This was the first of a number of televised three-way debates in the coming weeks, including a BBC London one next week and culminating with a Question Time special the week after that.

Boris’s opening speech was read out fairly competently, but he did keep having to suppress that smirk of his.

It was all downhill from there for him though, once the debate proper began.

Slippage

He did his best to hold in place the mask that Lynton Crosby has worked hard to cultivate on Boris over the past few months – the mask of a proper, competent politician – but there was no way this idiot could keep it in place over the course of a full half-hour.

So we saw it slipping to reveal parts of the old, bumbling Boris, who had no grasp of the figures, and indeed barely any grasp of how to construct a sentence: for instance, he told us that if issued with an ID card, he would

grind it up and eat it on my children’s cornflakes

which seems a bit mean to his children, who will presumably be left to go hungry. (Not to mention hazardous to his health – although he’s more renowned for snorting ground-up hazardous substances than eating them, of course.)

Boris also informed us that the people watching Newsnight are its “readers”.

Experience

One of the early wins for the other candidates was when Brian called his bluff on his much-trumpeted line about being the only one of the three with any experience of running a private organisation: Brian got his retaliation in first by turning it round on Boris, saying that the only management experience he had was managing a tiny organisation of about 20 people! Boris stammered his way to a mumbled correction of this but could only take it up to “at least 50 people”, which didn’t exactly make Brian’s point any weaker, when the job of Mayor involves managing 105,000 people!

Bus black hole

It was, as expected, his grasp of figures where Boris really came unstuck, though, particularly in relation to the legendary bus black hole.

Jeremy Paxman became increasingly frustrated by Boris’s apparent attempt to filibuster away the question of the cost of his hare-brained bendy-bus replacement scheme, by simply talking on, and on, and on, and on, and on, without really saying anything informative at all.

(In fact, Paxman gave him one minute and 47 seconds to come up with a figure, which is quite some time on live TV. In total, Paxman asked Boris 15 times to clarify his policy in this area, and in fact the last 12 of those times are straightforward pleading for the cost of the buses. It was like that classic Michael Howard interview – “Did you threaten to overrule him?” – all over again!)

Essentially, we were back to the good old days of the Andrew Marr Show interview, when Boris simply couldn’t answer what he was being asked and Marr literally found himself on the edge of his seat with exasperation at trying to get him to finish a sentence (preferably by actually answering what he had been asked).

Likewise, Paxman moved ever closer to the podium on which the three candidates were standing, begging Boris to give him a figure, but none was forthcoming. For a moment I thought Paxman might mount the stage and give him a slap, but sadly it didn’t quite come to that!

In the end, with extraordinary cheek – not to mention a revealing implicit admission about his arch-rival’s superior grasp of figures – Boris turned to Ken and asked him how much Ken’s bus plan would be costing, on the basis that he thought his own would cost a similar amount!

Spoilt

Even after all that, Boris still wouldn’t shut up, suddenly interrupting Brian (who had moved on to talking about trams) to ask to be allowed to say one more thing about his beloved uncosted buses. Paxman slapped him down thus:

No! No you can’t! You’ve said quite enough without enlightening us with a figure! You have a think about it: give us a figure and you can talk again.

Boris still continued to try to make his point as his microphone was faded out, providing evidence of the spoilt temperament that Janet Street-Porter hints at in her Marie Claire interview with him.

In that interview she suggests that people never say ‘no’ to him, and he is very uncomfortable and unsure how to respond. Tonight we saw the result of someone who’s spent his life surrounded by yes-men, underlings and hero-worshippers: a tendency to interrupt and talk over others repeatedly, and to assume that he was the most important person in the room.

This was clearly noticeable at the very end of the debate, when the debate’s allotted time on the programme had expired. Paxman held up his hand to signal to them to stop whichever bit of bickering was ongoing at the time.

Boris: Can I just say…?

Jeremy: No, I’m afraid, I’m very sorry, you can’t.

Boris: Why not?

Jeremy: [Somewhat taken aback by the question] Because we’re out of time!

“Why not?”? What kind of question is that? It was obvious to everyone else that their time was up, but apparently if Boris thinks what he has to say is important, it won’t do for anyone to try to stop him saying it.

A vote for Boris is a vote for a spoilt, incompetent and bumbling man with no relevant experience or grasp of the figures. For London’s sake, please vote for someone else.

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.

As I tried to get to sleep last night, the penny dropped about just how calculated today’s Sunday Telegraph front page and accompanying interview really are.

These are no ordinary articles. To call them journalism would be insulting to reporters up and down the country who spend their days trying to get to the truth.

What these articles give is a carefully calculated platform in which to rebut – sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously – all the most serious allegations raised by campaigns like ours at StopBoris.org over the past few weeks and months.

Once you start analysing it, it’s clear that the writing of this article was not approached as an opportunity by a journalist to profile honestly a candidate their newspaper’s readers might have been thinking of voting for. This article was approached with a checklist of points to rebut and suggestions of how to rebut them.

Can this really be true, I hear you cry. Yes, it can: Lynton Crosby leaves no stone unturned in his campaigns and will manipulate every last detail of his candidates’ media coverage, if the media let him. Of course, Boris worked for the Telegraph for 20 years so there’s no doubt he’d be able to call in a favour or two there if he wanted to. On today’s evidence, he wants to.

So let’s have a look at a likely checklist of things the article needed to rebut, and some quotes from the article which by an amazing coincidence address those points perfectly.

The right-hand column of the above table contains about 75% of the main interview article.

And of course, don’t overlook how little truth the Telegraph’s lawyers think they have any evidence of there being in these allegations of "dirty tricks" and "lies". Having given the nod to the article being published, in which the clear implication in e.g. the last quote above is that Ken Livingstone is personally involved in lying, they then insisted on the following being tossed into the mix in the summary article on the front page:

There was no suggestion that Mr Livingstone was in any way involved in the dirty tricks campaign.

Apart from the suggestions throughout the rest of their coverage, of course.

As I wrote last night, this article represents a huge step up in the level of media manipulation and cynical electioneering by the Boris campaign. Don’t fall for it. Look for yourself at the things Boris has written in the past, the positions he has consistently held on things like the environment and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and the racist articles he paid Taki for and published in the Spectator.

And I have no idea if Ken’s campaigners are lying on the doorstep, but Boris’s were certainly lying on the doorstep of the Time Out hustings. Strangely, the Telegraph have overlooked that.

I’m gobsmacked by what I believe is now today’s Sunday Telegraph front page article, Boris Johnson: I’m the victim of dirty tricks in London Mayor race.

The amount of cheek present in anyone whose campaign is being run by Lynton Crosby accusing anyone else of dirty tricks is staggering.

The Telegraph even states as a matter of fact (without offering any evidence) that Boris’s opponents have used "push polling", which is a well known favourite technique of Mr. Crosby himself.

Boris also accuses his opponents of "sub-radar stuff", despite it being well documented that Crosby’s own strategy for Boris is specifically known as an "under-the-radar" campaign.

He continues:

They’ve read every column I’ve ever written to see if they can find something to turn into a smear about a position I don’t hold.

It’s extraordinary that Boris would suggest that simply by highlighting things that he himself has written, we opponents of his (I assume StopBoris.org counts as an opponent, even though we don’t have our own Mayoral candidate) are somehow misrepresenting him. If we mention that he thinks gay marriage is in some way comparable to a union between "three men and a dog", or that he spent column after column repeatedly attacking the Stephen Lawrence inquiry as unnecessary and "Orwellian", it’s unbelievable that his response is to say we are smearing him, and that he doesn’t hold positions that he himself has written that he does hold.

This is the man who was happy to employ and publish outrageous articles by out-and-out racist Taki; the man who’s taken six years to appreciate that "piccaninnies" might be an offensive word to ethnic minorities; the man who supported George W. Bush’s election and re-election; the man who strongly opposed the repealing of Section 28 because he thought it would lead to enforced "homosexual instruction" in the classroom; the man who promised to help an old fraudster friend track down and beat up a journalist; the man who is in the tiny minority of politicians in the developed world who still opposes the Kyoto protocol to tackle climate change (Bush being the only remaining developed world leader not to sign up to it); the man who opposed the National Minimum Wage; the man who claims he did or didn’t snort cocaine based on who’s listening at the time, and did or didn’t have an affair based on what evidence has so far emerged.

With so much evidence that Boris is an untrustworthy charlatan at odds with the vast majority of Londoners’ views, why would anyone need to make anything up to ’smear’ him?

And meanwhile, a single recent appearance of the Back Boris team involved them issuing outright lies on crime and likening Ken Livingstone to mass-murdering dictator Robert Mugabe. Do these things not count as ‘dirty tricks’?

The Sunday Telegraph’s front page article represents a desperate escalation of tactics by Lynton Crosby, attempting to deflect attention away from his own campaigns lies, smears and deceptions by screaming blue murder about vastly exaggerated ‘dirty tricks’ being used against him.

As Boris-stoppers we must do all we can to help our fellow Londoners cut through this thick layer of meta-lies, and see Boris’s campaign for the cynical charade it really is, yet again trying to keep the spotlight off Boris by pushing it back towards his opponents, and raising the dishonesty and bluster levels higher than ever.

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!

The Mirror covers Boris’s lying about cocaine today, but includes a paragraph at the end that I hadn’t heard about before:

Last night it was revealed that Boris has been campaigning in areas which are not even eligible to vote for him. He has been urging bemused residents of Epping Forest in Essex to back his bid for mayor - despite the whole area being OUTSIDE the capital.

He’s been focusing his campaigning on the outer London boroughs, where the Conservatives traditionally do better (although voting Conservative is no excuse for voting Boris), but this is going a bit far. Perhaps he thinks his support is literally proportional to his distance from Trafalgar Square, but canvassing outside London won’t do him much good on polling day. Long may it continue!

Another anecdote reaches us from last night’s Time Out hustings.

One Boris-stopper was approached outside the event beforehand by one of the Boris-backers, who offered him a leaflet.

“No thanks!”

“Oh come on, you want one really!”

“No, I really don’t - you have no idea just how much I don’t want one.”

“Who do you think would be a better Mayor than Boris then?”

“Pretty much any of the other candidates.”

“Even Ken Livingstone?”

“Well, yeah, he’s been good.”

“Good? Hah! He hasn’t been good. For a start, crime is up in London…”

An argument ensued.

There are no two ways about this: this is an out-and-out lie. Crime is not up in London. Police recorded crime figures have fallen every year for the past five years or so.

Brian Paddick’s approach to this is to turn instead to the British Crime Survey (BCS), which covers unreported crime as well, using statistical polling techniques to get a picture of overall crime. He claims these figures show that crime has remained steady in London for the past four years, but actually the BCS has only had London broken out into a separate region in it for the past two years, which it’s difficult to extract any trend from.

But whatever way you look at whatever statistics, it’s impossible to draw the conclusion that, as this person from Boris’s campaign was insisting, “crime is up”.

It looks like Lynton Crosby is living up to his reputation for saying anything, no matter how false, to get his employer elected.

A few Boris-stoppers [i.e. members of the Facebook group and other followers of the campaign] went along to the Time Out hustings this evening, and want to fill Stop Boris blog readers in on what happened.

A couple turned up early to hand out the stickers - nice one, quick work printing those out! - and were surprised to find about ten people in Back Boris t-shirts, handing out Boris leaflets and trying to excuse his no-show.

The leader of the Back Boris campaigners - the assumption is that he was the leader, as he was the only one who stayed around to heckle inside the actual event - kept trying to start up chants, which were laughable in a number of ways:

1. The most-repeated one compared Ken Livingstone to Robert Mugabe (”Goodbye Mugabe/Next is Ken/Let’s make London/Smile again”);
2. This one bloke was the only one bothering to chant anything, so it just sounded like a lone weirdo rather than a political chant;
3. Best of all, he was reading the chants from a computer-printed sheet of A4 paper! Did they have to be approved by Lynton Crosby too?!

The sticker-distributers report brisk business, offloading dozens of the things in the 20 minutes or so they were working the area, as well as putting up with some heckling from the Boris-backers, who seemed to think that their campaigning was better than the Boris-stoppers because it was “positive” - obviously most of their chants mentioning Boris providing an opportunity to get rid of Ken was not thought to be negative campaigning.

Apparently one of the Boris-stoppers even caught Mr. Livingstone himself on the way in, and he was only too happy to add a Stop Boris sticker to the lapel of his overcoat!

The hustings itself was entertaining and informative in fairly equal measures, but the aforementioned Back Boris campaign leader made a bit of a pest of himself, heckling and seeming most put out that - like everyone else in attendance - he was limited to a single question from the floor. He used this to attack Ken rather than promote Boris - that’ll be that positive campaigning he was proclaiming earlier, presumably!

It was clear to all who’ve been in touch that the atmosphere was pretty favourable towards the three candidates on stage - Ken, Brian and Siân - and pretty hostile towards Boris, which lends further support to the suggestions he avoids any event where he thinks he’ll get asked any difficult questions or come under any serious scrutiny.

The best opening line came from Siân Berry:

I’ve been asked to speak about my vision for London over the next 40 years. In some ways, this hustings is already a lot like it: it doesn’t have Boris Johnson in it!

Sadly there was no tub of lard in the place of Boris, but Ken did turn up with a children’s book called Calm Down, Boris!, which he placed on the table behind Boris’s name card. This transpired to be some sort of book/puppet hybrid, which Ken then played with while the chair mentioned Boris’s absence.

It’s not Stop Boris’s job to assess the other candidates’ performances, other than to say, unsurprisingly, that it was clear that any one of these people would certainly make a better Mayor with a clearer vision and better grasp of policy than Boris.

Afterwards, the Boris-stoppers with the stickers bumped into Siân Berry, and offered her one. Her response was apparently: “Can I have a whole sheet please? I love the web site!” She received a whole sheet.

We’ve been promised some photos and perhaps even audio clips of this evening’s events by those Boris-stoppers in attendance. We’ll post these when we have them. If you have any good ones, or anything else to report about tonight that we haven’t been told about, please get in touch!

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!

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.