Yesterday, Boris was campaigning on an issue which, if I recall correctly, actually amounts to a complete misunderstanding on his part: Boris vows to fight closure of Tube station ticket offices.

The Tory mayoral candidate warned that passengers would be put off using the Underground if stations were unmanned […]

Mr Johnson pledged to halt TfL’s proposals to close around 40 offices and said: "They do provide a great deal of reassurance to people late at night if something untoward happens, if they’re scared, or if there is an affray.

"It’s good to at least have a human being there to give a sense of security. That’s why I think we should fight to reverse this programme of closures."

The ever-reliable Evening Standard reports the story entirely from Boris’s side without approaching TfL for a statement about Boris’s claims, so they don’t shed any light on the real situation, but if my memory serves me correctly, the whole idea of these ticket office closures is to free the staff up from their enclosed ticket booths so that they can be a more visible presence within the station.

It’s certainly my understanding, which no-one’s ever challenged in relation to one of the Stop Boris posters, that TfL specifically have a policy of never leaving any of their stations across the entire Under- and Overground network unmanned during their hours of operation.

So for Boris to suggest that the closures of these ticket offices will result in the loss of the "human being there [giving] a sense of security" is ridiculous: if the closures proceed, the human being in question will be released from his or her enclosure and be able to be far more visible around the station, providing a much better "sense of security" – for the people scared into thinking they actually have something to fear by Boris and his Evening Standard cronies in the first place.

Our old commenting friend Zach has put in another appearance on the Stop Boris blog today, flooding us with 13 illogical, error-ridden pro-Boris comments in a half-hour period earlier.

Interestingly, these were all posted via an Australian internet service provider. Could he have been brought along for the ride by Lynton Crosby, by any chance?

Apparently this bloke’s persistent trolling has forced a number of other anti-Boris blogs to switch to moderating their comments in an attempt to keep the debate operating at a sensible level.

Ideally we don’t want do this ourselves but really, if he keeps up the rate of one comment every two minutes for much more than half an hour next time, we might have to have a rethink.

As I tried to get to sleep last night, the penny dropped about just how calculated today’s Sunday Telegraph front page and accompanying interview really are.

These are no ordinary articles. To call them journalism would be insulting to reporters up and down the country who spend their days trying to get to the truth.

What these articles give is a carefully calculated platform in which to rebut – sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously – all the most serious allegations raised by campaigns like ours at StopBoris.org over the past few weeks and months.

Once you start analysing it, it’s clear that the writing of this article was not approached as an opportunity by a journalist to profile honestly a candidate their newspaper’s readers might have been thinking of voting for. This article was approached with a checklist of points to rebut and suggestions of how to rebut them.

Can this really be true, I hear you cry. Yes, it can: Lynton Crosby leaves no stone unturned in his campaigns and will manipulate every last detail of his candidates’ media coverage, if the media let him. Of course, Boris worked for the Telegraph for 20 years so there’s no doubt he’d be able to call in a favour or two there if he wanted to. On today’s evidence, he wants to.

So let’s have a look at a likely checklist of things the article needed to rebut, and some quotes from the article which by an amazing coincidence address those points perfectly.

The right-hand column of the above table contains about 75% of the main interview article.

And of course, don’t overlook how little truth the Telegraph’s lawyers think they have any evidence of there being in these allegations of "dirty tricks" and "lies". Having given the nod to the article being published, in which the clear implication in e.g. the last quote above is that Ken Livingstone is personally involved in lying, they then insisted on the following being tossed into the mix in the summary article on the front page:

There was no suggestion that Mr Livingstone was in any way involved in the dirty tricks campaign.

Apart from the suggestions throughout the rest of their coverage, of course.

As I wrote last night, this article represents a huge step up in the level of media manipulation and cynical electioneering by the Boris campaign. Don’t fall for it. Look for yourself at the things Boris has written in the past, the positions he has consistently held on things like the environment and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and the racist articles he paid Taki for and published in the Spectator.

And I have no idea if Ken’s campaigners are lying on the doorstep, but Boris’s were certainly lying on the doorstep of the Time Out hustings. Strangely, the Telegraph have overlooked that.

I’m gobsmacked by what I believe is now today’s Sunday Telegraph front page article, Boris Johnson: I’m the victim of dirty tricks in London Mayor race.

The amount of cheek present in anyone whose campaign is being run by Lynton Crosby accusing anyone else of dirty tricks is staggering.

The Telegraph even states as a matter of fact (without offering any evidence) that Boris’s opponents have used "push polling", which is a well known favourite technique of Mr. Crosby himself.

Boris also accuses his opponents of "sub-radar stuff", despite it being well documented that Crosby’s own strategy for Boris is specifically known as an "under-the-radar" campaign.

He continues:

They’ve read every column I’ve ever written to see if they can find something to turn into a smear about a position I don’t hold.

It’s extraordinary that Boris would suggest that simply by highlighting things that he himself has written, we opponents of his (I assume StopBoris.org counts as an opponent, even though we don’t have our own Mayoral candidate) are somehow misrepresenting him. If we mention that he thinks gay marriage is in some way comparable to a union between "three men and a dog", or that he spent column after column repeatedly attacking the Stephen Lawrence inquiry as unnecessary and "Orwellian", it’s unbelievable that his response is to say we are smearing him, and that he doesn’t hold positions that he himself has written that he does hold.

This is the man who was happy to employ and publish outrageous articles by out-and-out racist Taki; the man who’s taken six years to appreciate that "piccaninnies" might be an offensive word to ethnic minorities; the man who supported George W. Bush’s election and re-election; the man who strongly opposed the repealing of Section 28 because he thought it would lead to enforced "homosexual instruction" in the classroom; the man who promised to help an old fraudster friend track down and beat up a journalist; the man who is in the tiny minority of politicians in the developed world who still opposes the Kyoto protocol to tackle climate change (Bush being the only remaining developed world leader not to sign up to it); the man who opposed the National Minimum Wage; the man who claims he did or didn’t snort cocaine based on who’s listening at the time, and did or didn’t have an affair based on what evidence has so far emerged.

With so much evidence that Boris is an untrustworthy charlatan at odds with the vast majority of Londoners’ views, why would anyone need to make anything up to ’smear’ him?

And meanwhile, a single recent appearance of the Back Boris team involved them issuing outright lies on crime and likening Ken Livingstone to mass-murdering dictator Robert Mugabe. Do these things not count as ‘dirty tricks’?

The Sunday Telegraph’s front page article represents a desperate escalation of tactics by Lynton Crosby, attempting to deflect attention away from his own campaigns lies, smears and deceptions by screaming blue murder about vastly exaggerated ‘dirty tricks’ being used against him.

As Boris-stoppers we must do all we can to help our fellow Londoners cut through this thick layer of meta-lies, and see Boris’s campaign for the cynical charade it really is, yet again trying to keep the spotlight off Boris by pushing it back towards his opponents, and raising the dishonesty and bluster levels higher than ever.

As promised, we’ve got some audio and photos from the Time Out hustings on Wednesday.

The audio is not exactly of brilliant quality (it was recorded from quite near the back of the room) but if you’re really determined to hear what you missed, it’s just about listenable:

Time Out hustings full recording (MP3, 1hr20, 27.5MB)

The pictures are behind the cut:

(more…)

The Tory Troll has written a good post about the Boris campaign’s use of fear to try to divide and win votes from frightened Londoners.

The post includes a scan of one of the leaflets Boris’s team were giving out at the Time Out hustings on Wednesday. The leaflet has been created by Photoshopping a genuine yellow Police witness appeal board, which presumably marked the site of someone’s real personal tragedy.

The Boris-stopper who took issue with the Boris team’s lies about crime ‘going up’ also took issue with the tastelessness of adapting this symbol of someone’s individual trauma to turn it into a cynical and scaremongering piece of campaign material, but of course they didn’t care – they’d just refused to back down over undisputable crime figures, after all, so listening to reason wasn’t their strong point.

Of course, Lynton Crosby is behind this nasty campaign, the Troll points out.

Crosby won elections by driving wedges between refugee and resident communities in Australia. Fears were deliberately stoked up and false horror stories circulated at a time when community relations were already at a low.

Now in London we are seeing the same tricks played again. Bad cop’s threats are scaring us into good cop’s arms. Already fearful people are encouraged to be even more fearful still. And once they’ve all run in to hide, a new fresh blond guy pops up and smiles.

Londoners, don’t let Boris and Lynton divide us: instead, let’s unite against the common enemy – by voting for anyone but Boris on 1 May!

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!

When the Daily Mail secured the serialisation rights to a new biography of Ken Livingstone, knowing it would reveal three children he’d kept private for years, this can’t have been the 24 hours they had envisaged they would see when the revelation was made.

For a start, Ken revealed it himself on BBC London last night, rather than letting the Mail put its own spin on the story first.

Second, I haven’t yet heard anyone who’s particularly bothered about it. At most, people express surprise that he managed so successfully to keep his private life away from the prying eyes of the media for so long.

But third, for some reason, today was also the day that the mainstream media finally caught on to the fact, reported here on Monday, that Boris has snorted coke and smoked dope.

On ITV London Tonight he’s just been trotting out the completely hypocritical ‘defence’ that the drugs he took were somehow not as bad as the drugs today’s kids take - as if today’s kids are somehow more depraved and have actively sought debatably stronger drugs for the sake of behaving more rebelliously than Boris and his friends ever did, as I covered on Monday.

But setting aside the charge of hypocrisy, I - courtesy, perhaps surprisingly, of the Evening Standard - can go one better: his excessively strongly worded denials about cocaine this morning have left him open to charges that he has simply started lying about it now:

Janet: You said in interviews that you’ve snorted coke.
Boris: Well, that was when I was 19. It all goes to show that, sometimes, it’s better not to say anything.

[…]

In 2005, he joked on the quiz show Have I Got News For You: “I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.”
But then, in an interview with GQ magazine in June 2007, when he was asked whether any of the Class A drug went up his nose despite the sneeze, Boris responded: “It must have done, oh yes, but it didn’t do much for me I can tell you.” He added: “I tried it at university and I remember it vividly. It achieved no pharmacological psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.”

[…] 

But let me repeat his denial of this morning: “To say that I had used cocaine is simply not true.”

It might, at this point, be worth pointing 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…

Indeed - there’s no doubt Boris has form as a liar. A timely reminder of his affair, too - I didn’t see any suggestion that any of Ken’s children came from, shall we say, simultaneous relationships!

And while the media have today grouped together the revelations about the two candidates, let’s not forget one key difference that can easily be overlooked amid claims and counter-claims about whether candidates’ personal lives matter in elections: by smoking dope and snorting cocaine, Boris Johnson was breaking the law.

Here’s hoping his drug-taking doesn’t play well with his the more traditionally conservative end of his supporter spectrum.

Another anecdote reaches us from last night’s Time Out hustings.

One Boris-stopper was approached outside the event beforehand by one of the Boris-backers, who offered him a leaflet.

“No thanks!”

“Oh come on, you want one really!”

“No, I really don’t - you have no idea just how much I don’t want one.”

“Who do you think would be a better Mayor than Boris then?”

“Pretty much any of the other candidates.”

“Even Ken Livingstone?”

“Well, yeah, he’s been good.”

“Good? Hah! He hasn’t been good. For a start, crime is up in London…”

An argument ensued.

There are no two ways about this: this is an out-and-out lie. Crime is not up in London. Police recorded crime figures have fallen every year for the past five years or so.

Brian Paddick’s approach to this is to turn instead to the British Crime Survey (BCS), which covers unreported crime as well, using statistical polling techniques to get a picture of overall crime. He claims these figures show that crime has remained steady in London for the past four years, but actually the BCS has only had London broken out into a separate region in it for the past two years, which it’s difficult to extract any trend from.

But whatever way you look at whatever statistics, it’s impossible to draw the conclusion that, as this person from Boris’s campaign was insisting, “crime is up”.

It looks like Lynton Crosby is living up to his reputation for saying anything, no matter how false, to get his employer elected.