The Tory Troll earlier posted a summing-up at the end of a 50-post campaign against Boris, which has been one of the best-researched and most strident on the web.

Here at the Stop Boris campaign, we have also been blogging for some time now, as a way of spreading the word about why we need to vote against Boris Johnson today.

Our campaign started in July last year, when it was first announced that Boris Johnson was going to put himself forward for the Conservative Mayoral candidacy. While most people dismissed him as a joke, it was clear to us that in modern politics, in a personality-driven campaign, there was a very real threat that Boris could be elected.

The Stop Boris group on Facebook was set up, and its Posted Items and Wall remained the focus of the campaign until March this year, when the idea of stepping things up with campaign posters first dawned.

Somewhere to host the posters was needed, and before we knew it we’d had the StopBoris.org domain and a nice chunk of web space donated to us, so it seemed rude not to set up a web site too.

Mrs. Stop Boris suggested she should create an accompanying application for Facebook users, which she did with aplomb, and tonight sees its user base on the verge of hitting 1,000.

A static web site proved, within just a few days of launch, inadequate for tracking a fast-moving campaign, rich in developments and arguments against Boris, so that’s where the Stop Boris blog came in, and it’s on researching and writing for this I’ve spent nearly every free moment for the past six weeks.

So I’m now able to look back over the 183 posts prior to this one that I’ve written on this blog, and bring you a summary of the compelling case against electing the woefully unsuitable Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, divided into 15 headings which seemed vaguely appropriate at the time…

Some links to posts are in bold/larger type, indicating some sort of relative importance in their subject area. I don’t pretend it’s been done in a scientific way, though.

The people who know Boris know he’s completely inappropriate to be Mayor

Of course, only those who aren’t desperate to get him elected are admitting it publicly. Even plenty of people who are in or support his own party are worried about the damage he’ll do to the Conservative brand if he becomes the most powerful Tory politician in Britain.

• Portillo squirms - are other Conservatives worried too?
• Cameron starts the damage limitation
• Manchurian Boris
• Boris ‘underwhelming and nervous’
• Monsieur de Parris
• Simon Heffer wants to stop Boris too!
• Tories’ enemy’s enemy is also their enemy

He holds offensive views that make him unsuitable to lead a diverse city

For years he filled his writing with outrageous statements, many of which he has refused to apologise for. Even when he has said sorry for things, it’s been a grudging apology riddled with caveats. Issues include homophobia and pandering to racists. No wonder the BNP have called on their voters to give him their second preferences.

• Three men and a dog
• More evidence of Boris’s cluelessness
• In the Stop Boris inbox today…
• Gay Shame poster
• BNP say vote Boris
• More on the BNP recommendation
• A bit of Jewish empathy
• The Voice speaks
• The problem is Islam
• Boris can’t be "out-ethnic"ed by an Asian
• Stonewall hustings
• More on today’s Stonewall hustings
• Boris’s "big idea"
• Fruity gossip
• Littlejohn backs Boris
• A bit of class

His flagship policy is a complete and utter mess

The main policy associated with Boris for many months was his plan to replace bendy-buses with a "new Routemaster". It’s been discredited on so many grounds it’s extraordinary he’s still persisting with it.

• Bendy bus-lovers of the city, unite
• The bendy-bus - no, Routemaster - menace
• The last word on Boris’s bus black hole?
• Bashing Boris on buses
• Boris’s bus idiocy, part 99999
• Boris’s routemaster plan “non-starter”

He is by far the weakest candidate on tackling crime; his Mayoralty will see more deaths

He’s the only main candidate with no pledged target on cutting crime (he just whips up fear about it without being able to tackle it), and his Freudian slip shows this is because he knows his planned budget cuts will mean they can’t cut crime at all.

And while crime may well rise under Boris, so will pedestrian deaths on the roads as he reverse the progress that has been made in making London more pedestrian-friendly over the past few years.

• Some deaths are more equal than others
• ITV London’s Mayoral debate

He is atrocious on the environment

There’s a general consensus among environmentalists that Boris, a climate change denier and anti-Kyoto campaigner, would be a disaster on green issues the world over.

• Boris’s environmental pledge: plant far fewer trees
• Boris’s next enviro-pledge: encourage more waste and energy use
• Jonathon Porritt
• Boris “stuck in the 80s” on the environment
• The whole world in our hands

His entire campaign has been fake and micromanaged by Lynton Crosby, and he has never focused on the issues

He just knows a few focus-group tested lines but has no substance behind any of the sentences he’s learnt and certainly has no concrete policies to back them up. When asked about his own policies he instead turns everything into a tenuously linked and generally unfounded attack against Ken Livingstone.

• Don’t mention the issues
• Logic problem
• Surreal Metronet coverage
• Serious business
• Gaffophobia in action
• Any questions? Tough, Boris won’t be answering them
• What a difference abstaining makes
• Manchurian Boris
• Boris’s own TV fakery scandal
• Divide – and conquer?
• Boris shamed out of ‘under the radar’ strategy?
• Boris turned up to something!
• The gaffophobia issue arrives in the national media!
• Time Out hustings
• ‘Bottler Boris’ strikes again
• Nannied state
• Boris’s Party Election Broadcast - a review
• Boris on PM
• Boris’s "big idea"
• The return of gaffophobia!
• Boris the puppet
• Irrelevant question time
• The astroturfing continues
• Boris on PM - transcript
• Still running scared
• Today? I’ll get back to you tomorrow
• Sky News debate
• The main candidates’ last TV appearance
• "Boris isn’t wearing any clothes"
• A reason to vote for Boris

Most of his policies are the stuff of cloud cuckoo land

He promises a no-strike deal with the RMT union. The RMT say they would never, ever, ever sign such a deal. It’s almost certain that they will go on strike if he tries to impose one, in fact. And that’s just one of his policies: the majority of the others are also fanciful. Or just rubbish.

• Who’s he gonna call? Union-busters!
• BoozeTube no longer
• Boris’s "big idea"
• On your bike, Boris!
• Evening Standard lays in to Boris’s rubbish manifesto
• Dave Hill on transport policies

He can’t be taken seriously

He’s built his entire career on being a buffoon, an idiot, a fool, a clown. He simply can’t be taken seriously. Imagine him trying to address the city after a terrorist attack? "How many are dead? Oh, cripes!"

• Business leaders: vote with your heads
• Boris, terror attack, Cripes!

He simply isn’t up to the job

He has a track record of incompetence, gaffes, sackings and not being able to take anything seriously or dedicate himself to anything for a prolonged period of time. And he’s barely managed to find anyone who’s willing to join his administration so who knows who’d end up doing any of the real work?

He only entered into this contest for a bit of self-publicity – he never actually wanted the job, but now he’s in too deep…

• It was never meant to go this far…
• Manchurian Boris
• Et tu, Tele?
• Empty canvass
• “Boris to homeless: my house is worth shedloads”
• Newsnight debate
• Newsnight- reaction and video
• If Boris gets in, we ‘can always move to Scotland’
• Charlie Brooker wants to stop Boris too
• Monsieur de Parris
• Boris’s dream team
• Smokescreen
• Boris’s "big idea"
• Won’t anyone join his team?
• Irrelevant question time
• Video: Boris’s incompetence with figures
• Caitlin Moran wants to stop Boris
• Polly Toynbee wants to stop Boris as well
• Dave Hill declares
• Simon Heffer wants to stop Boris too!
• Zoe Williams wants to stop Boris – and so do loads of other people 

People have been underestimating his chances

Many anti-Boris people think he’s just a joke and there’s no serious chance of him getting the job. These people are complacent and might not get out and vote. They need to be alerted to the danger urgently and dragged to the polling stations!

• Ruin your friends’ evenings

He claims to support ‘zero tolerance’ but has broken the law a number of times himself

Evidently he thinks the law only applies to the little people, not VIPs like himself.

• Dangerous driving
• Drugs
• Boris breaks the rules on financial declarations, again
• A bit of class

His campaign is riddled with outright dishonesty

His campaign team have been paying people to comment on blogs such as ours and The Tory Troll’s, pretending to be normal members of the public. Fortunately we exposed them and they then left us largely in peace.

Aside from that, the team have also been spreading various lies and half-truths to scare people into voting for Boris, who has let a number of lies slip himself.

• Hit the road, Zach
• Rewriting history in Epping Forest
• Lies, damned lies and ignoring statistics
• What goes up must come out
• Boris’s answer to Tube crime fears: keep staff shut away from passengers
• The lies just keep coming
• All-day Freedom Pass ‘mad’ claims Team Boris

His media cronies have run half his campaign for him

Certain nasty parts of the media have made no attempt at balanced coverage of this election, instead doing everything they can to discredit the current Mayor and promote Boris, despite there being no case for doing so. Just about all the newspaper leaders endorsing Boris failed to give a single positive reason to vote for him.

The Evening Standard’s own journalistic team even tore Boris’s manifesto to shreds while managing to pick only modest holes in Ken’s, yet their billboards and pages have teemed with anti-Ken, pro-Boris propaganda for months.

• The pot calls the kettle a piccaninny
• Dirty tricks in the Telegraph
• La la la la not listening can’t hear you la la la la
• Vendetta
• Tribune
• Evening Standard web poll
• Don’t let it be the Sun wot wins it
• ‘Interesting’ times at the Evening Standard
• How the media works
• Lack of gaffes ≠ statesmanlike competence
• Weak leadership
• Sunday leaders
• Dave Hill on some of those leaders
• Link to Is this rubbish ‘the big one’ Gilligan was saving up?
• More on sub-Standard accounting

He doesn’t care about ordinary Londoners

He has no real roots here and is completely out of touch with the concerns and lives of everyday Londoners.

• Is Boris overplaying his London credentials?
• Those strong London credentials come to the fore again
• A change for the better off
• A bit of class

Campaign videos

Sometimes 25 pictures a second are worth 25,000 words a second, or something.

• 3am eternal
• Bremner, Bird and Fortune
• Stop Boris now on YouTube
• A leader, not a joker
• Not for the easily offended
• There’s a (slightly) less offensive video too!
• All at sea in the Stop Boris campaign song
• Newsnight Mayoral debate, children’s edition
• Boris criticises Brian’s record – because, er, um…
• The return of gaffophobia!
• Back this?
• London Election Cinema contest
• Another song/video
• Video: Boris’s incompetence with figures
• Return of the d***head

Campaign posters

They still hold true, seven weeks on from creating them.

How to stop Boris

So, all that said, here’s how to vote most effectively to stop Boris.

Good luck, Boris-stoppers.

This election is going to be extremely close. We need to get Boris-stoppers and Boris-sceptics to the polling stations in their millions.

Do whatever you can to encourage people to vote today and we can stop Boris.

A grassroots campaign taking on the might of the Standard and the Sun. Are you up for the fight? Let’s do it.

Martin O’Neill, writing for the New Statesman, reckons "our society is still disfigured by problems of social class".

It’s quite possibly true, although probably not the level of debate to win over swing voters to our cause at this late stage, so let’s concentrate on the facts instead.

You might prefer to click through to the article than to read such a huge quotation in small red type, but I couldn’t work out which bits to delete from any of paragraphs 2–7 so I’ve had to just put them all here!

The facts about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson are well-known, and should be more than sufficient to stop him being a plausible candidate for any kind of elected office in a mature democracy. He is a man who has lost a number of jobs for lying: he was sacked from The Times for making up a quotation from his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas, and lost his front-bench role, under Michael Howard, for lying about his four-year extra-marital affair with his fellow toff journalist, Petronella Wyatt. (For men like Johnson, with friends in high places, serial sackings are no bar to advancement.)

As well as being a famous liar, Johnson has skirted the borders of criminality when it has suited his interests or those of his foul, larcenous and over-privileged friends. In 1990 he agreed to give the home address of journalist Stuart Collier to Darius Guppy, a narcissistic Old Etonian convicted fraudster, who wanted to have Collier beaten up in revenge for some perceived slight. On being asked how badly Collier would be beaten up, Guppy informed Johnson that it would involve “a couple of black eyes, a cracked rib … or something like that”.

It is beyond satire that the man campaigning for the mayoralty of London by stoking up fear of violent crime should once himself have been involved in the attempted commission of an instance of GBH. Despite his new found enthusiasm for the Metropolitan police, did he alert the authorities to Guppy’s intentions? No doubt he takes the view that police attention should just be “for the little people”, and not for his odious chums from Eton.

But this is only the beginning of the charge-sheet against Johnson. Although he is campaigning to run London, he admits to completely administrative incompetence: he left a job as a trainee management consultant complaining that he could not “stay conscious” when confronted with financial information. We should not be surprised, in that case, if he is unable to master the fine details of running one of the world’s most complex cities.

Boris Johnson is not only shady, dishonest and incompetent. He is also a particularly offensive kind of clown, as is evidenced by his absurd litany of gaffes and insults. The people of Papua New Guinea are, according to Johnson, “cannibals,” while Portsmouth is “full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs”.

Worst of all is Johnson’s casual racism, although it is perhaps not wholly surprising from someone of his class and background. It takes a particular kind of bad judgement, as despicable as it is revealing, to think that there could be anything funny about describing the participants in the Congolese civil war as having “watermelon smiles” or talking of “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” (with conscious echoes of Enoch Powell?), yet both phrases appeared in a Daily Telegraph article by Johnson as recently as 2002. Such a man simply does not belong in modern, multicultural London.

I can’t argue with that. Indeed, I don’t think anyone can really. Has anyone heard a decent rebuttal of much of this stuff? I’ve mainly heard deflection onto the Evening Standard’s allegations against Ken, for instance, rather than reasons why the above catalogue of calamity doesn’t disqualify Boris from the job.

I bet you think there’ll be some clever twist in this post which will mean that the heading is completely the opposite of the truth – a bit like an Evening Standard advertising board.

Think again!

The Standard have given their team of reporters – the ones who haven’t come out on BBC News as self-proclaimed "Boris Johnson supporter[s]" (Andrew Gilligan on Question Time Extra last night, in case we weren’t sure) – the three leading candidates’ manifestos and asked them to pass judgement on their pledges.

In fact, they have largely interpreted their brief to be to pick as many holes as possible in the manifestos, but it’s interesting how easy a job they’ve had doing this with Boris’s.

The article opens well, pointing out that he is completely hopeless on the Tube:

1. there’s no chance of Aslef or the RMT signing up to a no-strike deal ("it will immediately lead to a strike" if he suggests one!);
2. his air-conditioning plans just amount to what is already being done or isn’t really possible; and
3. they question whether he’s really understood the Metronet contracts.

The piece goes on to criticise him on a further fourteen separate issues:

4. his bus costing;
5. his lack of detail on "reform" of the Congestion Charge;
6. the difficulties of his proposals to fine utility companies who dig up the roads;
7. his possible optimism about how far he could stretch money saved on advertising;
8. the "major headache" of enforcing his Tube alcohol ban (which "will not necessarily help" with cutting crime anyway);
9. his return to the days of stop and search;
10. his crime mapping potentially creating crime-ridden ghettos;
11. his pathetically low number of pledged tree-plantings;
12. his complete ignoring (ignorance?!) of climate change;
13. his hypocritical position on airport expansion which "would dramatically increase emissions from air travel and damage local wildlife";
14. the risk of his house-building policy letting "poor performing councils off the hook";
15. the fact that his supposedly ‘affordable’ housing scheme would require a household income of £60,000, which apparently puts it out of reach to 80% of London households!;
16. his complete misunderstanding of the empty homes situation – empty homes are at their lowest in 30 years and the majority may only have been empty for weeks: "the housing market can’t operate without a reasonable degree of turnover".

As well as all that, and particularly interestingly, they have this – we’ll call it no. 17 – to say about his promise to chair the Metropolitan Police Authority:

His pledge to run the MPA, and hold the Commissioner to account, is well intentioned but can he cope with being chairman of the body which oversees the biggest force in the country? Previous holders put aside three days a week.

Given that most people doubt Boris’s ability to run an alcohol-based event in a brewery, and certainly can’t imagine how he’ll cope with trying to run London, the idea that he could take all that on and cope with the burden of a chairmanship which would require as much as three days a week of his time is stretching credibility to breaking point.

Of course, given how little is left in his manifesto that the Standard haven’t exposed as fundamentally or seriously flawed in this article, one has to wonder why on earth they’re so keen to get him elected as Mayor. Nothing to do with a petty squabble with a certain incumbent, is it? As it happens, Ken’s manifesto comes off comparatively well under their scrutiny. (They even admit his crime reduction target is "realistic" and that "latest figures show crime fell by six per cent last year"!) No wonder they’re trying to distract voters from the actual issues in their more high-profile day-to-day election coverage!

A few weeks ago, the Telegraph ran its appalling Boris campaign puff piece masquerading as front-page news, in which we learned, amid sentences worded carefully under the watchful eyes of lawyers, that Boris had been the victim of ‘dirty tricks’ and his e-mail system had been hacked. (No further details or evidence of the hacking were provided, nor do they report that the police were called in, despite this being a criminal offence if true, which makes you wonder if it even happened.)

They mixed phrases about the ‘dirty tricks’ and ‘hacking’ with phrases about Ken’s campaign, implying that he had been involved in one or both of these things without ever actually saying as much.

The overriding message of the article was that poor, innocent Boris had been the victim of evil hacking and other skulduggery at the hands of brutal, law-breaking Ken.

Now, let’s see, what happened last night? Harriet Harman’s web site was hacked, and publicly plastered with Back Boris logos. There’s no doubting that this happened – that article has the screenshot to illustrate it – and there’s equally no doubt what the motivation of the hackers was. So how is this reported in that article by The First Post?

"It is unbelievable that her digital security is so weak," says a Westminster source. "I mean if they can hack the deputy PM they can hang anyone, even Gordon Brown."

Brilliant - if Boris claims he’s been hacked, it’s basically Ken’s fault, but if a Boris supporter hacks someone in Ken’s party, it’s her own fault.

If Boris wins this election – and I still firmly believe he need not do so if we sustain our campaigning efforts, Boris-stoppers – it will be as a result of one of the most flagrant abuses of media power (primarily that of the Evening Standard and their mendacious advertising boards) ever involved in getting anyone elected in this country. Thanks, Lynton Crosby.

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?

To some extent, I agree with Dave Hill’s coverage of Tuesday night’s debate, which did indeed take place in a bit of a "bear pit atmosphere".

I think a lot of the criticism for the ineffectiveness of the debate has to be levelled at the completely unbriefed host, though. In BBC debates, the host has tended to know what the truth is of things like the bendy bus costing fiasco and what Boris has really written and signed off as editor in the past, but Alastair Stewart – who I’ve little time for anyway since he usually comes across as some sort of Daily Mail columnist reject – never seemed to know what the reality of the situation was when contentious allegations were flying about.

One error in Dave’s account is that the audience member who questioned Boris about his publication in the Spectator of comments about blacks having lower IQs did not say Boris wrote them himself, only that he had recently apologised for them, which is at least as true as anything else published in the Evening Standard.

Boris’s reaction to this being mentioned by the audience member was shocking. He went into full-on indignation mode, looking apoplectic and saying the audience member was making it up, then veering towards personally insulting by spitting out, as if discovering vermin in his kitchen or dog excrement under his shoe, "I don’t know how you came to be in this studio"!

Other points of note include the fact that he has no firm targets on crime reduction at all. When pressed on this the best he could do was to suggest that he wanted to see muggings "substantially reduced" and that he would "like to see a 100% reduction in crime on the buses"! I’d like to see world peace: perhaps I should stand for Mayor and put that in my manifesto too.

Pressed further about why he wouldn’t state a target on crime, he came out with:

There is absolutely no point in having a target unless you’re going to give the police the means and resources to do it.

Just think about the logic of that statement for a moment. The only way that can possibly work as a justification for Boris not having any crime reduction targets is if he has no intention "to give the police the means and resources to [achieve] it"! I mean, we all know he’s said on numerous occasions that he wants to find ‘real savings’, i.e. cuts, in the police budget, but this is an exceptional admission which shows he is the weakest candidate of all on crime, despite his much-trumpeted claims about it being his key focus.

He also pledged to sell off some council houses, by the way. That’s always worked well as a way to solve housing crises… Oh, wait, I mean as a way to initiate housing crises. Silly me.

And of course good old Rude, Interrupting Boris was present throughout the show, shouting over others and never shutting up when asked to. At one point the host had to point out to him that he was chairing the debate. Although, to be fair, it wasn’t always easy to tell.

The highlights of the debate are on YouTube, with a guide to skipping through the file to find the bits you want in the ‘video info’ bit on the right.

The Tory Troll’s on good form today, with a great analysis of Boris’s contradictory positions on different types of unnatural deaths.

On the one hand, we hear over and over again about how concerned he is about the high levels of fear about crime, particularly in relation to the 27 young people murdered with knives and guns last year. He claims he’ll somehow be able to do something about this better than anyone else, which is a laughable suggestion given how completely out of touch he is with the poorer communities in which these tragic but rare incidents tend to happen.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, he proposes measures to tip the balance between the priorities given to cars and pedestrians back towards the cars, which can only increase the higher, but reducing, levels of pedestrian casualties and deaths.

There’s a pelican crossing near my workplace which is very much biased towards cars. It will only ever let pedestrians cross after a particular one of the two car directions has had its lengthy turn; and if you don’t press the Wait button by a certain surprisingly early point in the sequence, you have to wait for the whole process to go around again. So of course, what do I see as I await the green man? People of all ages getting bored of waiting and taking a chance on it - dashing across when the red man’s on display, despite the fact that there’s no way of knowing what’s coming round the corner or how fast it’s coming.

The simple fact is that the more you tip the balance in favour of traffic, the more pedestrian deaths there will be. Funny how Boris’s voters in their 4×4s aren’t portrayed as posing a greater threat - as they do, statistically - than young people, even the minority who carry knives or guns. Doesn’t quite fit the narrative, does it?

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!

Team Boris have apparently promised us one new announcement every day since the start of this week until the election (give me a chance, guys – I have a full-time job to hold down as well as blogging, you know).

I’m not sure what today’s was supposed to be, but I don’t imagine the fact he’s done dope and coke was on Lynton Crosby’s schedule.

Yesterday’s announcement was explained concisely in the Daily Telegraph:

Boris Johnson will ban alcohol from the London Underground if he becomes the next mayor of London.

The Conservative candidate will say that the Tube must become a no-go area for drinkers, claiming that alcohol is a factor in four out of 10 incidents of violent crime. […]

Banning alcohol would require a simple amendment to the Tube’s conditions of carriage specifying that the consumption of alcohol was prohibited, he said.

That’s true. In much the same way, banning people from wearing, for instance, blue hats would require a simple amendment to, say, the legislation covering public decorum.

I think both ideas might be somewhat overlooking a crucial aspect of any proposed changes to laws and regulations: enforcement. After all, banning murder required only a “simple amendment” to the statute books, but it doesn’t quite seem to have resulted in no-one ever being murdered again.

This looks like yet another hollow and uncosted policy announcement with no real thought or planning behind it.

And unlike some, this piece of attempted populism isn’t even proving popular, judging by the number of comments I’ve seen people adding at the bottom of news stories to the effect of “my friends and I often share a drink on our way out in the evening on the Underground - why punish us by banning this?”

So make sure you point this policy out to anyone you know who’s thinking of voting for Boris, if you think they’re among those who enjoy a tipple on the Tube.

When the Daily Mail secured the serialisation rights to a new biography of Ken Livingstone, knowing it would reveal three children he’d kept private for years, this can’t have been the 24 hours they had envisaged they would see when the revelation was made.

For a start, Ken revealed it himself on BBC London last night, rather than letting the Mail put its own spin on the story first.

Second, I haven’t yet heard anyone who’s particularly bothered about it. At most, people express surprise that he managed so successfully to keep his private life away from the prying eyes of the media for so long.

But third, for some reason, today was also the day that the mainstream media finally caught on to the fact, reported here on Monday, that Boris has snorted coke and smoked dope.

On ITV London Tonight he’s just been trotting out the completely hypocritical ‘defence’ that the drugs he took were somehow not as bad as the drugs today’s kids take - as if today’s kids are somehow more depraved and have actively sought debatably stronger drugs for the sake of behaving more rebelliously than Boris and his friends ever did, as I covered on Monday.

But setting aside the charge of hypocrisy, I - courtesy, perhaps surprisingly, of the Evening Standard - can go one better: his excessively strongly worded denials about cocaine this morning have left him open to charges that he has simply started lying about it now:

Janet: You said in interviews that you’ve snorted coke.
Boris: Well, that was when I was 19. It all goes to show that, sometimes, it’s better not to say anything.

[…]

In 2005, he joked on the quiz show Have I Got News For You: “I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.”
But then, in an interview with GQ magazine in June 2007, when he was asked whether any of the Class A drug went up his nose despite the sneeze, Boris responded: “It must have done, oh yes, but it didn’t do much for me I can tell you.” He added: “I tried it at university and I remember it vividly. It achieved no pharmacological psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.”

[…] 

But let me repeat his denial of this morning: “To say that I had used cocaine is simply not true.”

It might, at this point, be worth pointing 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…

Indeed - there’s no doubt Boris has form as a liar. A timely reminder of his affair, too - I didn’t see any suggestion that any of Ken’s children came from, shall we say, simultaneous relationships!

And while the media have today grouped together the revelations about the two candidates, let’s not forget one key difference that can easily be overlooked amid claims and counter-claims about whether candidates’ personal lives matter in elections: by smoking dope and snorting cocaine, Boris Johnson was breaking the law.

Here’s hoping his drug-taking doesn’t play well with his the more traditionally conservative end of his supporter spectrum.

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.

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?