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!

Perhaps it will be easier to report the rare occasions Boris does turn up to an event than the numerous things he bottles out of in the coming weeks.

Last night he went to an actual hustings with actual members of the public and TV cameras and everything - extraordinary! It’s almost as if he’s campaigning properly in an election or something!

There was a catch, though. This hustings was organised by the Evening Standard (and the almost-as-objectionable ITV London Tonight), and was held in Knightsbridge, far and away one of the wealthiest areas of the capital, which also happens to be in the more recently added half of the Congestion Charge zone, and home to a lot of 4×4-drivers who’d be liable to Ken’s proposed £25 CO₂ Charge.

So, guess what the outcome was at the end of the debate when they held a vote to ask the audience who they thought would be getting their vote? You’ll be gobsmacked to learn that the winner was Boris.

I wonder why he decided this was the event to turn up to, rather than the Time Out hustings tomorrow or Radio 4’s Any Questions?

On the Time Out front, Boris’s team last night tried to cover their gaffophobia by blaming Time Out themselves; Time Out have since responded at length to set the record straight. Of course, it’s their word against his, but their account is pretty detailed, and there’s clearly a lot of nannying and manipulation going on from Boris’s side.

And let’s face it, who are you going to believe, some journalists, or, er, another journalist, who’s now also a politician, who’s additionally desperately trying to get elected, using what looks to be the second most dishonest campaign of this election (after the BNP, of course)?

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!

It’s not just Any Questions? that Boris has chickened out of:

From: [removed]@timeout.com
Date: 31 Mar 2008 12:25  
Subject: Time Out Mayoral Hustings

[…]

We were excited and proud to be able to offer you direct access to all four main candidates on one platform, which would give you an opportunity to quiz them in person on their plans for our city. Disappointingly, Boris Johnson, who had initially confirmed his place at this hustings, has withdrawn from the event and so will NOT be attending. I’ll leave you to surmise what this says about the Tory mayoral candidate and his commitment to London.

Quite.

Edit: it seems The Tory Troll also received this e-mail, and has been reminded of a pertinent quote from The Times from a few weeks ago about how Boris is renowned for his unreliability and for often failing to turn up to events:

There is hardly a senior soul in this business who hasn’t turned up to an evening with Boris, to discover that it is an evening with anyone but. “I’m sorry,” says the chair, anticipating the boos of disappointment, “but Boris Johnson is unable to be with us.” followed by some lie.

…And another quick edit to point out that another blogger, Dave Cole, has also picked up on this.

On 7 March, Ken Livingstone was on the panel of Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4. In the interests of impartiality, host Jonathan Dimbleby introduced him thus:

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London and the first of the three leading candidates that we’ve invited on to the programme between now and the election in May when the people of London will decide who should be their next mayor.

Sure enough, last night’s panel included Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate, and (as with the show on which Ken appeared) there was plenty of discussion of the London elections and issues pertaining to London.

But then came this surprising announcement from Mr. Dimbleby:

Regular listeners to the programme may remember that Ken Livingstone was on the programme on March the 7th, and of course Brian Paddick is on on this occasion, and inevitably we asked the other leading candidate, Boris Johnson, if he would like to join the programme, and he declined, saying that he didn’t wish to discuss national issues while he was concentrating on the London Mayoral election.

So he’s not just terrified of his incompetence at debating the issues with his rival Mayoral candidates: he can’t even face the thought of discussing any issues with anyone in a live environment where the panellists don’t know what they’ll be asked in advance.

Is it unprecedented for a London Mayoral candidate to turn down a high-profile media appearance in which they can put across their views and policies to a large audience? I certainly can’t remember it happening before.

This betrays a fundamental lack of confidence in both Boris’s policies and abilities, neither of which it seems even his own team think would stand up to proper public scrutiny.

A vote for Boris is a vote for policies and incompetence so indefensible he can’t even be bothered to defend them. Extraordinary.

If there were any doubt that Boris’s minders are rather paranoid about the media seeing him when he’s off his guard, out of his ‘serious politician’ act, one Guardian journalist’s account of her experience should soon remove it.

Last night saw a hustings at which the leading four of the mayoral candidates addressed the big business community in London.

Dave Hill of the Guardian ‘live-blogged’ the event, giving a good overview of proceedings. One of the comments posted underneath, from (one assumes) a member of the business community in the audience, offered what we can only hope is an opinion which reflects the thoughts of plenty of other audience members!

I was actually there tonight; first time I’ve seen them all in the flesh. I thought Boris came across rather poorly in the end. His jokes got their usual laughs but he seemed agitated the whole time and [kept] interjecting when others were speaking.

Sounds like more evidence as to why Boris is avoiding any similar events in a more public sphere, like a televised debate. He just can’t handle proper, adult discussions of the real issues, without getting flustered and interrupting people rudely.

Over the weekend, a bit of a heated debate broke out on the Guardian’s blogging site Comment is Free between Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, with Siân Berry and even George Galloway also joining in.

Notable by his absence, as the linked article mentions, was Boris, who a spokesman informed the Guardian was ”out there meeting real people” - not to be confused with the pretend people who use the internet of course.

This highlights an important part of Boris’s strategy: don’t engage in meaningful discussions of policies.

A month after David Cameron called for live TV debates during elections, Boris has been refusing to participate in any sort of televised debate with his opponents in the Mayoral contest. Cameron taunted Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Question Time last month, asking him “What on earth are you frightened of?”, and it now seems that question would be more pressingly addressed to his own Mayoral candidate, Boris Johnson.

But then, we know the answer: Boris is frightened of the other candidates wiping the floor with him in a discussion of the issues, because unlike him, they have a grasp of them and are competent, capable politicians who can engage in debates properly, rather than reeling off soundbites and expending much of their concentration on trying not to smirk.

Boris is in the lead in the polls, and as such a debate would be his to lose - and lose it he most certainly would. A televised debate would expose his cluelessness to a viewing audience of thousands (of “real people”, no less), who would quickly switch their allegiance to someone more worthy of a vote.

I suppose it’s hard to blame Boris for being terrified by the idea of a debate. After all, if I had a manifesto as thin on policy and heavy on meaningless waffle as his, I’d want to steer clear of anything that might bring any scrutiny to bear on it.

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.