First, thanks to Mrs. Stop Boris for holding the fort so well all day yesterday. I did get home in time for the result but she clearly had things under control here so I didn’t need to face posting myself in the deeply depressing circumstances.

Awful

What a truly awful outcome.

Boris Johnson will become Mayor of London at midnight tomorrow night, and the BNP’s odious thug-in-a-beige-suit Richard Barnbrook will take a seat on the London Assembly at the same time.

There’s no point beating about the bush in summing up what this means for our nine months’ work, and for our every spare minute of the past two:

The Stop Boris campaign failed in both its headline objective and its additional appeal.

On the plus side, given our final voting recommendation (which has been viewed by 1,700 unique web-users), I think it would not be immodest to claim that we did have some effect on the voting. Turnout was up by around 20% on 2004, and Ken Livingstone received over 200,000 more votes – about 25% more – than in 2004, after reallocation of second preferences. (His first-preference voting figures were boosted by a similar number, representing around a third more votes than last time.)

These figures suggest that the threat of Boris, promoted by us and others, did motivate more people to the polls and more people to vote against him. So why, despite such success, did we ultimately fail?

Impossible to overcome

The trouble is, for all our voluntary efforts, and the grassroots movement against Boris – and notwithstanding the £400,000-odd spent by the Labour party promoting Ken – the sheer scale and organisation of the Back Boris campaign in all its guises simply proved impossible to overcome. They doubled the number of first-preference votes cast for the Conservative mayoral candidate in 2004.

It’s well known that the official campaign spent around £1million on putting across their ‘time for a change’ message. On top of this, you had the ‘money-couldn’t-buy-it’ support of a range of right-wing media outlets, most effectively the Evening Standard, whose advertising boards are seen by millions of potential voters, day in, day out, as they walk around the city. While only 180,000-odd people [should that hyphen be there? The statement works in an equally valid sense without it ] buy the paper, the value of those boards should not be underestimated. Their often shockingly misleading headlines, taken in by passers-by over a period of months, fuelled a grossly overstated perception of ’sleaze’ and ‘corruption’ in Ken Livingstone’s administration, and a positive perception of Boris’s chances and suitability for the role as a replacement Mayor.

And where did that £1million campaign budget go? It went on Lynton Crosby’s cynical and manipulative campaign, which was designed to build up strong anti-incumbent feeling through half-truths and repeated attacks, while giving as little detail as possible on a bland and vague manifesto containing focus group-tested phrases and sweeping, undetailed pledges on unarguable issues like wanting to cut crime. The money also went on regular, targeted, glossy leaflets and letters to encourage out the core vote and tempt over the swing voters. More controversially it also went on paying people as far afield as Australia to conduct a covert campaign of ‘astroturfing‘ against opposing journalists and bloggers.

The combined might of the Mail/Standard, Telegraph and Murdoch groups of newspapers, the motorists’ lobby, the anti-environmentalist lobby, BNP supporters’ second-preference votes, the anti-Ken protest vote, the anti-Labour protest vote, the Lynton Crosby cynical marketing effort and of course the LOLBorisROFL!!!!1! contingent, simply couldn’t be fought back against successfully enough.

Vague feelings and meaningless pronouncements

Contrary to a pro-Boris comment on one of Mrs. Stop Boris’s posts yesterday, we will not now be eating and choking on our words. I stand by everything I’ve blogged and written on StopBoris.org over the past two months. I would challenge anyone to find factual inaccuracies or unfounded opinions on this blog, were it not too late for it to matter now anyway, and were I not intent on taking a considerable break from blogging and getting involved in Boris-related arguments from today.

At the end of the day, this election was not fought and won by Boris on the policy details that matter. Who would vote against the idea that affordable housing should be available to households with a joint income of £30,000, rather than the £60,000 Boris’s planned scheme requires (putting it out of reach of 80% of Londoners)? Who would vote for an erroneously costed bus plan rejected by just about every bus expert in the industry? The list of such things is already well known and now academic, but it’s illustrative of the fact that this election was fought and won on vague feelings and meaningless pronouncements.

Where now?

So where does this leave London now? We can only wait and see how Boris runs his Mayoralty, but if this is how he treats his own supporters, it doesn’t look good for the open and inclusive leadership he promised.

In all fairness (perhaps too much fairness!), his acceptance speech last night was moderate and inclusive-sounding. Interestingly, in his speech he essentially offered Ken Livingstone a job in his administration, and in Ken’s speech he basically accepted the offer. Giving Boris a helping hand with not completely messing up London through maladministration is undoubtedly in the best interests of the city, so I won’t dwell on my nagging gut feeling that it would in some sense be more satisfying to see Boris left to his own devices to preside over a complete farce for four years. The less of the progress made in the past eight years that is set back in the next four years, the better, however frustrating it could be if an unexpectedly stable administration threatens a re-election of Boris in four years’ time.

But what can we really expect to happen over the next four years?

Unachievable promises

Boris has made a lot of unachievable promises. We will see increased strikes on the Underground if he attempts to impose a no-strike deal on the RMT union. We’re unlikely ever to see a new open-backed Routemaster-style bus hitting London’s streets. His ‘big idea’ for a Thames Estuary airport is almost unthinkable. And his proposed police budget cuts and lack of firm proposals or targets on cutting crime risk a return to rising crime, or at best merely a slowdown in crime reduction, rather than the falling crime enjoyed for the past five years.

With Boris as Mayor and the BNP on the Assembly, we could also see race-hate crime on the increase in the capital for the first time in many years, following years of the capital bucking the national trend with a fall, versus a rise elsewhere.

(The significance of the BNP’s Assembly win should not be overstated, however: while it represents a depressing level of BNP support, and a symbolic victory for a bunch of racist thugs, their single Assembly seat gains them minimal public expenditure and virtually zero power, so the fact they didn’t gain two seats and thus a staffed office offers some comfort.)

We can also expect Boris to be far less pro-active on environmental matters, and more motorist-focussed. News footage of him leaving his home for City Hall this morning showed him being driven away in a huge people-carrier, in stark contrast with the exiting Mayor’s use of public transport to get around in almost all circumstances. We know he plans to rephase traffic lights to favour cars over pedestrians: let’s see if pedestrian road casualties continue to fall under his leadership or, as seems more likely, not.

Continued scrutiny

It’s important that we Boris-stoppers continue to scrutinise him now he has been elected Mayor. There’s clearly a lot of scope for broken promises, and more scope still for the undermining of progress in this world-leading city in any number of policy areas.

Some have suggested that we at Stop Boris are well placed to exercise this scrutiny. We’re certainly better placed than his official scrutineers, the London Assembly, who are completely toothless due to Boris’s own party holding more than the third of seats needed to be able to nod through his budgets without reading them.

We are, however, also exhausted, demotivated, upset, depressed and above all thoroughly fed up with watching this objectionable man blathering on in news bulletins and statements, after two months of non-stop, often painful Boris-watching – and in dire need of a break.

There’s no harm admitting at this stage what many of you will have read between the lines over that period: Stop Boris has essentially been a one-man operation, ably assisted (not to mention at times lovingly tolerated!) by that one man’s wife. Sure, the Facebook group has nearly 2,000 members, and we’ve had plenty of supporting comments, e-mails and even some active on- and off-line campaigning for the cause, but the vast bulk of the work has taken place in a single suburban (Zone 6, no less – ‘put that in your pipe and smoke it’, Mr. Crosby ) living room.

I don’t rule out an active return to the web in the future (so keep us in your RSS reader or check back from time to time), but for now this is it, the last post on the Stop Boris blog.

Thanks

Before I sign off for the last time, I’d like to thank a number of people for their help, support and information over the past few months.

• Mrs. Stop Boris, for everything!
• The donor of the StopBoris.org domain and web space, without which we would have had far, far less impact.
• The Tory Troll for setting up exactly the kind of blog I would probably have set up if I’d ever bothered before Stop Boris, and breaking lots of interesting news throughout the campaign, including being first to the news of the BNP backing Boris. I’d suggest the Troll as the best place to go if you’re looking for a blog to plug the gap left by the Stop Boris blog.
• Dave Hill for running by far the most comprehensive and broad coverage of the entire election anywhere on the web.
• Liberal Conspiracy for giving us some good promotion in the crucial last couple of weeks of the campaign.
• All the other bloggers who’ve linked to us and helped spread our message – I daren’t try to list them all as I will undoubtedly miss some out, but I seriously appreciated every single bit of promotion of this site.
• The Guardian for, contrary to many of the more outraged comments on pro-Ken or anti-Boris articles, covering the election with for the most part moderation and balance. I think the people who’ve criticised this newspaper as a mouthpiece for the Ken campaign, contrasting it unfavourably with the Evening Standard, have really engaged their typing fingers rather more quickly than their brains.
• All the Boris-stoppers who’ve been in touch with us, tipped us off about articles, played an active role on- and off-line in spreading the anti-Boris message, even singing our campaign song for us or creating other songs/videos, and just generally offered their support to our efforts.
• And of course you, the Stop Boris blog readers, all 3-5,000 (understanding webstats seems to be an imprecise science) of you. Thanks for justifying my outpourings’ worthwhileness by reading them!

That’s it

So for now that’s it for the Stop Boris blog.

I wish all Londoners the best in coping with yesterday’s disastrous result, and above all I hope Boris is not as bad as we’ve feared he will be. For someone so convinced everything I’ve blogged about Boris over the past two months has been fundamentally correct, for London’s sake, I now hope just as strongly to be proven wrong about the consequences of his election for the city I love.

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.

It looks like today’s main G2 feature in the Guardian is pretty much a distillation of the Stop Boris campaign into G2 article form.

It seems appropriate, then, that this should be what will probably be the very last link to an article to appear before we all go to the polls to do our best to keep the Conservative clown, the blond buffoon, the incompetent imbecile out of City Hall.

Because if he gets in, as the headline says:

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

P.S. This article’s tactical voting advice, at the bottom of that page, is not as comprehensive or based on such detailed psephology as ours. It’s essentially accurate but ignores the role of Brian in the most dedicated of Boris-stoppers’ voting tactics.

Could support from this **** be an even bigger embarrassment to Boris than the support of the BNP? Littlejohn and the BNP are certainly just as racist and just as misogynistic as each other.

In London, Livingstone is relying on a huge turnout among innercity Muslims.

If previous experience is anything to go by, "community leaders" will simply collect the ballot papers from bewildered Muslims, especially women, and "help" them cast their votes.

I await a statement from Boris that he "abominates" everything Littlejohn stands for and does not want a second preference vote from any Littlejohn reader.

P.S. It’s interesting that even Richard Littlejohn has his doubts:

We’ve all got our reservations but [Boris] deserves a go. If he screws up, we can kick him out in four years’ time.

Hmm. It’s a long time, four years.

If you’re a Lib Dem who isn’t yet convinced that you should be a number 2 (or 3 or 4, which amount to the same vote for you!) in our tactical voting against Boris guide, I recommend Ken’s appeal to you today, particularly the well researched and clearly presented listing of policies on which the Liberal Democrats hold positions in agreement with him, while Boris has stated positions and views against them. For instance:

Cutting emissions from air travel

Ken’s policy:  Oppose new runway at Heathrow, Stansted, or Gatwick.

Lib Dem policy:  "Liberal Democrats believe that for the foreseeable future, and at least until 2030, limits on air flight capacity in the South East in particular should be set by limiting the amount of runway space to a level that is roughly equivalent to what is currently available. This is why we have opposed a second runway at Stansted and the third (and short) runway at Heathrow." A Soft Landing: Creating a Sustainable Market in Aviation, 21 December 2005

Boris Johnson’s policy:  Hoodwinked environmentalists by winning plaudits for coming out against Heathrow and then immediately announcing plan for new airport in the Thames Estuary, which he now calls his ‘big idea’ for London.

Civil Partnerships

Ken’s policy:  Ken introduced the first civil partnerships register, which was opened in 2001.  This paved the way for the 2004 Civil Partnerships Act.

Lib Dem policy: Supported civil partnerships register

Boris Johnson’s policy: Compared to gay marriage to the right to "the union between three men and a dog".

You get the idea.

Ken’s open letter to Lib Dem supporters is here. Thanks to Dave Hill for drawing it to my attention through his blog.

Today’s Telegraph gossip column brings us an anecdote from Saturday’s Stonewall hustings:

Boris’s bloomer

Convivial chap that he is, Boris Johnson - the Tories’ candidate in the London mayoral election - bounded up to his Lib Dem opponent Brian Paddick at the Stonewall hustings on the South Bank yesterday. "How are you, old fruit?" Boris greeted the homosexual former police chief.

One of Paddick’s associates started to giggle. Boris blushed. "Oh Lord, I didn’t mean it like that, honestly," Boris blustered. "I meant it as in ‘old bean’ or ‘old chap’." Paddick smiled stoically.

He really does manage to put his foot in it at the slightest opportunity, doesn’t he? And this is while he’s off the drink.

Imagine him trying to run City Hall when he’s back on the booze. Imagine that, imagine the embarrassment, imagine the shame – and keep that all in mind when you’re voting next week!

I’m just calming down after 50 minutes of non-stop Mayoral fun on BBC One’s Politics Show.

The first half-hour national segment was a discussion between the presenter and the three main candidates, which was actually rather good.

One highlight was Boris claiming his writings in the aftermath of 7 July 2005 were being taken out of context, whereupon the presenter said, OK, here’s the context then, and proceeded to read back a huge extract of Boris’s appalling, divisive, anti-Islamic blatherings, which made it perfectly clear that the context was at least as bad as the individual quotes. These are the quotes about Islam being "the problem" and Islamophobia being "a natural reaction" to reading the Qu’ran, which Boris was spouting while the current Mayor and every faith leader and politician in London were frantically encouraging people of all faiths to stand together against the terrorists who they made very clear did not represent any faith.

Extraordinarily, after sitting looking extremely uncomfortable as his column was read back to him on national TV, Boris made no apology for anything he’d written, instead trying (and failing!) to justify what he’d said but in the process showing how he simply couldn’t be trusted to lead and unite London’s diverse communities.

This segment was followed by the London regional opt-out section, where this week it was Boris’s turn to be grilled by the local host.

This was also a satisfyingly thorough interview, in which we again saw Boris coming unstuck on his Routemaster costings: he’s clinging to his new-found £100m figure with the same illogical desperation that characterised his previous clinging to an £8m figure, despite the fact that even the new £100m price clearly doesn’t cover the cost of conductors or drivers, as the presenter made clear.

He was also caught out on his oft-repeated bleating about the Mayor’s council tax precept being too high: the presenter pointed out that 80% of that is spent directly on extra police to go on the beat, so there is very limited scope for cutting it without also removing police from the street.

Anyone, like me (oh how I long for May), who follows Boris’s media appearances very closely will have found much of what he bumbled on about in this interview familiar: his usual tactic of scrambling to reach one of his pre-learned lines was very much in evidence.

Particularly revealing was towards the end of the interview, when the presenter said that one thing the current Mayor had done early on which was a big, bold idea which separated him clearly from other politicians and the government, and had broadly been successful, was the introduction of the Congestion Charge. He then asked what Boris’s "big idea" would be, that would mark him out as an original and new Mayor and make his mark on the capital in a noticeable way.

First, Boris undertook the usual tactic, ignoring the question and leaping on the words "Congestion Charge" to cough up some scripted statements on "payment on account", "reform", and not introducing the £25 CO₂ charge.

Fortunately the presenter didn’t settle for that, repeating his question and insisting on a proper answer.

Boris bumbled a bit more before finally striking gold. His "big idea", he revealed, was a new airport in the Thames Estuary.

Seriously: Boris’s big idea for London is to put an environmentally damaging airport into an area which is pencilled in for a nature reserve. The Mayor doesn’t have control over building airports. The Mayor also doesn’t have control over the Thames Estuary, which is outside Greater London.

The chances of Boris getting such an airport built are even lower than the chances of the RMT agreeing to his promised no-strike deal. The fact that he can seriously put this forward as his main "big idea" shows just how short on ideas of all sizes he really is.

• You can watch the whole of today’s Politics Show, including the London opt-out, here (until next Sunday lunchtime).

I’ve had a listen to the recording Dave Hill posted and it makes interesting listening, if you’ve an hour and a half to spare!

Oh, alternatively, he’s since updated his post and it now contains some excellent videos of the highlights that he’s posted on YouTube. The third video there is particularly relevant to what I’ve written below.

I was a bit worried that they were giving Boris a bit of an easy ride considering what an integral part of the bitterly fought campaign against gay rights he played with his Section 28-supporting, gay marriage-bashing, widely read columns in the national media.

Fortunately, they did actually move on to his past proclamations on homosexuality and gay marriage, and they certainly didn’t let him gloss over it, but he really didn’t answer them satisfactorily at all.

For a start, an audience member asked (triggering the discussion) why his views on gay matters had changed since he wrote his columns – and he actually rejected the “hypothesis” of the question, saying his views had not changed!

He also refused to apologise for any of his past writings, when asked if he would like to do so by the chair.

So remember, everyone: Boris’s view hasn’t changed since he wrote the things quoted here. A vote for Boris is a vote for homophobic outpourings like those.

Might as well embed Dave’s video, actually:

The Tory Troll was also at the hustings, and was surprised by the lack of effort put in by Team Boris.

Sadly we were unable to attend this morning’s hustings, but fortunately Dave Hill was there and has posted an audio recording, which I’m just listening to now.

Apparently Boris was challenged about his outrageous support for the anti-gay Section 28 legislation and gave an utterly illogical and nonsensical response about believing in liberty – why censor teachers from discussing particular issues with their pupils if you believe in liberty?

I’m delighted to see (on Dave’s blog) that there was a particularly excellent protest outside, by three men and a dog:

That is of course a reference to Boris’s writings on gay marriage a few years ago, when he said that if it was acceptable (and he was "unsure" about that), he could see no reason why we shouldn’t "consecrate a union between … three men and a dog". Well done to those three – and the dog!

Boris continued his record of blundering racial offence yesterday by telling an Asian presenter on BBC radio: "You can’t out-ethnic me".

Unfortunately I hadn’t heard that there was to be a three-way debate between the candidates on the BBC Asian Network yesterday morning (perhaps because I’m not Asian and their station advertising is very well targeted? ), but apparently there was, and the relevant part of the transcript reads:

Boris Johnson: Almost 100 years ago my Turkish great-great grandfather came to London and I’m very proud of that.

Presenter Nihal Arthanayake: What part of your Turkish culture do you maintain?

BJ: A lively … interest in Turkey.

NA: How often do you go and see your family?

BJ: It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London.

NA: Did you just find out when you needed it to get the ethnic vote?

BJ: I’m happy to say that lots of Turkish relations have been coming and going in our family for a long time.

NA: Are you down with the ethnics?

BJ: I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me Nihal.

NA: How many bhangra gigs have you been to over the last few years?

BJ: I can’t remember. But my children are a quarter Indian so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

NA: Okay, let’s not try to out-brown each other.

(I’ve taken that from the Evening Standard, which ran a surprising number of anti-Boris pieces yesterday (i.e. any). Their full article on this is here.)

As well as the obvious ‘out-ethnic’ gaffe, and his obvious complete lack of interest in and knowledge of the culture he claims to be so integral to him, I find the comment "It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London" particularly interesting, because of those first three words: "It turns out". That doesn’t sound like the phrasing of someone who’s taken a keen interest into his ethnic heritage throughout his life: it sounds very much like someone who has paid a lackey to do a quick bit of research to try and get more votes.

And of course the most laughably ridiculous bit is him saying "I can’t remember" when asked how many bhangra gigs he’s been to. I’d be prepared to place a large bet on the answer being an all too memorable zero. Strange that that should slip his mind so easily.

Soumaya Ghannoushi writes on Boris and race relations in yesterday’s Guardian.

What a difference a mayoral race can make. Only two years ago, Johnson’s writings – readily available in the online archives of the Spectator and Daily Telegraph – were peppered with talk of the "paranoia of the Muslim mind", of Islam’s "medievalism", "heartlessness" and "disgusting arrogance". Islamophobia was, he maintained, "a natural reaction" to "any non-Muslim reader of the Qur’an". We must, therefore, dispose of the "first taboo", he counselled, and accept "that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem."

This article gives yet more evidence that Boris is completely inappropriate to lead a multicultural city like London.

Here’s one particularly interesting fact (my emphasis):

Given Johnson’s record on minorities, his endorsement by the far right as a second-preference candidate seems understandable, shocking though it may be. This signifies a worrying precedent in the history of the BNP - notwithstanding Johnson’s claim that he has no wish "to receive a single second-preference vote from a BNP supporter". Never before has the BNP felt sufficiently fond of a mainstream mayoral candidate to lend him or her its support.

And for those who think quotes from Boris on race are ’smears’ being taken ‘out of context’, someone has compiled a load of links to some of the original articles the quotes come from and posted them into the second comment under the article, so you can see for yourself that there’s no contradictory context for them at all.

The choice before Londoners could not be more serious. What is at stake on May 1 is the spirit of this vibrant cosmopolitan city with its unique mix of races and cultures and its vision of itself – nothing less.

Here’s the front page of this week’s Tribune magazine:

Good stuff. I wonder what will be on the Evening Standard’s front page on 1 May. Any suggestions?

The black British newspaper The Voice today runs with an article called London under threat, which leaves readers in no doubt about how bad they think Mayor Boris would be for ethnic minority communities.

It includes the usual quotes from things Boris himself has written in the past, and adds into the mix some of the things that the racist columnist Taki, whom Boris employed and whose columns he signed off week after week for publication.

Boris Johnson was recently forced to publicly apologise after coming under fire over racist articles claiming blacks have lower IQs, which Johnson allowed to be published while he was Editor of the Spectator magazine.

In the Spectator, the columnist Taki, wrote that "Orientals … have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole." The columnist also described black American basketball players as having "arms hanging below their knees and tongues sticking out".

I hadn’t heard that last quote before, and find it shocking that any editor (except perhaps that of the BNP’s publications) could permit such outrageous racism to be printed in a modern publication. Didn’t we abandon those kinds of views some time around the axing of TV ‘comedy’ Love Thy Neighbour?

At best, Boris’s judgement is breathtakingly flawed; at worst, he saw nothing wrong with these comments because he agreed with them.

Jonathan Freedland writes in the latest Jewish Chronicle:

As for Boris Johnson, suffice it to say that the BNP is so comfortable with his politics — his leisurely branding, in writing and in documented conversation, of black people as “piccaninnies”, his claim that Africa’s problem is that it’s no longer ruled by the British Empire — that they are urging their supporters to use their second preference votes for Johnson.

That’s right: the BNP is backing Boris.

Second, we can use a bit of Jewish empathy. In the week after the July 7 bombings, Johnson wrote a piece which described the Koran and Islam itself, not merely Islamic radicalism, as “viciously sectarian” and “medieval”, accusing it of “disgusting arrogance”, and adding that Islamophobia was a “natural reaction” to Muslim holy texts.

Now ask yourself, as a Jew, how you would feel if someone who wrote that way about Jews and Judaism was leading in the polls for the London mayoralty. Then ask yourself, as a Londoner, whether that was the message we needed to hear in the immediate aftermath of 7/7 when every other public figure, including our own Chief Rabbi, was urging people to come together and not to turn on a religious minority because of the wicked actions of four murderous individuals. Do all that — and then vote.

This week’s set of If… cartoon strips by Steve Bell drew to a close today:

I don’t know if he’ll have changed anyone’s mind about voting for Boris, but he’s certainly kept those of us who already weren’t voting for him entertained all week.