Mr Johnson also had trouble when asked by the Sutton Guardian who he felt was the greatest ever Londoner.”Oh God. Churchill was from Oxford so I can’t say him, now let me think,” he said.Prompted by local Conservative councillor Tony Shields, Mr Johnson then named Nelson as the city’s greatest resident.
Andrew Rawnsley’s filled a large column in today’s Observer with a mixture of pro-Ken and anti-Boris commentary.
So, concentrating on the half which falls within our remit here at Stop Boris, here are some choice extracts:
The Johnson campaign has come to resemble that chilling 1962 movie, The Manchurian Candidate. The presidential candidate, you will remember, is the brainwashed puppet of a foreign power.
In the case of Boris, the foreign power is Lynton Crosby, the right-wing Australian strategist who has taken over his campaign. The Antipodean’s primary task is stopping his candidate from being his real gaffe-prone self. ‘Boris has been bound and gagged for the duration,’ says one senior Tory. […]
Boris spouts crack-down slogans about crime put in his mouth by his Antipodean hard man. They fall unconvincingly from the lips of Boris, because the words are not his but those of his Aussie ventriloquist.
The true Boris, as opposed to the bogus Boris who has been sanitised for the campaign, is the one who randomly insults other cities, countries and races, and thinks he can clown his way through any misadventure. There was a priceless moment at the last Tory conference before his minders had got him under control. As Boris was pantomiming from the platform, he was being watched over a video link by the next speaker to the conference, Arnie Schwarzenegger. The governor of California could not believe what he was hearing, muttering to his aides: ‘Who is this guy? He’s fumbling all over the place.’ Clowning that may come over as endearingly eccentric to British audiences does not translate so well to the rest of the world to whom the mayor is London’s face and voice. […]
Boris is feared by his own colleagues. Much as they want to win London, many Tories are extraordinarily anxious about what will happen if the famously chaotic and ill-disciplined Boris becomes mayor.
Should he win London, he will be the most powerful Conservative in Britain. He will be looked to as an example of what a Cameron government might be like. If he screws up the capital, he will not be able to laugh it off with a shake of his blond mop and a gasp of: ‘Oh, cripes!’ The prospect of Mayor Boris scares many Tories even more than it does Labour people.
‘Have you ever seen his room?’ one senior Conservative asked me recently, before going on to describe in aghast detail how Boris’s quarters at the Commons were a smelly anarchy of papers and old gym shoes. ‘It’s like the worst sort of student dig.’ David Cameron, who was three years behind him at Eton, is intimately acquainted with the weaknesses of his fellow Old Bullingdonian. Tellingly, the Tory leader feels it necessary to keep issuing reassurances that Mayor Boris would be swaddled in a protective blanket of expert advisers to keep him out of trouble. In other words, even David Cameron doesn’t think his candidate can be trusted to run London.
So in summary:
We can only hope Andrew Rawnsley will continue to cover the issues we’ve been raising on StopBoris.org and the Stop Boris blog in the run-up to the election – it’s nice to see them taken to a wider audience than our web stats suggest we are managing (by a factor of about 10,000)… 
I’ve just received a very interesting tip-off about Boris’s Epping Forest canvassing gaffe.
The source of this story, it seems, was an article on the Epping Forest Guardian newspaper web site:
[Boris] may well be ahead in the latest opinion polls in the mayoral race - but we can tell him that he is targeting the wrong electors!
He has written to the Epping Forest Guardian - which covers the entire local authority district, and no part of any London borough - seeking voter support.
In a letter emailed to Epping Forest Guardian editor David Jackman, for inclusion on our letters pages, Mr Johnson wrote: "Last week the contest to become Mayor of London Mayor began. A contest that will make a big difference to your lives in Epping Forest." […]
When contacted by the Guardian, Mr Johnson’s campaign office issued a statement saying it was aware that "many" residents of Epping Forest were not eligible to vote - yet the facts are that NO residents of Epping Forest district are entitled to vote in the London mayor elections.
All good stuff of course – a nice illustration of Boris’s incompetence and how poor his grasp of even the most basic information about London really is.
However, the story has since taken a rather sinister turn. This is a link to the article – and this is what the page now says:
The selected article was not found.
Who has got to them, and how did they persuade them to erase an embarrassing piece of history in this way?
And in the light of today’s Boris campaign material masquerading as front-page news in the Sunday Telegraph, just how many favours can Boris call in via his powerful media cronies?
Fortunately, Google’s cache has retained a copy of the original article.
And when that eventually disappears (when Google notices that the article has been removed), all will not be lost: we’ve saved our own copy too. We’re too good to you, Boris-stoppers, we really are.
The Mirror covers Boris’s lying about cocaine today, but includes a paragraph at the end that I hadn’t heard about before:
Last night it was revealed that Boris has been campaigning in areas which are not even eligible to vote for him. He has been urging bemused residents of Epping Forest in Essex to back his bid for mayor - despite the whole area being OUTSIDE the capital.
He’s been focusing his campaigning on the outer London boroughs, where the Conservatives traditionally do better (although voting Conservative is no excuse for voting Boris), but this is going a bit far. Perhaps he thinks his support is literally proportional to his distance from Trafalgar Square, but canvassing outside London won’t do him much good on polling day. Long may it continue!
Where Richard and Judy and Blue Peter led, the Tory Troll has today noticed that Boris has followed.
It appears he got some figures wrong in his video, so they had to cut away and overdub him later giving the correct figures.
Hard to believe that Boris would ever get any figures wrong though, isn’t it? Er, no.
No wonder they wanted to keep him off live TV.
There comes a point at which additional commentary on this blog is pretty unnecessary, and trying to think of a title for yet another post showing how hopeless Mayor Boris would be is just more effort than it’s worth. Johann Hari’s encounter with Boris, described in today’s Independent, speaks for itself.
when we get onto the issues, I get worried. I ask him why he supported Section 28, the notorious legislation that banned teachers from “promoting” homosexuality – and it quickly becomes clear he doesn’t actually know what it was. “As I recall the issue was to do with compulsion. Wasn’t the question [about] whether or not schools should be compelled to have [these lessons]? I thought the issue was: are you compelling teachers in schools to take a particular line? I’m not in favour of that… There’s far too much proscription already of what teachers have to say and do. I’m against bossiness”
But Boris, I explain – Section 28 was the act of bossiness and proscription. It was a flat-out ban, telling teachers not to talk about gays. He goes into his ‘oh cripes’ routine, as if it is charming that he supported a piece of legislation he had totally misunderstood.
On all the questions, he seems to go into a sort of panicked free association, where he desperately to find a link to something he does know about. When I ask him what he would do to reduce the sky-high rate of suicide among gay teenagers, he starts talking about the need to get kids out of gangs – as if the Brick Lane Massiv is stocked with gay-boys and lesbians. He admits he isn’t sure what you call the unions between gay people – they’re civil partnerships, Boris.
If that’s the best he can do when trying to court the gay vote - Hari’s interview was primarily intended for consumption by Attitude readers - I don’t think he’ll be getting very far.
Today’s Times has a lengthy but not particularly substantial article about the contest, and how Boris and co are already drawing up plans for his first month in office. (Presumably the plans will include working out how best to climb down on all the unachievable policies he’s been promising during the campaign.)
The last paragraph is quite revealing:
One person as surprised as anyone at the turn of events is Mr Johnson himself, if one account of a recent meeting with the Olympic Delivery Authority is to be believed. On being told that, on being elected, he would be expected to attend the closing ceremony and receive the flag for London, Mr Johnson is said to have worriedly consulted his diary before complaining: “But I’m in Tuscany that week!”
On reading that, I remembered something it’s easy to lose sight of amid the deeply worrying success Boris has had in the opinion polls, and the disturbing fact that he’s the clear favourite with the bookies to win.
The thing is, it wasn’t supposed to go like this: Boris was the Conservative party’s last choice for their Mayoral candidate, after they’d approached a large number of big names and begged them to be their candidate but been turned down. Only then did they turn to Boris, who in typical style spent several days giving out mixed messages about whether or not he would run before finally agreeing to do so.
He never imagined in his wildest nightmares that he’d ever actually have to do the job, though. His application form for the position of Conservative Mayoral candidate (leaked to the media last year, perhaps by a dismayed party worker worried about the damage he’d do to the party’s reputation!) looked like it had been dashed off in about five minutes. It included such useful answers as:
How much time could you give to the role of Conservative Mayoral candidate? Please be as specific as possible.
A great deal.
Basically the whole idea of standing for Mayor was just a big jolly wheeze. Since StopBoris.org launched we’ve heard from a number of people familiar with Boris who have seen how quickly he tires of things once they become serious tasks requiring proper, sustained attention. Perhaps a constant need to be excited by new and shiny things, discarding yesterday’s three-minute wonder at the first opportunity, is an endearing characteristic of an eccentric person, but it’s not endearing in someone aspiring to be Mayor of London, a job in which they’d be in it for the long haul.
Boris simply doesn’t have the dedication to tasks, the personality to get to grips with details and take large strategic decisions based on properly digested information, or the willingness to be constrained to a single job requiring serious hard work on pretty much every day for four years.
He would never have signed up for this candidacy if he’d realised it would go this far, and neither would his party, now frantically trying to surround him with enough officials to cushion him from doing the party damage (not so keen on ‘small government’ now, are you Boris?). Boris was in this for a few months of high-profile self-publicity, which is all he has ever been interested in.
So all things considered, it’s not surprising that he would have already booked a trip to Tuscany this summer, some time ago, on the assumption that he wouldn’t be Mayor. Let’s do everything we can to make sure he doesn’t have to cancel it.
Channel 4’s excellent online FactCheck service has had a look at Boris’s costing of his pointless plan to replace bendy buses with conductor-dependent Routemaster-style buses, aka Boris’s bus black hole.
FactCheck rates each claim it examines on a scale from 0 to 5, where (rather counter-intuitively) 0 means it’s completely true, and 5 means there’s not a shred of truth in it anywhere at all. So how does Boris’s claim stack up?
The verdict
Even taking the unspecified costs of getting the new bus design on the road out of the calculations, the £8m figure is a vast under-estimate of the extra cost of staffing a new Routemaster.
Independent analysis puts the total cost of Johnson’s plans at £114m - in comparison to which, Johnson’s estimate looks like pretty small change.
FactCheck rating: 4.5
I’m just trying to work out where the 0.5 points’ worth of truth is located. Perhaps it’s the fact that he said it would cost £8m, and in fact it will cost £8m; it will just cost a further £106m as well!
Worth a read, anyway: they’ve certainly done their homework, unlike a certain Mayoral candidate, who clearly can’t be trusted to do his, even when it comes to his most highly publicised policy.
It really doesn’t bode well for Boris’s ability to control an £11bn budget as Mayor if he can’t even get the small sums right.
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.
Not sure how I missed this - it’s only taken six months for me to stumble across it!
Boris Johnson illegally using his mobile phone while driving.
(Of course, he has also been seen on his phone while cycling, but that’s just risky and stupid, not illegal.)
I wonder if he advocates a zero tolerance approach to all criminal behaviour on the roads, or only that of his boss?
I’ve heard much about the article in today’s Evening Standard which states that Boris is “holding secret talks with potential executives to run City Hall” if he becomes Mayor, but unfortunately the Standard’s web site appears to me to be down at the moment (long may it continue) so I can’t read it for myself.
What I can do is link to a MayorWatch article with a headline of the “Pope: ‘I am Catholic’” variety: Labour: ‘Boris isn’t up to the job’. Hardly a surprise that Labour might think that, but it sounds like this story certainly does lend itself to this interpretation.
The report claims senior Tories are concerned that a badly run capital would have an adverse impact on David Cameron’s chances of winning the next General Election.
Speaking this afternoon Tessa Jowell MP, Minister for London, said […] “David Cameron is asking Londoners to elect someone he is determined won’t be allowed to exercise power.”
Rumour has long had it that Cameron never expected that Boris would actually end up winning the Mayoralty, and now he’s the clear front-runner it’s understandable that he might be nervous about the impact on the Conservative party’s reputation. The General Election is widely expected not to be held until May 2010 now, which would give voters more than enough time to see what an atrocious buffoon the party has put forward for Mayor of London, potentially damaging the party’s credibility.
So Cameron - who, it should be acknowledged, Boris’s team have denied “is directly involved” in the discussions (presumably in the same way as Gordon Brown was never “directly involved” in those regular attempts to destabilise Tony Blair’s premiership) - has now had to enter damage limitation mode rather hastily and endeavour to find people with the skills Boris so obviously lacks, like, er, pretty much all the skills needed to run London.
Heh, I’ve just realised - does this story remind you of any particular Stop Boris poster? We hadn’t realised any of them would come quite so literally true, quite so quickly.
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.
Last night’s edition of This Week has an interesting little discussion starting 26-and-a-half minutes in. Prominent former Conservative minister Michael Portillo, regular guest pundit alongside Diane Abbott, struggles to reply to questions about whether Boris is now a serious politician, or just a joke - indeed, he is completely lost for words for some time!
Eventually he goes as far as to state that, prior to a clip they’d just shown of Boris moaning about crime, Portillo hadn’t seen Boris talking about any serious areas of policy at all - and that even in the clip he wasn’t actually putting forward any proposals to indicate how he would actually deal with the problems he was describing.
Portillo is speaking here as someone who’s obviously a Conservative through and through, but has stepped down from party political activity so is freer to speak his mind than most Conservatives. How many other Conservatives are sitting on similar views, keeping them to themselves?
As Portillo also pointed out, if Boris wins this election, he will become the most powerful Tory in the country for over a decade. “He will be in power over 7 million Londoners while Cameron is still just talking about power - which would be quite an extraordinary situation!”
Extraordinary indeed - can fellow Conservatives really afford for Boris to be their figurehead?
On a related note, this week’s Guardian Politics Podcast has some discussion about the Mayoral election contest (about 14-and-a-half minutes in), and it’s well worth a listen. The related point is made by their correspondent Allegra Stratton, who’s seen Boris in action on the campaign trail.
I’m not saying I think it’s a good thing, but I think he possibly can [stay more serious/bury his buffoonishness] for the election campaign; I think over the period of a year, to a year and a half, to two years, that would see us go from the London Mayoral election to the probable general election, I think that there is a question mark over whether Boris wouldn’t become the biggest problem for the national Conservatives.
If I were a Conservative supporter, I’d want to keep Boris as far away from City Hall as possible, so as not to damage Cameron’s chances in couple of years’ time. And, of course, I’d start by downloading the Conservatives against Boris poster… 