Dave Hill blogs from his Cornish retreat:

this reminded me of Pippa Crerar’s recent blog on the subject of Johnson’s apparent acknowledgement of his coke use to Janet Street-Porter and subsequent denials that he’d done such a thing. She gently pointed out that, "Boris was sacked from the Tory frontbench by former Tory leader Michael Howard in 2004 not for having an affair, but for failing to tell the truth about it." Frankly, I couldn’t give a hoot or toot if Boris powdered his nose illegally when aged 19 - after all, I did and look what a terrific fellow I’ve turned out to be - and wouldn’t blame him if he’d fibbed about it later. But just imagine if the Evening Standard was conducting a vendetta against Johnson rather than against Livingstone. We’d hear of nothing but denials and evasions and insinuations of profound untrustworthiness from now until polling day.

He’s right, of course, but that’s the Evening "Double" Standard for you.

And, because we are running a vendetta against Boris Johnson, of sorts, I feel I would be neglecting my duty were I not to take this opportunity to point out that Boris is evidently a liar and therefore should certainly not be trusted with running London, etc etc.

I had something else Dave Hill-related to blog about tonight but time has slipped away from me. Tomorrow will have to suffice. He won’t mind: he’s on holiday.

As seen on BBC London this evening, a person in the street captured on a mobile phone Boris admitting that his foolhardy Routemaster plans would in fact cost around £100m, not the £8m he’s been claiming for weeks.

He even claims it on tonight’s BBC London debate, which was only recorded last night. Are we really to believe that they finally did some sums between then and today when this video was taken – or is this evidence of him saying one thing on the ground and another in the media?

BBC London also had some footage from inside what we have decided to call Boris’s Blunderbus (the Routemaster he’s been campaigning from), where Boris could be seen looking worried as he received a serious grilling about what he had said to whom. It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for him: he looked like a schoolboy receiving a dressing-down for forgetting his lines in a school play. It was certainly a good insight into how under the thumb of his minders he is.

Just ten minutes until the BBC London TV debate on BBC One – don’t forget it, but don’t hold your breath for any major gaffes (other than his refusal to admit the bus figure he admitted today).

If you click through to just one link from this blog, make it this one.

if you or your friends and family haven’t registered yet, you need to do so now. You cannot register after this Wednesday, so you need to stop putting it off and do so today.

Register to Vote at London Elects

-Registration ends on Wednesday-

It’s vital to get turnout up because, as The Tory Troll explains in the linked post, Team Boris are relying on keeping turnout as low as possible. So please do register if you haven’t already, and do share this advice with anyone you know too.

I was going to arrange to send a similar message to the members of the Stop Boris group on Facebook, but sadly the group has reached the arbitrary membership level at which Facebook no longer lets its administrators send messages to its members. Quite why there is a need for such a level, I don’t know: if you join a group, you are surely interested in receiving information about it. Apparently Facebook thinks otherwise.

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.

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.

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?

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…

Apparently some people might not think that the Stop Boris blog would have provided an accurate and impartial take on last night’s Newsnight debate, for some reason. Honestly, next you’ll be saying the Evening Standard can’t be trusted to provide balanced coverage of the election campaign.

The account posted here last night is not exactly contradicted elsewhere on the internet though, and not just by anti-Boris types.

It’s particularly interesting to have a read through some of the comments on Iain Dale’s miserable coverage. (Presumably part of the reason for his grumpiness is that his party’s candidate for Mayor had just been exposed as a useless idiot!)

Some of the highlights from the comments are:

Sadly and very surprisingly though, Boris was crap - I mean just really REALLY bad. He had verbal dioreha, was blabbing on and saying nothing cohessive, speaking way too fast, unable/unwilling to answer the question on the cost of new routemasters (bad briefing), which was reminiscent of Paxman’s eviscertation of Micheal Howard!

If he had used his wit it owuld have been better.

I thought he was going to walk it!

Shabolic performance by Boris and I agree with Iain’s analysis of old “What’s his name?” (the Liberal Democrat candidate. Ken was relaxed but none of them was able tog et a word in edge ways. Someone tell Boris to stop interrupting!!!!!

If, like me, you have grave misgivings about leaving London in the hands of an arrogant Trotskyite berk then you would do the sensible thing and vote for the candidate most likely to oust the git. That would be Bojo. The trouble is - he’s shit. On tonight’s evidence this city would be in the hands of a bumbling, rambling, clueless(if likeable) nitwit.
Stop waffling on about bloody bendy buses, please! What’s he on about now, Routemasters? WTF???
Very depressing. Poor old London. It deserves much, much better.

Johnson reminded me of a graduate in his first ever job interview and he hadn’t done a stroke of preparation. Lamentable

The Tories dug their own grave by appointing BoJo. I almost wish they had s erious candidate, as I dislike Leavingsoon as much as anyone.

Boris Johnson came over as a lightweight joke. Why on earth did the Tories choose him? He bumbled his way through the whole event.

Boris was by far and away the worst. And Paxman actually showed how unmanageable the clown actually is. […]

Boris would be a disaster for London. Slippery, wet, dangerously vague, bullshitter.

Boris was just an embarassment. As a Tory, I don’t know who to vote for now. Why didn’t he prepare?

Andrew Sparrow on the Guardian’s Politics Blog has further coverage, and links to further coverage still. Dave Hill, as seen on BBC London this evening, has a brief response to Newsnight too, while Dave Cole goes into more depth.

Alternatively, rather than relying on everyone else’s coverage, you could just watch it for yourself. Here are two useful links, depending on how much time you have to spare:

• Two minutes: Paxman despairs at Boris’s bendy bus blathering
• 32 minutes: the whole thing (in RealPlayer format)

Enjoy – and let us know what you think. Will the polls continue to slip (slightly) away from Boris if he keeps up these performances?

P.S. Liberal Conspiracy have a similar, shorter but better lip-sync’ed video of the Boris bus blathering on their home page at the moment. Apologies to them for the fact that the StopBoris.org spam filter meant I didn’t see their e-mail telling me this until three hours after they sent it!

PoliticalBetting.com has some interesting coverage of the details of today’s YouGov poll for the Evening Standard, which again shows an extraordinary lead for Boris. They have him on 49%, to Ken’s 36% and Brian’s 10%.

Particularly interesting are the figures around the one singled out by YouGov’s Peter Kellner in response to criticism – or at least questioning – of his methods. Kellner says:

To my mind, the key fact in this campaign so far is that around one-in-five people who “generally speaking” think of themselves as Labour say they would vote for Boris Johnson. If Livingstone can get most of this group to return to the fold (plus do better on second preferences), he might still win; if he can’t, he loses.

The figures showing how people seeing themselves as generally supporting a particular political party intend to vote are indeed interesting.

What we can see from them are how Boris is doing so well: he’s somehow managed to lure over people who usually support other parties to vote for him instead.

Of course, most Conservatives (86%) intend to vote for him. The 14% who don’t are of course the only ones who have realised what a dangerous idea for their party making Boris their most powerful representative in the country is, and we can only hope that between now and 1 May some more of the 86% majority will see the light too!

Perhaps more surprising is that a fairly large 22% of people who normally support Labour intend to vote for Boris. Quite why anyone of a left-wing persuasion would want to support a nasty, selfish right-winger who’s spent the past 20 years pandering to upper-middle-class Daily Telegraph readers’ prejudices through his often offensive regular column is beyond me. Indeed, the idea that anyone who normally supports Labour could possibly think that Boris Johnson will have the first clue about how to address their social justice priorities would be laughable, were the danger of our great capital sleepwalking into four long years of an incompetent Boris Mayoralty not so threatening.

The final column of these figures is especially interesting, and must be bitterly disappointing to Brian Paddick. When asked who they would be voting for, the 114 people who identified themselves as Liberal Democrat supporters answered in the following proportions: Ken 24%, Brian 31%, Boris 40%. One third more Liberal Democrats intend to vote for Boris than for Brian.

Again, I’m rather at a loss to explain this. From what I’ve seen of Brian’s pronouncements, he hasn’t done anything to alienate the more right-leaning side of his party: opposing the £25 CO₂ charge using rhetoric about it penalising ‘family cars’, for instance, should have easily kept them on board, I would have thought. So is it the moderate Lib Dems, or the left-leaning Lib Dems who are abandoning their own candidate and turning to Boris? Brian seems competent and articulate; why desert him for a bumbling buffoon who would make London a laughing stock?

What seems clear from these figures, assuming they are broadly accurate, is that Boris is the only main candidate who is currently managing to keep nearly all his party’s supporters on side. Both Ken, and to an even more alarming extent Brian, are seeing some of their own parties’ supporters crashing other parties, particularly Boris’s.

So if you know anyone who you think you can rely on to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat, and therefore haven’t bothered mentioning StopBoris.org to them, or checking they’ve registered to vote, there’s no time like the present to get them on board.

If Boris is elected Mayor on 1 May, the people who’ve crashed his party will find themselves waking up the morning after with a terrible hangover, wondering why they ever left their own party behind as they look on in horror at the four-year-long fallout of the night before. We need to get people to reach that realisation as soon as possible now, so that they return safely to their own parties before the election!

No, I don’t really. But that is the title of this amusing video, first spotted by Conservative blogger Iain Dale:

While I can see this actually going down well with a certain type of Boris-supporter (primarily the ‘I don’t usually vote, but I know that Boris bloke off the telly and he seems a laugh’ type), I think it’s safe to assume the titular sentiments are ironic.

According to Sam Coates of Times Online, the Boris campaign team hate it, so that’s a good enough reason for me to post it on this blog, anyway

The Times mentions suspicions about the video, in a news item:

The Livingstone campaign denies any connection to the video, made by a group which calls itself TRSG. The high production standards have raised suspicions that the video has been financed professionally.

Unfortunately, as we’ve experienced ourselves at StopBoris.org, if you oppose Boris and have half-decent standards in what you produce, people are very quick to decide that you must have been funded by the Livingstone campaign.

These days you need very little in the way of budget or equipment to meet reasonable production standards. Thanks to a donated domain and webspace from a sympathetic (but otherwise unrelated) party, StopBoris.org has been put together on a budget of £0.00, for instance.

Making a video does require some expenditure beyond making a web site, but not a great deal. It still mostly comes down to whether you can be bothered to invest a bit of time in something, and what sort of standards you’re prepared to settle for when you do.

(After all, last year a musician-cum-journalist showed how little you could make and promote a pop record for using modern technology, and his project included a very professional-looking music video which was at one point YouTube’s most watched in the world. And one of his biggest costs was a licence to film in Westminster – not something I suspect the Boris-fancier will have bothered applying for.)

We didn’t have to code StopBoris.org to meet Web Accessibility Initiative standards or use valid XHTML, but we did because we believe in those things as a minimum standard for any web site.

Ultimately, we didn’t even have to set up a web site, or a blog: we didn’t have to do anything, because we’re not being employed (or leant on, or encouraged) by anyone to do anything.

So on balance I reckon ‘I think I fancy Boris’ has indeed been made by a lone maverick, or a handful of mavericks, putting a few days’ work into something in the hope of affecting the Blond Buffoon’s chances.

One reason I believe this is that it was posted onto YouTube by someone who’s been a member for several months and posted two previous, completely unrelated, equally off-the-wall videos, made to a similarly decent standard, suggesting that this is just what he gets up to as a hobby from time to time.

I’m sure that won’t stop people digging to find out whether there is any evidence linking him to Ken Livingstone’s campaign but, assuming there isn’t any, I hope the apparent lack of a link might convince people that sometimes, there really are some of us who are just campaigning against Boris of our own volition, in our own time, without any link to any other candidate’s campaign, and without any financial reward.

Because not having to see the city we love suffering four long years of a Boris Johnson Mayoralty would be a perfectly adequate reward in itself.

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.

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!

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.