Posts in the ‘Incompetence’ category

London Election Cinema results

Thursday, 1 May 2008, 9.15 by Mr. Stop Boris

Just remembered we promised to put the winning video from the poll on LondonVids.com up as our top post today. As an excuse to get our own video in here, as well as a more serious message than either ours or the winner’s, I’m going to post the videos which came first, second and third. They’ve all been posted before but they’re worth a look before you cast your vote today.

Winner: Boris Johnson’s Reputation

Second: Ken Livingstone for London

Third: MYR of LDN (that’s our one!)

Please go and vote against Boris today. We can stop him if we get turnout up high enough.

Why we must stop Boris at the polls today

Thursday, 1 May 2008, 1.26 by Mr. Stop Boris

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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…

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! :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Campaign videos

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

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.

Zoe Williams wants to stop Boris – and so do loads of other people

Thursday, 1 May 2008, 1.24 by Mr. Stop Boris

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.

A bit of class

Wednesday, 30 April 2008, 19.51 by Mr. Stop Boris

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.

Simon Heffer wants to stop Boris too!

Wednesday, 30 April 2008, 0.50 by Mr. Stop Boris

And he says so in the Telegraph too.

OK, he starts by saying Ken and Brian are rubbish as well, and ends up encouraging mass abstention, which is pretty poor advice since the politicians always ignore abstention (they call it "apathy" and pretend it doesn’t mean anything).

But goodness me, he really doesn’t think Mayor Boris is a good idea, and nor does he mince his words (not that he’s renowned for doing so).

There’s no point in me adding anything more to this post apart from quotes directly from the Heffer’s mouth:

[Boris’s buffoon act] conceals two things: a blinding lack of attention to detail, and (though this might seem to sit ill with the first point) a ruthless ambition.

Mr Johnson is the most ambitious person I have ever met. That ought to be a commendation for high office, since ambitious people normally understand they will go further only by doing their present job well. Mr Johnson’s scattergun approach to life will not allow this.

… What is there in Mr Johnson’s past to suggest that his mayoralty would be anything but [a comic spectacle]? Where is the evidence of his adroitness in administration, his sense of responsibility, his ethic of public service?

As [biographer of Boris, Andrew Gimson] makes clear, one of Mr Johnson’s failings is a belief that the public is there to serve him, not vice versa. He has given much pleasure to millions over the years, but will that cause the Underground to work better, the Metropolitan Police to catch more criminals, or business to thrive in London? Or would a Johnson mayoralty be yet one more chapter in an epic of charlatanry - perhaps, since it is so serious a job with potentially no hiding place, the last chapter?

… The guiding theme of his life is the charm of doing nothing properly. …

He is pushy, he is thoughtless, he is indiscreet about his private life. None of this matters much to anyone these days, which is why he has gone so far in spite of them, and tomorrow may go further still.

Lynton Crosby, the Australian public relations genius who has kept Mr Johnson out of trouble during his campaign, returns home after it.

Then what? Who will guide the unguided missile? Who will support the figurehead? Who will ensure he turns up on time, or at all? How will they be accountable?

All good stuff, all true, all valid reasons why tomorrow we really must all do our bit to stop Boris.

Boris’s routemaster plan “non-starter”

Tuesday, 29 April 2008, 19.56 by Mr. Stop Boris

I’m a bit tied up at the moment but I had to pass on what I just saw The Tory Troll blogging about: Transit magazine have interviewed various bus experts and they’re unanimous in saying that Boris’s bus plan is at best “not thought through” and at worst a complete “non-starter”.

So not only is the plan not properly costed, it’s not even worth doing or indeed likely to be doable at all.

And that’s his flagship policy – just imagine how little thought has gone into the others!

Don’t vote for Boris – it’s just not worth the risk of voting for someone whose manifesto is an amateurish wishlist that can’t be delivered.

Boris, terror attack, "Cripes!"

Monday, 28 April 2008, 13.49 by Mr. Stop Boris

He’s not the first person to make this point (and I’m not saying we were either), but Paul Waugh puts it rather well on his Evening Standard blog.

George Psaradakis, the driver of the Number 31 bus that was bombed on 7/7, was on hand to introduce Ken. "Ken Livingstone gave London the leadership our city needed that day," he said, before receving a tearful hug from the Mayor.

Now, no one in the Ken camp is so crass as to want to make the events of 7/7 a centrepiece of his re-election campaign, but they do feel it encapsulates The Choice the capital faces on May 1.

The Mayor pointed out that just as the Olympic bid had needed years of detailed preparation to succeed, so the calm and efficient response to the terror attack had been long in the planning. […]

If another terror attack took place under Mayor Boris’s watch, what kind of speech could and would he give?

There are other good points in his post too, so give it a read.

It’s nice to see someone attempting balance at the Standard, which today continues its appalling, corrupt, biased coverage, penned by self-proclaimed "Boris Johnson supporter" Andrew Gilligan, which today sees him conjuring up more extremely tenuous links between Ken and some sort of fabricated corruption in ethnic minority communities.

Apparently, in one case, a Latin American newspaper in London has been running full-page ads from its own publisher encouraging its readers to vote for Ken. This is, we are assured by Mr. Gilligan, outrageous.

Can anyone think of any other newspapers, perhaps with bigger circulations and higher profiles, which have devoted page after page after page to attempting to influence the outcome of the Mayoral election? I’ll see if I can remember any such newspapers and perhaps offer a follow-up post later looking at their own corruption if so.

Video: Boris’s incompetence with figures

Sunday, 27 April 2008, 13.09 by Mr. Stop Boris

At last! I have just stumbled across a link to a video I’ve been looking for for ages.

It’s a BBC London report from six months ago, showing just how completely hopeless Boris is at getting to grips with figures and details. You may want to share this link with anyone who suggests he isn’t a bumbling incompetent who’s far too risky to trust with an £11bn budget!

Ironically, his appeal to "Victoria" in the audience during one of his rambling pronouncements is an appeal to one of the other people who’d put herself forward for the Conservative party’s mayoral candidacy, but had lost out to the blond buffoon. It seems that even Boris thinks someone else would have been a more competent and knowledgeable candidate than he is!

Sadly I’m more than a week too late to include this footage in the video for MYR of LDN, as I’d originally been hoping to do, although I did get a short clip of it in there from a subsequent BBC London report that used archive footage of the "Victoria knows this figure" moment.

Evening Standard lays in to Boris’s rubbish manifesto

Friday, 25 April 2008, 22.30 by Mr. Stop Boris

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:

  1. his bus costing;
  2. his lack of detail on "reform" of the Congestion Charge;
  3. the difficulties of his proposals to fine utility companies who dig up the roads;
  4. his possible optimism about how far he could stretch money saved on advertising;
  5. the "major headache" of enforcing his Tube alcohol ban (which "will not necessarily help" with cutting crime anyway);
  6. his return to the days of stop and search;
  7. his crime mapping potentially creating crime-ridden ghettos;
  8. his pathetically low number of pledged tree-plantings;
  9. his complete ignoring (ignorance?!) of climate change;
  10. his hypocritical position on airport expansion which "would dramatically increase emissions from air travel and damage local wildlife";
  11. the risk of his house-building policy letting "poor performing councils off the hook";
  12. 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!;
  13. 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!

Lack of gaffes ≠ statesmanlike competence

Friday, 25 April 2008, 22.23 by Mr. Stop Boris

It’s hardly a surprise that someone called ‘Labourboy’ should suggest Boris would not be a good Mayor, but it is an interesting point he makes, that the media appear to be setting the bar far lower for Boris the clown than they would be for anyone else.

Of course it is a minor miracle that he’s managed to go so many months without any major gaffes, but he has said a few moderately ill-advised things, and more to the point he certainly hasn’t said anything that would qualify anyone else to be taken seriously as a Mayoral contender. Like, you know, some properly thought-through policies, or evidence of relevant experience for managing an £11bn budget and 105,000 staff.

ITV London’s Mayoral debate

Thursday, 24 April 2008, 8.32 by Mr. Stop Boris

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.

Boris breaks the rules on financial declarations, again

Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 19.38 by Mr. Stop Boris

Tut, tut. For someone so keen on highlighting alleged, but unproven, ’sleaze’ in City Hall, and who delights in whipping up complaints about Ken’s campaign funding, which is not breaking any rules, Boris should really (to coin a phrase) sort out his own tangled hair before trying to comb other people’s.

Today, the Evening Standard broke the news that Boris Johnson has been in breach of Parliamentary rules for 18 months, having never declared to Parliament that he owned a third of the shares in a TV company – more than double the 15% threshold that makes declaration compulsory.

Labour MP Karen Buck today referred the breach to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards John Lyon for a full investigation.

The Regent’s Park & Kensington North MP said: "This shows both hypocrisy and incompetence. Londoners can’t afford to have someone who has such ‘oversights’ in charge of the multi-billion pound responsibilities of Mayor… Ignorance of the law is no defence at all. If he can’t run his MP’s office properly, how can he run London?"

Cabinet minister Peter Hain was forced to quit this year for failing to declare donations to his office in full.

In other words, in Government this could easily be a resignable offence. It also follows a reprimand for Boris from the Electoral Commission earlier this year for failing to declare correctly £45,000 in donations.

What these incidents show is that Boris is completely incompetent, and can’t follow the basic rules with even his own financial affairs. Quite how anyone will believe he can be trusted with London’s £11bn budget is beyond me!

It’s also interesting that it was the Evening Standard which broke this story. It certainly looks like they’re trying to claw back some standards after realising they were really doing themselves a lot of damage with their relentless bias.

The return of gaffophobia!

Tuesday, 22 April 2008, 22.12 by Mr. Stop Boris

Ah, gaffophobia, how we’ve missed you. What was for a brief time our own home-grown Googlewhack seemed to have been swept somewhat under the carpet in a piece of meta-calculation by Boris’s minders, reasoning that once it had reached a full-page article on page 3 of a national newspaper, his non-appearance had started to become the negative story they were trying to avoid by keeping him away from things in the first place!

So soon enough they started putting him forward for TV debates and hustings and all the things he’d previously been pulling out of. Indeed there have been so many TV appearances it’s been hard to keep up with them all! (There’s another in 25 minutes on ITV1 London, by the way.)

But this weekend Boris’s minders were reminded why they’d been pulling him out of things in the first place. At the Stonewall hustings he was humiliated and ridiculed over his offensive remarks comparing gay marriage to bestiality.

So after that, what happened today? Only a short time before the event, Boris finally confirmed he wouldn’t be taking part in a hustings at the University of London Union.

This brings us full circle: the Time Out hustings were held at ULU a few weeks ago, and it was Boris’s no-show for that event that propelled the gaffophobia of his minders into the public consciousness.

It seems he has a fear of students, which is bizarre given how many of them have set up Boris-loving groups over on Facebook. Presumably he’s only scared of politically engaged students, since it’s the apathetic ones who think the election is a laugh that he’s counting on the votes of. Let’s hope they think it’s so much of a laugh that they don’t bother going out to vote.

Wes Streeting, President-elect of the National Union of Students, speaking in a personal capacity said:

"It’s a shame Boris Johnson’s minders won’t let him face a student audience. We were looking forward to challenging his reactionary views on everything from tackling racism and advancing LGBT equality to climate change and war."

Boris Johnson chickens out of student hustings – what is he scared of?, KenLivingstone.com

I realise that is taken from his main rival’s web site, but in the interest of balance I just checked Boris’s web site and can find no mention at all of his chickening out of this debate – not even a lame excuse like we were offered for him missing the Time Out one.

In the mean time, by a happy coincidence, a couple of people have contacted us to point out a new video on YouTube highlighting Boris’s fear of scrutiny. Enjoy!

Won’t anyone join his team?

Tuesday, 22 April 2008, 20.51 by Mr. Stop Boris

Dave Hill’s been determined to find out who’ll be in Boris’s team, if he becomes Mayor, for a long time, and today he reports that at last some others have begun asking the same thing.

He raises a point that someone e-mailed to me after I posted about Bob Diamond: Diamond and the subsequently named handful of others involved in administering his Mayor’s Fund (wherein Boris crosses his fingers and hopes businesses will give to needy groups so he doesn’t have to) are, as Dave says, "a side issue". (Apologies to the person who e-mailed me about this last week and hoped I’d blog about it then. Time got away from me – something to do with spending every spare moment for five days making a video, I suppose…)

The point here is that he hasn’t revealed anyone who’ll be doing any of the real, important work of the office of Mayor of London. One can only assume that his silence on this issue is because he simply hasn’t got anyone lined up. Who’d want to commit to working for someone of such widely renowned world-beating incompetence, who changes his mind more often than he combs his hair, and has no hands-on managerial experience at all?

I wouldn’t want to work for him, not that I imagine I’m about to get a job offer. (Except perhaps in advising a future campaign team on maintaining their anonymity more successfully.) Would you?

Boris criticises Brian’s record – because, er, um…

Tuesday, 22 April 2008, 9.33 by Mr. Stop Boris

Just come across this audio clip masquerading as a video clip over on YouTube:

It’s worth a listen as it shows Boris blustering into an argument in which he hasn’t the first clue what he’s talking about and eventually having to completely back down and withdraw his original point. (Does anyone know what the clip is from, by the way?)

You would kind of think that you might do a bit of basic homework on your two main opponents in an election where the three of you will be parading around debating things with each other, but clearly Boris’s dog ate his homework on this one. We can look forward to Boris’s metaphorical dog also eating, for instance, billions of pounds of our money as he mismanages the Crossrail project after he fails to do any work around that either if he’s elected next week.