Sadly I’ve no time to compose a proper post, but I couldn’t leave it until late this evening to point out that the BNP have endorsed Boris as their candidate of choice for their voters’ second preferences.

I think the Tory Troll was first with this news - well spotted, that troll - and Dave Hill’s also covered it since.

I’m not aware of a response from Boris’s team yet, but I assume this wasn’t part of Lynton Crosby’s carefully orchestrated campaign. That’s the trouble with ‘dog-whistle’ tactics: you can’t control exactly which ‘dogs’ prick up their ears at them…

I’m delighted to see that the Guardian have given over the whole of page 3 of today’s paper to the ‘Bottler Boris’ story, calling it “A diary clash, a prior engagement, the wrong issues. Boris Johnson shuns mayoral hustings“. It begins:

It is a crude, if effective, campaign strategy for a frontrunner. Keep your candidate on a tight leash, stop him saying anything controversial and avoid the opposition.

That, it seems, is the theory behind Boris Johnson’s bid to become the mayor of London. Yesterday it emerged he has failed to appear at a series of clashes with rival candidates Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, raising suspicions that the famously gaffe-prone Tory is being protected from himself.

And so it continues, covering the issues involved perfectly. Boris’s team get a couple of lines to restate their strongly disputed reason for his absence from tonight’s hustings, but their words sound just as hollow in print as they did in the light of Time Out’s rebuttal yesterday.

The piece also carries an interesting profile of Lynton Crosby, Boris’s campaign strategist, who’s even more objectionable than I thought (which takes some doing):

He was accused of running “wedge” campaigns which divided voters by focusing on emotive issues such as abortion and immigration. A 2001 campaign advert suggested, falsely, that a shipload of refugees had thrown their children overboard in an attempt to enter Australia. He is said to advocate “push polling” - phoning voters on the pretext of conducting a poll and then spreading damaging rumours about a rival candidate.

Sounds like he’d be quite at home campaigning with the BNP, given his favoured tactics and indeed issues.

So, read this article, enjoy it, then click “Send to a friend” to pass on the news. The anti-Boris backlash, after weeks of him getting an easy ride in the media, starts now!

Jason points out in a comment on the previous post that Janet Street-Porter was taken aback when Boris turned up to be interviewed by her for Marie Claire, accompanied by a nanny figure, sent to ensure he didn’t put his foot in it.

he arrived with a female minder in tow, who wanted to sit in on our interview and record it - something that none of the stars I have interviewed for Marie Claire - from Annie Lennox to David Walliams to Dawn and Jennifer - have ever requested. I refused and sent her off for a coffee; she was obviously there to make sure Boris didn’t put his foot in it. He was unbelievably cautious… and kept saying there were personal things he couldn’t talk about!

The Boris campaign is pursuing a deeply cynical strategy, masterminded by Lynton Crosby, the Australian specialist best remembered in the UK for his particularly nasty 2005 election campaign for Michael Howard, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” (Fortunately, most of the electorate weren’t: the campaign focussed on irresponsibly increasing fear of crime, among other unsavoury methods.)

The strategy here is to ride on a wave of anti-Ken sentiment (primarily whipped up by Evening Standard journalist Andrew Gilligan, whose career was saved by Boris offering him a job at his magazine when Gilligan left the BBC in disgrace) by doing two simple things:

1. Being the most likely candidate to have a chance of deposing Ken (inevitable when you’re both the joke/protest vote receptacle and the candidate for one of the two main parties);
2. Making sure that no serious analytical attention is focussed on your own candidate at all, and your candidate doesn’t say or do anything offensive or controversial.

Of course, I say these are simple things, but number 2 is pretty difficult when your candidate is Boris, one of the most gaffe-prone politicians in living memory. So they’re just keeping his profile as low as possible, avoiding any public appearances that aren’t carefully stage-managed.

Hence the no-shows for Any Questions? and Time Out, the repeated refusal to take part in a TV debate between the main candidates, and the ‘nanny’ accompanying him to interviews to hold his feet firmly out of his mouth.

London is in grave danger of sleepwalking into a Boris Mayoralty. Wake up and smell the whiff of fishy campaign tactics, fellow Londoners!