Sure enough, the Evening Standard web site is now carrying the results of this week’s YouGov poll.

Boris Johnson has maintained his lead over Ken Livingstone in the race to be Mayor - despite increasing doubts over his seriousness for the job, a poll reveals today.

The Evening Standard/YouGov poll found that the Tory candidate is still on course to oust his Labour rival from City Hall.

Mr Johnson leads Mr Livingstone by 44 per cent to 37 per cent on first preference votes, with Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick third on 12 per cent.

But the gap between Mr Johnson and the Mayor for the final "run-off", when second preferences are taken into account, has narrowed to its closest in the race.

The Tory MP’s lead over Mr Livingstone in the "run-off " is 53 per cent to 47 per cent, a gap of six per cent. Last week, YouGov found the gap was eight per cent (54-46), a fortnight ago it was 12 per cent (56-44) and four weeks ago it was 14 points (57-43).

Liberal Democrat voters appear to be turning away from Mr Johnson, giving him his lowest level of their support since our polls began at the start of the mayoral campaign.

Only 29 per cent of Lib-Dem supporting Londoners say they are likely to give the Tory contender their first preferences, with 29 per cent also set to give them to Mr Livingstone.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of voters are worried that Mr Johnson is "not serious enough" to make an effective mayor. Those who question the Tory candidate’s seriousness has risen from 34 per cent two weeks ago, to 40 per cent last week, to 43 per cent this week.

YouGov says that this appears to be the main reason why his lead in the runoff continues to narrow.

So we’re chipping away at his lead, but are we chipping hard enough and fast enough to knock him off course by the election, which is now just ten days away?

If YouGov’s analysis (last line above) is correct, we need to keep emphasising to anyone thinking of voting for him that he really is an incompetent man who couldn’t run for a bus, let alone run a city with an £11bn budget. Sharing the campaign song/video around may help with this, but it may not be enough: challenge anyone you think might vote Boris and remind them how unreliable he really is and how it’ll be their money and their city’s reputation he throws away if he doesn’t manage his Mayoralty properly, which of course he isn’t capable of doing.

Keep up the pressure, Boris-stoppers – this battle is going to the wire.

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).

Who’s the slightly scary chap on the right?

Find out in the video accompanying the new Stop Boris campaign song…

Yesterday saw Boris’s minders again having to try to conceal Boris’s real position after he let it slip in a web chat. This time the subject area was the smoking ban.

Surprisingly, the Evening Standard actually ran with this story (did the normal editor have the day off yesterday or something?) pointing out that he was paid £5-10,000 by the Association of Tobacco for a speech last year and now is coming out against the smoking ban – what a coincidence!

His minders have since issued all kinds of twisting ‘clarifications’ trying to mop up the mess. Paul Waugh – again at the Evening Standard! – has a good summary of how the events unfolded.

Brian Paddick has a good turn of phrase:

First of all Boris Johnson says that he will overturn the smoking ban. Then he issues a press release denying that he ever meant what he said. As with his comments on whether or not he snorted cocaine, Johnson continues to drop himself in it and his team have to follow him with a bucket and shovel.

How can Londoners trust someone who has received money from the tobacco industry to be objective about the smoking ban? Most Londoners agree with this initiative. There are two possible explanations for Boris wanting to overturn it: either he is out of touch with Londoners or he is in the pocket of the tobacco industry.

I love that bucket and shovel image. Spot on.

For most of the campaign, Dave Hill has been pressing repeatedly for Boris to name the key members of his team if he becomes Mayor, so that people can better judge whether or not he will be sufficiently cosseted by advisers for his managerial incompetence not to be too damaging.

Sadly Boris waited for Dave to go on holiday this week, then on Tuesday finally did announce one person:

A city banker who earned £36m last year will become the first member of Boris Johnson’s team if the Tory is elected mayor of London on May 1. Bob Diamond, who runs Barclays Bank’s investment banking arm

The thing is, this announcement completely negates Boris’s previous claim that he would ‘definitely not’ be naming his team prior to the election (as it would be ‘presumptuous’). By naming one member of the team, he has completely broken his word (hardly a new experience) on this.

Most interesting, though, is the fact that he has gone back on his pledge to keep quiet while only actually naming one member of what would be a large team.

Reading between the lines, what this suggests is that the real story is that for all the time Dave and others have been calling for him to name his team, Boris simply hasn’t been able to find anyone willing to commit to supporting (or rather doing all the work for) a renowned incompetent. So as soon as Mr. Diamond agreed to help, the team were so excited and astounded that they forgot their previous promise not to reveal anyone – despite its most recent airing being only the previous evening at a BBC London debate which didn’t even air until after Diamond’s involvement was announced.

And of course the obvious corollary of this interpretation of the situation is that Bob Diamond is the only person who has so far agreed to be in his team.

He certainly has a dream team all right: that’s ‘dream’ as in ‘imagined, hoped-for fantasy’.

Coming soon to a Jobs page near you…

The Times writer and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris writes about Boris in Thursday’s newspaper, and it’s really quite wonderfully damning:

Boris Johnson’s new, sobersided persona is working well; but happily there does remain the frisson of watching a man apparently dipping into a mental bran tub as he speaks, as mystified as the rest of us to know what bauble of opinion or information he may come up with next.

And (having been one of Mr Johnson’s stable of writers when he was editor of The Spectator) I must challenge Ken Livingstone’s complaint that as former editor of a small right-wing magazine, the only administrative decision Mr Johnson ever took was choosing a restaurant for lunch.

This paints an exaggeratedly hands-on picture of the Boris management style. His secretary did that kind of thing. You were just lucky if Boris came to the lunch.

As he says, he should know, he was there.

So don’t fall for any of this stuff about Boris having great management experience and expertise. It’s all utter nonsense, as it seems anyone who’s worked with him (and isn’t desperate for him to become Mayor, so keeping quiet) will acknowledge.

* Chambers Dictionary informs me that Monsieur de Paris is a euphemism for the public executioner (at the time of the French Revolution). Since these paragraphs amount to a public execution of Boris’s fantasies about having a managerial reputation, it seemed appropriate.

Those of you looking at our YouTube channel may have spotted a video called “Ken Livingstone for London” appearing in our Favo[u]rites, and thought “Hah! This campaign does support Ken after all!”. So I thought I’d better explain why I’ve added it.

The video, apparently made by an ‘anon Ken admirer’, contrasts Ken’s handling of that extraordinary 48 hours in July 2005 which I’m sure most Londoners can still vividly remember, with the idea of Boris trying to cope with similar events.

The Tory Troll has written about this video too, so have a read of what he had to say, but the reason it’s appeared in the Stop Boris favourites is that the point the video is making is valid regardless of the competition for Boris. Yes, Ken handled it really well, but I’m sure there are other politicians who would have done too. The key point here is that Boris is obviously, definitely, clearly not one of them.

So, with that in mind, here’s the video:

As seen on BBC London this evening, a person in the street captured on a mobile phone Boris admitting that his foolhardy Routemaster plans would in fact cost around £100m, not the £8m he’s been claiming for weeks.

He even claims it on tonight’s BBC London debate, which was only recorded last night. Are we really to believe that they finally did some sums between then and today when this video was taken – or is this evidence of him saying one thing on the ground and another in the media?

BBC London also had some footage from inside what we have decided to call Boris’s Blunderbus (the Routemaster he’s been campaigning from), where Boris could be seen looking worried as he received a serious grilling about what he had said to whom. It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for him: he looked like a schoolboy receiving a dressing-down for forgetting his lines in a school play. It was certainly a good insight into how under the thumb of his minders he is.

Just ten minutes until the BBC London TV debate on BBC One – don’t forget it, but don’t hold your breath for any major gaffes (other than his refusal to admit the bus figure he admitted today).

His G2 column today is devoted to his desire to stop Boris.

I wouldn’t trust Boris to operate a mop, let alone a £10bn Crossrail project.

On a related note, I don’t believe in my gut that Boris gives even the faintest hint of a wisp of a glimpse of a toss about London, or indeed humanity in general. Both of which are fairly important in a job like this.

Good to have him on board. I wonder if he’s aware of our campaign.

A.A. Gill is not impressed with New Boris. Example:

“This is the best job in politics, isn’t it?” he says. “This is the really big one.”

And you might get it, I say. “Yes, yes.” He has a nervous, concentrated look, as you might have while waiting for the all-clear siren to sound. “I might – it’s very close, isn’t it?” He flicks me a sideways glance. Yes, I think it is quite close. What are the three things you’ll do when you take over City Hall on the first day: what’s at the top of your agenda?

“Um, um.” He’s plainly never considered this; like the Americans in Iraq, there is no plan for after victory. He searches the horizon for inspiration: “Um, well, put conductors and policemen on buses. Yes, and take away free passes from children.” That’s my son you’re taking about, I point out.

“Only if they’re naughty – your son isn’t naughty, is he? Um, er, give pensioners 24-hour travel passes. Er, stop Tube workers going on strike, bring in legislation to, oh, er.”

Allowing octogenarians travel passes to go clubbing doesn’t quite have the ring of a mission statement. Tell you what, Boris: have a think and call me tomorrow.

We subsequently learn that this was the day of what Gill calls his "ghastly, unfocused, underprepared, stuttering and blustering factless rant" on Newsnight.

Of course, we’re not impressed with New Boris either. Nor Old Boris, nor anything to do with Boris, in fact; except the idea of his defeat in the Mayoral election.

We keep hearing how the candidates in this election (and others in the UK) could or should learn a lot from the US presidential election.

Well, it looks like someone on YouTube has decided to try to help them out with that:

Via the Tory Troll.

I hadn’t spotted this before: an independent analysis from TAS, "the UK’s leading specialist public transport consultancy", of "why Boris’s policy for buses in London is wrong".

I’d seen the Guardian quoting this independent organisation saying he had his figures wrong, but this article demolishes his entire policy, regardless of the figures.

Ask average Londoners to name one of Boris’s policies and most will remember the bendy-bus-scrapping policy as his totemic pledge. But on Newsnight it was clear he hadn’t thought the policy through properly at all, and now I see that TAS think the entire policy is simply "wrong".

What kind of indication is this of the reliability of his other policies, which one assumes will have had even less thought put into them than this, his first and most famous one?

Apparently some people might not think that the Stop Boris blog would have provided an accurate and impartial take on last night’s Newsnight debate, for some reason. Honestly, next you’ll be saying the Evening Standard can’t be trusted to provide balanced coverage of the election campaign.

The account posted here last night is not exactly contradicted elsewhere on the internet though, and not just by anti-Boris types.

It’s particularly interesting to have a read through some of the comments on Iain Dale’s miserable coverage. (Presumably part of the reason for his grumpiness is that his party’s candidate for Mayor had just been exposed as a useless idiot!)

Some of the highlights from the comments are:

Sadly and very surprisingly though, Boris was crap - I mean just really REALLY bad. He had verbal dioreha, was blabbing on and saying nothing cohessive, speaking way too fast, unable/unwilling to answer the question on the cost of new routemasters (bad briefing), which was reminiscent of Paxman’s eviscertation of Micheal Howard!

If he had used his wit it owuld have been better.

I thought he was going to walk it!

Shabolic performance by Boris and I agree with Iain’s analysis of old “What’s his name?” (the Liberal Democrat candidate. Ken was relaxed but none of them was able tog et a word in edge ways. Someone tell Boris to stop interrupting!!!!!

If, like me, you have grave misgivings about leaving London in the hands of an arrogant Trotskyite berk then you would do the sensible thing and vote for the candidate most likely to oust the git. That would be Bojo. The trouble is - he’s shit. On tonight’s evidence this city would be in the hands of a bumbling, rambling, clueless(if likeable) nitwit.
Stop waffling on about bloody bendy buses, please! What’s he on about now, Routemasters? WTF???
Very depressing. Poor old London. It deserves much, much better.

Johnson reminded me of a graduate in his first ever job interview and he hadn’t done a stroke of preparation. Lamentable

The Tories dug their own grave by appointing BoJo. I almost wish they had s erious candidate, as I dislike Leavingsoon as much as anyone.

Boris Johnson came over as a lightweight joke. Why on earth did the Tories choose him? He bumbled his way through the whole event.

Boris was by far and away the worst. And Paxman actually showed how unmanageable the clown actually is. […]

Boris would be a disaster for London. Slippery, wet, dangerously vague, bullshitter.

Boris was just an embarassment. As a Tory, I don’t know who to vote for now. Why didn’t he prepare?

Andrew Sparrow on the Guardian’s Politics Blog has further coverage, and links to further coverage still. Dave Hill, as seen on BBC London this evening, has a brief response to Newsnight too, while Dave Cole goes into more depth.

Alternatively, rather than relying on everyone else’s coverage, you could just watch it for yourself. Here are two useful links, depending on how much time you have to spare:

• Two minutes: Paxman despairs at Boris’s bendy bus blathering
• 32 minutes: the whole thing (in RealPlayer format)

Enjoy – and let us know what you think. Will the polls continue to slip (slightly) away from Boris if he keeps up these performances?

P.S. Liberal Conspiracy have a similar, shorter but better lip-sync’ed video of the Boris bus blathering on their home page at the moment. Apologies to them for the fact that the StopBoris.org spam filter meant I didn’t see their e-mail telling me this until three hours after they sent it!

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

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

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

Slippage

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

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

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

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

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

Experience

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

Bus black hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoilt

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

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

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

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

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

Boris: Can I just say…?

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

Boris: Why not?

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

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

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