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

Awful

What a truly awful outcome.

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

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

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

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

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

Impossible to overcome

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

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

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

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

Vague feelings and meaningless pronouncements

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

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

Where now?

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

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

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

Unachievable promises

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

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

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

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

Continued scrutiny

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks

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

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

That’s it

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

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

The Tory Troll earlier posted a summing-up at the end of a 50-post campaign against Boris, which has been one of the best-researched and most strident on the web.

Here at the Stop Boris campaign, we have also been blogging for some time now, as a way of spreading the word about why we need to vote against Boris Johnson today.

Our campaign started in July last year, when it was first announced that Boris Johnson was going to put himself forward for the Conservative Mayoral candidacy. While most people dismissed him as a joke, it was clear to us that in modern politics, in a personality-driven campaign, there was a very real threat that Boris could be elected.

The Stop Boris group on Facebook was set up, and its Posted Items and Wall remained the focus of the campaign until March this year, when the idea of stepping things up with campaign posters first dawned.

Somewhere to host the posters was needed, and before we knew it we’d had the StopBoris.org domain and a nice chunk of web space donated to us, so it seemed rude not to set up a web site too.

Mrs. Stop Boris suggested she should create an accompanying application for Facebook users, which she did with aplomb, and tonight sees its user base on the verge of hitting 1,000.

A static web site proved, within just a few days of launch, inadequate for tracking a fast-moving campaign, rich in developments and arguments against Boris, so that’s where the Stop Boris blog came in, and it’s on researching and writing for this I’ve spent nearly every free moment for the past six weeks.

So I’m now able to look back over the 183 posts prior to this one that I’ve written on this blog, and bring you a summary of the compelling case against electing the woefully unsuitable Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, divided into 15 headings which seemed vaguely appropriate at the time…

Some links to posts are in bold/larger type, indicating some sort of relative importance in their subject area. I don’t pretend it’s been done in a scientific way, though.

The people who know Boris know he’s completely inappropriate to be Mayor

Of course, only those who aren’t desperate to get him elected are admitting it publicly. Even plenty of people who are in or support his own party are worried about the damage he’ll do to the Conservative brand if he becomes the most powerful Tory politician in Britain.

• Portillo squirms - are other Conservatives worried too?
• Cameron starts the damage limitation
• Manchurian Boris
• Boris ‘underwhelming and nervous’
• Monsieur de Parris
• Simon Heffer wants to stop Boris too!
• Tories’ enemy’s enemy is also their enemy

He holds offensive views that make him unsuitable to lead a diverse city

For years he filled his writing with outrageous statements, many of which he has refused to apologise for. Even when he has said sorry for things, it’s been a grudging apology riddled with caveats. Issues include homophobia and pandering to racists. No wonder the BNP have called on their voters to give him their second preferences.

• Three men and a dog
• More evidence of Boris’s cluelessness
• In the Stop Boris inbox today…
• Gay Shame poster
• BNP say vote Boris
• More on the BNP recommendation
• A bit of Jewish empathy
• The Voice speaks
• The problem is Islam
• Boris can’t be "out-ethnic"ed by an Asian
• Stonewall hustings
• More on today’s Stonewall hustings
• Boris’s "big idea"
• Fruity gossip
• Littlejohn backs Boris
• A bit of class

His flagship policy is a complete and utter mess

The main policy associated with Boris for many months was his plan to replace bendy-buses with a "new Routemaster". It’s been discredited on so many grounds it’s extraordinary he’s still persisting with it.

• Bendy bus-lovers of the city, unite
• The bendy-bus - no, Routemaster - menace
• The last word on Boris’s bus black hole?
• Bashing Boris on buses
• Boris’s bus idiocy, part 99999
• Boris’s routemaster plan “non-starter”

He is by far the weakest candidate on tackling crime; his Mayoralty will see more deaths

He’s the only main candidate with no pledged target on cutting crime (he just whips up fear about it without being able to tackle it), and his Freudian slip shows this is because he knows his planned budget cuts will mean they can’t cut crime at all.

And while crime may well rise under Boris, so will pedestrian deaths on the roads as he reverse the progress that has been made in making London more pedestrian-friendly over the past few years.

• Some deaths are more equal than others
• ITV London’s Mayoral debate

He is atrocious on the environment

There’s a general consensus among environmentalists that Boris, a climate change denier and anti-Kyoto campaigner, would be a disaster on green issues the world over.

• Boris’s environmental pledge: plant far fewer trees
• Boris’s next enviro-pledge: encourage more waste and energy use
• Jonathon Porritt
• Boris “stuck in the 80s” on the environment
• The whole world in our hands

His entire campaign has been fake and micromanaged by Lynton Crosby, and he has never focused on the issues

He just knows a few focus-group tested lines but has no substance behind any of the sentences he’s learnt and certainly has no concrete policies to back them up. When asked about his own policies he instead turns everything into a tenuously linked and generally unfounded attack against Ken Livingstone.

• Don’t mention the issues
• Logic problem
• Surreal Metronet coverage
• Serious business
• Gaffophobia in action
• Any questions? Tough, Boris won’t be answering them
• What a difference abstaining makes
• Manchurian Boris
• Boris’s own TV fakery scandal
• Divide – and conquer?
• Boris shamed out of ‘under the radar’ strategy?
• Boris turned up to something!
• The gaffophobia issue arrives in the national media!
• Time Out hustings
• ‘Bottler Boris’ strikes again
• Nannied state
• Boris’s Party Election Broadcast - a review
• Boris on PM
• Boris’s "big idea"
• The return of gaffophobia!
• Boris the puppet
• Irrelevant question time
• The astroturfing continues
• Boris on PM - transcript
• Still running scared
• Today? I’ll get back to you tomorrow
• Sky News debate
• The main candidates’ last TV appearance
• "Boris isn’t wearing any clothes"
• A reason to vote for Boris

Most of his policies are the stuff of cloud cuckoo land

He promises a no-strike deal with the RMT union. The RMT say they would never, ever, ever sign such a deal. It’s almost certain that they will go on strike if he tries to impose one, in fact. And that’s just one of his policies: the majority of the others are also fanciful. Or just rubbish.

• Who’s he gonna call? Union-busters!
• BoozeTube no longer
• Boris’s "big idea"
• On your bike, Boris!
• Evening Standard lays in to Boris’s rubbish manifesto
• Dave Hill on transport policies

He can’t be taken seriously

He’s built his entire career on being a buffoon, an idiot, a fool, a clown. He simply can’t be taken seriously. Imagine him trying to address the city after a terrorist attack? "How many are dead? Oh, cripes!"

• Business leaders: vote with your heads
• Boris, terror attack, Cripes!

He simply isn’t up to the job

He has a track record of incompetence, gaffes, sackings and not being able to take anything seriously or dedicate himself to anything for a prolonged period of time. And he’s barely managed to find anyone who’s willing to join his administration so who knows who’d end up doing any of the real work?

He only entered into this contest for a bit of self-publicity – he never actually wanted the job, but now he’s in too deep…

• It was never meant to go this far…
• Manchurian Boris
• Et tu, Tele?
• Empty canvass
• “Boris to homeless: my house is worth shedloads”
• Newsnight debate
• Newsnight- reaction and video
• If Boris gets in, we ‘can always move to Scotland’
• Charlie Brooker wants to stop Boris too
• Monsieur de Parris
• Boris’s dream team
• Smokescreen
• Boris’s "big idea"
• Won’t anyone join his team?
• Irrelevant question time
• Video: Boris’s incompetence with figures
• Caitlin Moran wants to stop Boris
• Polly Toynbee wants to stop Boris as well
• Dave Hill declares
• Simon Heffer wants to stop Boris too!
• Zoe Williams wants to stop Boris – and so do loads of other people 

People have been underestimating his chances

Many anti-Boris people think he’s just a joke and there’s no serious chance of him getting the job. These people are complacent and might not get out and vote. They need to be alerted to the danger urgently and dragged to the polling stations!

• Ruin your friends’ evenings

He claims to support ‘zero tolerance’ but has broken the law a number of times himself

Evidently he thinks the law only applies to the little people, not VIPs like himself.

• Dangerous driving
• Drugs
• Boris breaks the rules on financial declarations, again
• A bit of class

His campaign is riddled with outright dishonesty

His campaign team have been paying people to comment on blogs such as ours and The Tory Troll’s, pretending to be normal members of the public. Fortunately we exposed them and they then left us largely in peace.

Aside from that, the team have also been spreading various lies and half-truths to scare people into voting for Boris, who has let a number of lies slip himself.

• Hit the road, Zach
• Rewriting history in Epping Forest
• Lies, damned lies and ignoring statistics
• What goes up must come out
• Boris’s answer to Tube crime fears: keep staff shut away from passengers
• The lies just keep coming
• All-day Freedom Pass ‘mad’ claims Team Boris

His media cronies have run half his campaign for him

Certain nasty parts of the media have made no attempt at balanced coverage of this election, instead doing everything they can to discredit the current Mayor and promote Boris, despite there being no case for doing so. Just about all the newspaper leaders endorsing Boris failed to give a single positive reason to vote for him.

The Evening Standard’s own journalistic team even tore Boris’s manifesto to shreds while managing to pick only modest holes in Ken’s, yet their billboards and pages have teemed with anti-Ken, pro-Boris propaganda for months.

• The pot calls the kettle a piccaninny
• Dirty tricks in the Telegraph
• La la la la not listening can’t hear you la la la la
• Vendetta
• Tribune
• Evening Standard web poll
• Don’t let it be the Sun wot wins it
• ‘Interesting’ times at the Evening Standard
• How the media works
• Lack of gaffes ≠ statesmanlike competence
• Weak leadership
• Sunday leaders
• Dave Hill on some of those leaders
• Link to Is this rubbish ‘the big one’ Gilligan was saving up?
• More on sub-Standard accounting

He doesn’t care about ordinary Londoners

He has no real roots here and is completely out of touch with the concerns and lives of everyday Londoners.

• Is Boris overplaying his London credentials?
• Those strong London credentials come to the fore again
• A change for the better off
• A bit of class

Campaign videos

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

• 3am eternal
• Bremner, Bird and Fortune
• Stop Boris now on YouTube
• A leader, not a joker
• Not for the easily offended
• There’s a (slightly) less offensive video too!
• All at sea in the Stop Boris campaign song
• Newsnight Mayoral debate, children’s edition
• Boris criticises Brian’s record – because, er, um…
• The return of gaffophobia!
• Back this?
• London Election Cinema contest
• Another song/video
• Video: Boris’s incompetence with figures
• Return of the d***head

Campaign posters

They still hold true, seven weeks on from creating them.

How to stop Boris

So, all that said, here’s how to vote most effectively to stop Boris.

Good luck, Boris-stoppers.

This election is going to be extremely close. We need to get Boris-stoppers and Boris-sceptics to the polling stations in their millions.

Do whatever you can to encourage people to vote today and we can stop Boris.

A grassroots campaign taking on the might of the Standard and the Sun. Are you up for the fight? Let’s do it.

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

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

Because if he gets in, as the headline says:

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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

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.

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.

A very interesting development in the hard-fought battle of the Freedom Pass is this morning reported by the Tory Troll.

The trouble with people dismissing the Freedom Pass as mad on the basis that it will increase overcrowding in the rush hour is that they completely miss the point.

No-one on earth would dream of travelling on public transport (or indeed by car) in the rush hour if they could see any way to avoid doing so. I wouldn’t. Would you? Would Brian Cooke? Would Boris? (Well, no, but then he avoids public transport if he can help it anyway, of course.)

So why would people aged 60+ be any different from anyone else? They wouldn’t. They would also only travel on public transport in the rush hour if they had to. So the 24-hour Freedom Pass proposal isn’t mad, as deciding whether to make it 24-hour or not isn’t a matter of choosing between more and less overcrowding in the rush-hour. It’s a matter of choosing between making people aged 60+ have to pay to travel before 9am and letting them travel for free.

So it’s nice to see evidence of Team Boris thinking it’s “mad” to offer our older people this concession. I hope they’ll remember Boris’s cohorts’ lack of generosity when they come to vote on Thursday.

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.

Even after all this time, Boris’s "scary" (his word) campaign managers are still keeping him away from any media outlet they don’t think will give him glowing praise or provide a strategic boost to their campaign.

Cole Moreton writes in today’s Independent on Sunday (thanks to Dave Hill for pointing it out) about how Boris’s minders have made it completely impossible for him to get even a minute of time with Boris to ask him a question or two. Their lies and excuses to avoid this reporter are exposed towards the end of the article, when they have no time to speak to him but suddenly find just enough time to suck up to Muslim voters on Al-Jazeera:

I am next, and the only one left … but just as Boris opens his mouth to speak, the handler places his body between us. They have to go, he says nervously but insistently. Right now.

"Cole was with me on the stump in my first campaign in Henley," Boris protests. The old pro has either been forewarned, or this is an example of that prodigious memory that allows him to quote the Greeks at length.

"Cole is my first priority!" he insists, not entirely plausibly, but the handler has other ideas. Al-Jazeera has appeared. Suddenly, it seems, they are not in such a hurry to go. Boris tells the reporter he is proud of his Muslim ancestors, rattles off a few answers then turns back to me. The room is almost empty. Every single reporter or broadcast journalist who wants it has been given time. But not me.

"We really do have to go," insists the handler, who has obviously had firm instructions not to let us speak. Boris shrugs, and flashes one of those smiles that have helped him get away with so much. He’s sorry, he’s so busy, he’ll ring me. In the morning. Absolutely.

I know he won’t. Even if he wants to. (And so, in time, it proves.)

The article is well worth a read, and provides yet more evidence of Lynton Crosby’s cynical, manipulative and downright dishonest campaign of avoiding media outlets that will scrutinise his candidate properly. No wonder no-one has been able to provide any positive reasons to vote for Boris: there aren’t any, but no-one has been able to get close enough to expose that!

Over on Dave Hill’s blog, Tom from Blairwatch has exposed a couple more ‘astroturfers’ working for the Conservative party, trying to spread pro-Boris sentiment around the blogosphere by pretending to be ordinary members of the public talking him up in comments. Their mistake there was to post pretty much the same ‘on-message’ material to more than one blog, and elsewhere to have rather different positions on things in different contexts.

We had our own plague of these dishonest idiots ourselves a while back, of whom the Tory Troll chronicled our exposure.

Boris just can’t help himself.

Hot on the heels of an ITV appearance in which he insultingly accused an audience member of making up an accurate news story, and suggested he could cut crime on buses by 100%, Boris was today slammed by a crime expert for claiming that "everyone" in Islington has been burgled.

The Tory Troll post linked above points out that this is part of a long-running trend of gross exaggeration, instilling fear in voters with an aim to drive them to vote for him.

But when Boris is the only one of the three candidates not promising to cut crime by at least 6% per year for the next four years, this is a bizarre leap of logic.

Boris has no targets on crime at all, and a Freudian slip on ITV suggests he knows he will be cutting funding for the police so they would have no chance of hitting any targets he set anyway!

Boris’s manifesto is the least impressive on crime, but his rhetoric is also the most full of exaggerated claims and outright lies about how dangerous a place London is.

If his claims were true, he’d be the last person anyone should vote for to fix the problem; and if they’re not true, why should anyone vote for a proven liar who denigrates the city he wants to lead by labelling it as some sort of crime-ridden hell on earth?

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.

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).

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…

Dave Hill blogs from his Cornish retreat:

this reminded me of Pippa Crerar’s recent blog on the subject of Johnson’s apparent acknowledgement of his coke use to Janet Street-Porter and subsequent denials that he’d done such a thing. She gently pointed out that, "Boris was sacked from the Tory frontbench by former Tory leader Michael Howard in 2004 not for having an affair, but for failing to tell the truth about it." Frankly, I couldn’t give a hoot or toot if Boris powdered his nose illegally when aged 19 - after all, I did and look what a terrific fellow I’ve turned out to be - and wouldn’t blame him if he’d fibbed about it later. But just imagine if the Evening Standard was conducting a vendetta against Johnson rather than against Livingstone. We’d hear of nothing but denials and evasions and insinuations of profound untrustworthiness from now until polling day.

He’s right, of course, but that’s the Evening "Double" Standard for you.

And, because we are running a vendetta against Boris Johnson, of sorts, I feel I would be neglecting my duty were I not to take this opportunity to point out that Boris is evidently a liar and therefore should certainly not be trusted with running London, etc etc.

I had something else Dave Hill-related to blog about tonight but time has slipped away from me. Tomorrow will have to suffice. He won’t mind: he’s on holiday.

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).