too many questions on the emotive subjects of crime, race and immigration. Perhaps the QT team was worried about being too London-centric, but I thought the emphasis was wrong.

As someone looking forward to seeing Boris’s policies exposed as the hollow shams they are on live national TV, I can only agree! There was minimal focus on policy detail, which is what matters in the end.

Liberal Conspiracy have another take on the show:

The BBC1 Question Time special last night, featuring “the three main London mayoral candidates”, was as depressing a tit-for-tat charade as I’ve seen for some time. The ratio of insult to fact or argument was far, far too high.

Their blogger is particularly disappointed by Brian Paddick, but that doesn’t change our tactical voting advice! He does come on to Boris at the end though:

As for Boris Johnson, well it’s hardly any news that he is a complete buffoon, but his performance was shockingly bad. Tory or not, how anyone can consider backing him (other than as a childish prank or a cipher for the return of county squire politics) is astonishing. The final questioner of the evening noted that he couldn’t even figure out how to answer a question without getting into a mental scramble. But he fluffed that one, too.

As do some of the commenters:

there are no positive reasons for Boris to get the job, while Ken’s record has plenty. It’s quite the oddest election campaign I’ve ever seen, since it seems to be run solely in order for a newspaper editor to revenge herself on an elected politician who pissed her off, without any thought that there’s actually a large city to be run at the end of it.

So what did we here at Stop Boris make of the programme?

To be honest I think Question Time was such a big let-down that it’s barely worth me writing about it, particularly when the above quotes are all spot on, so I’ll keep my additional thoughts brief.

This was the umpteenth televised mayoral debate and Boris still hasn’t got the hang of taking turns to speak, since he’s so self-absorbed and self-centred that he has no concept of other people’s right to be heard. Brian Paddick got huge applause when he told him to "shut up and let somebody else speak for once!" (quoted from memory), and I’ve seen mixed reactions to this outburst online but he’s had to put up with seeing Boris in even more debates than I have, and frankly I don’t blame him at all for finally snapping!

What Boris has got better at with practice is sticking to his cynical brief, but that means he still doesn’t properly answer questions or tell anyone any details about his policies. His cynical brief is to spout brief, hollow, scripted lines about issues (primarily crime), then turn around whatever has been asked of him into an opportunity to attack the incumbent Mayor, Ken Livingstone.

And so it was that last night we saw him turning everything into an attack on Ken as quickly as possible, and heard almost no information about Boris’s own plans. It was particularly noticeable in the final, ‘off-the-wall’ question: which type of food would each candidate say best represented his leadership style? There is no way on earth that any normal person would turn this into an attack on someone else, but somehow Boris attempted to do so, having barely touched on an answer about himself, to cries of derision from most people in the studio.

In the end, under significant pressure to answer the question for once, he mumbled some nonsense about Tesco Value cornflakes, which certainly sounds about right: they’re all right if you’re primarily concerned with cutting expenditure (as Boris is on instigating big police cutbacks, for instance), but the results aren’t quite as good as ‘proper’ cornflakes (hence his complete lack of targets on crime reduction) and you can’t help feeling you’ve bought into a pale imitation of the real thing (for ‘the real thing’ read ‘a competent politician’). Perhaps he was on to something there with his one unscripted answer of the evening, after all.

It seems the colourful character protruding from the front of the book Ken took to the Time Out hustings isn’t the only puppet called Boris.

The Tory Troll’s analysis of today’s in-depth Boris coverage in the Guardian is spot on. Among the revelations:

Boris Johnson was effectively chosen as the Tory candidate by The Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley.

Boris’ minders are being paid on a commission basis. The fewer the gaffes, the higher the pay.

Boris admits that even he is intimidated by his minders.

Lynton Crosby is paying a PR company to ’round on journalists who fail to portray Johnson in a flattering light.’ Hmm does that sound familiar to you?

It all gives further evidence of how tightly managed Boris is being at the moment, which is all very well for a campaign but can’t possibly last for four years, particularly not when his Crosby-imposed drinking ban will end after the election. So we’re being asked to elect someone we won’t actually be served by in office if he wins. How dishonest; how Crosby.

(Don’t forget, Lynton Crosby’s renowned for his BNP-like campaign tactics of simply saying whatever it takes to get elected, no matter how untrue it may be: when working in Australia he falsely claimed that immigrants had thrown their children overboard from a boat, in order to stir up anti-immigrant feeling and get his right-wing employer elected. It worked.)

The front-page Guardian article (the first one of the two linked above) details how Boris has raised (and presumably spent) about a million pounds, most of it going on campaigning in the outer boroughs. The mayoral election spending limit is £400,000, but Team Boris spent a small fortune before the official campaign period kicked in, so they’ve been able to get around that restriction without too much difficulty. I seem to remember reading that Ken has struggled to raise even as much as the spending limit.

Will Boris manage to buy the election? It depends which opinion poll is right, really – a new one came out today suggesting a lead for Ken, but Boris had that same lead in a poll on Monday, and several other polls have shown just a handful of votes between them, in both directions. The result really could go either way, and every single vote counts, so it’s vital that we make the best use of our votes to stop Boris!

Boris just can’t help himself.

Hot on the heels of an ITV appearance in which he insultingly accused an audience member of making up an accurate news story, and suggested he could cut crime on buses by 100%, Boris was today slammed by a crime expert for claiming that "everyone" in Islington has been burgled.

The Tory Troll post linked above points out that this is part of a long-running trend of gross exaggeration, instilling fear in voters with an aim to drive them to vote for him.

But when Boris is the only one of the three candidates not promising to cut crime by at least 6% per year for the next four years, this is a bizarre leap of logic.

Boris has no targets on crime at all, and a Freudian slip on ITV suggests he knows he will be cutting funding for the police so they would have no chance of hitting any targets he set anyway!

Boris’s manifesto is the least impressive on crime, but his rhetoric is also the most full of exaggerated claims and outright lies about how dangerous a place London is.

If his claims were true, he’d be the last person anyone should vote for to fix the problem; and if they’re not true, why should anyone vote for a proven liar who denigrates the city he wants to lead by labelling it as some sort of crime-ridden hell on earth?

I’ve just discovered that our campaign song/video has found its way into a competition.

If anyone wants to vote for it, or indeed for one of the others (we’re not precious), please do!

P.S. This appears to be a Labour bloggers’ competition so for clarity – particularly given something I’ll be posting later this evening about how best to use votes to stop Boris – I should just mention that we didn’t put forward our video for this competition ourselves and are not a ‘Labour blog’.

Ah, gaffophobia, how we’ve missed you. What was for a brief time our own home-grown Googlewhack seemed to have been swept somewhat under the carpet in a piece of meta-calculation by Boris’s minders, reasoning that once it had reached a full-page article on page 3 of a national newspaper, his non-appearance had started to become the negative story they were trying to avoid by keeping him away from things in the first place!

So soon enough they started putting him forward for TV debates and hustings and all the things he’d previously been pulling out of. Indeed there have been so many TV appearances it’s been hard to keep up with them all! (There’s another in 25 minutes on ITV1 London, by the way.)

But this weekend Boris’s minders were reminded why they’d been pulling him out of things in the first place. At the Stonewall hustings he was humiliated and ridiculed over his offensive remarks comparing gay marriage to bestiality.

So after that, what happened today? Only a short time before the event, Boris finally confirmed he wouldn’t be taking part in a hustings at the University of London Union.

This brings us full circle: the Time Out hustings were held at ULU a few weeks ago, and it was Boris’s no-show for that event that propelled the gaffophobia of his minders into the public consciousness.

It seems he has a fear of students, which is bizarre given how many of them have set up Boris-loving groups over on Facebook. Presumably he’s only scared of politically engaged students, since it’s the apathetic ones who think the election is a laugh that he’s counting on the votes of. Let’s hope they think it’s so much of a laugh that they don’t bother going out to vote.

Wes Streeting, President-elect of the National Union of Students, speaking in a personal capacity said:

"It’s a shame Boris Johnson’s minders won’t let him face a student audience. We were looking forward to challenging his reactionary views on everything from tackling racism and advancing LGBT equality to climate change and war."

Boris Johnson chickens out of student hustings – what is he scared of?, KenLivingstone.com

I realise that is taken from his main rival’s web site, but in the interest of balance I just checked Boris’s web site and can find no mention at all of his chickening out of this debate – not even a lame excuse like we were offered for him missing the Time Out one.

In the mean time, by a happy coincidence, a couple of people have contacted us to point out a new video on YouTube highlighting Boris’s fear of scrutiny. Enjoy!

Dave Hill’s been determined to find out who’ll be in Boris’s team, if he becomes Mayor, for a long time, and today he reports that at last some others have begun asking the same thing.

He raises a point that someone e-mailed to me after I posted about Bob Diamond: Diamond and the subsequently named handful of others involved in administering his Mayor’s Fund (wherein Boris crosses his fingers and hopes businesses will give to needy groups so he doesn’t have to) are, as Dave says, "a side issue". (Apologies to the person who e-mailed me about this last week and hoped I’d blog about it then. Time got away from me – something to do with spending every spare moment for five days making a video, I suppose…)

The point here is that he hasn’t revealed anyone who’ll be doing any of the real, important work of the office of Mayor of London. One can only assume that his silence on this issue is because he simply hasn’t got anyone lined up. Who’d want to commit to working for someone of such widely renowned world-beating incompetence, who changes his mind more often than he combs his hair, and has no hands-on managerial experience at all?

I wouldn’t want to work for him, not that I imagine I’m about to get a job offer. (Except perhaps in advising a future campaign team on maintaining their anonymity more successfully.) Would you?

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

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.

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.

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…

Those of you looking at our YouTube channel may have spotted a video called “Ken Livingstone for London” appearing in our Favo[u]rites, and thought “Hah! This campaign does support Ken after all!”. So I thought I’d better explain why I’ve added it.

The video, apparently made by an ‘anon Ken admirer’, contrasts Ken’s handling of that extraordinary 48 hours in July 2005 which I’m sure most Londoners can still vividly remember, with the idea of Boris trying to cope with similar events.

The Tory Troll has written about this video too, so have a read of what he had to say, but the reason it’s appeared in the Stop Boris favourites is that the point the video is making is valid regardless of the competition for Boris. Yes, Ken handled it really well, but I’m sure there are other politicians who would have done too. The key point here is that Boris is obviously, definitely, clearly not one of them.

So, with that in mind, here’s the video: