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)…

Not sure how I missed this - it’s only taken six months for me to stumble across it!

Boris Johnson illegally using his mobile phone while driving.

(Of course, he has also been seen on his phone while cycling, but that’s just risky and stupid, not illegal.)

I wonder if he advocates a zero tolerance approach to all criminal behaviour on the roads, or only that of his boss?

I’ve heard much about the article in today’s Evening Standard which states that Boris is “holding secret talks with potential executives to run City Hall” if he becomes Mayor, but unfortunately the Standard’s web site appears to me to be down at the moment (long may it continue) so I can’t read it for myself.

What I can do is link to a MayorWatch article with a headline of the “Pope: ‘I am Catholic’” variety: Labour: ‘Boris isn’t up to the job’. Hardly a surprise that Labour might think that, but it sounds like this story certainly does lend itself to this interpretation.

The report claims senior Tories are concerned that a badly run capital would have an adverse impact on David Cameron’s chances of winning the next General Election.

Speaking this afternoon Tessa Jowell MP, Minister for London, said […] “David Cameron is asking Londoners to elect someone he is determined won’t be allowed to exercise power.”

Rumour has long had it that Cameron never expected that Boris would actually end up winning the Mayoralty, and now he’s the clear front-runner it’s understandable that he might be nervous about the impact on the Conservative party’s reputation. The General Election is widely expected not to be held until May 2010 now, which would give voters more than enough time to see what an atrocious buffoon the party has put forward for Mayor of London, potentially damaging the party’s credibility.

So Cameron - who, it should be acknowledged, Boris’s team have denied “is directly involved” in the discussions (presumably in the same way as Gordon Brown was never “directly involved” in those regular attempts to destabilise Tony Blair’s premiership) - has now had to enter damage limitation mode rather hastily and endeavour to find people with the skills Boris so obviously lacks, like, er, pretty much all the skills needed to run London.

Heh, I’ve just realised - does this story remind you of any particular Stop Boris poster? We hadn’t realised any of them would come quite so literally true, quite so quickly.

Earlier this evening I was watching a recording of Boris rambling and talking over an unimpressive interviewer on BBC London.

The interview dated back to last November, and it was the Boris we know and fear. Bumbling and incompetent, he would shout down his interviewer to finish whatever meandering point he was stumbling towards at the time, no matter how unworthwhile the point turned out to be. It was less cringe-making than his interview on the Andrew Marr show in February, but only because the interviewer was not a hard-hitter and just let him walk all over her rather than challenging him. Marr desperately tried to maintain some kind of coherence in his interview and looked like he didn’t know whether to cry, laugh or just smack Boris around the head by the end of it, as Marr inched ever closer to the edge of his seat to plead desperately for Boris to reach the end of his sentence.

Anyway, by a strange coincidence, less than an hour later I was watching Boris on this evening’s BBC London programme, being interviewed by the same presenter as before. I could have suffered from a sense of déjà vu, were it not for the fact that Boris has had one hell of a makeover in the past few weeks.

Looking at the date of that Andrew Marr appearance, I wonder if that was the straw that broke the Conservative camel’s back, actually. Cameron and co must surely have been watching that through the gaps between their fingers, egging on the clock towards the end of the programme, and really must have been thinking, “This can’t go on.”

And so it seems they determined it wouldn’t. Boris has been told to stop drinking completely until after 1 May, and has clearly spent what time his friends in the media let him have out of the spotlight being intensively coached in being a politician, rather than a clown.

Of course, there is no substance underneath the new exterior. Tonight’s interview was notable, like Boris’s manifesto, for how little information was actually imparted through it. If lesson number one was “Don’t be a clown”, lesson number two was evidently “Don’t tell anyone anything about what you’ll actually do if you’re Mayor”. Very politician-like, but not very helpful to anyone who wants to pick a candidate based on policies. Which is of course perfect for a campaign with no worthwhile policies to offer.

The trouble for London is that, if elected, Boris won’t be able to stay off the drink for four years, he won’t be able to keep the serious politician act up for four years, and he won’t be able to avoid making policy decisions and doing the serious business of being Mayor of London for four years. So don’t fall for the current “I’m serious after all” act: what you saw in November, or even in February, is what we would get in Mayor Boris, not the character he was acting out tonight.

Just seen a great report on Channel 4 News (I assume the video will be added to that rather thin page at some point). The Daily Mirror filmed David Cameron cycling through red traffic lights and performing various other misdemeanours.

Quite amusing (not to mention annoying for those of us who obey the rules when we cycle but are given a bad name by the minority who don’t!), but Boris got himself a bit tangled up when Channel 4’s reporter caught up with him at Borough Market.

He said there should be zero tolerance for cyclists breaking the road traffic regulations, slipping into one of his plethora of pre-prepared bland lines (which seem to be his main tactic against the risk of coming out with a blunder - well, that and the fact that he’s been ordered to stay off the drink for a couple of months).

For once (good old Channel 4 News), the reporter actually followed up on what he’d just said, asking what his zero tolerance approach meant he thought about his party leader’s misbehaviour. For the first time in a while (thanks to a combination of the aforementioned tactics and hitherto woeful journalistic scrutiny), Boris was visibly flustered, and paused for a moment, before coming out with the hopeless riposte: “Show me the evidence!”

The report immediately cut to the Mirror’s footage again.

I do hope Channel 4 News does a lot more coverage of the Mayoral election in the coming weeks.