I’ve never liveblogged before in my life, but hey, we have to try new things don’t we? I’ve currently got BBC London 94.9 on audio, and ITV London Tonight on video, with a variety of election web sources on refresh.

18:29

Paddick on BBC London 94.9 has just confirmed his second preference went to the Left List. A surprise, and an ultimately pointless gesture, but interesting all the same.

18:38

Bit of a news catch-up:
Again on BBC London 94.9, Peter Kellner, head honcho of YouGov, has also called the election for Boris, and will resign if he’s wrong. He’s predicted a 55/45 split between Boris and Ken after 2nd preferences.

The BNP are reported to be doing well in the ExCeL count, taking fourth place ahead of the Greens in the assembly list vote in three of the constituencies being counted there. Barnbrook is also doing well in the mayoral ballot there. Of course the BNP are never happy, and are currently claiming the ballots were tampered with and that if they don’t hit 5% in the list vote they will take legal action, going to the High Court if necessary.

18:54

Boris is currently leading on first preferences in 8 constituencies; Ken in 6. This is a marginal improvement on the earlier 9 to 5, but nothing to get excited about. Boris-preferring constituencies do seem to have higher turnouts as well.

19:10

The time estimated for the announcement of the result has been bouncing about all day. The latest I’ve heard is now midnight, apparently from Nick Robinson of the BBC. Who has heard insiders at both Labour and Conservative HQ saying they’re sure Boris will win. Did I mention it’s not looking too good?

19:39

It’s all gone a bit quiet. Apparently some constituencies are nearly finished (e.g. City and East is past 90%) so we might get some assembly results soon.

20:08

The Evening Standard has called the election for Boris. However they’ve said that his rivals have conceded, which isn’t true just yet - Brian said it looked like Boris was ahead last I heard (and certainly didn’t think that he had a chance any more), while Ken’s been pretty quiet all day to my knowledge, with official Labour spokespeople waiting for the result before saying any more. No idea what’s going on behind the scenes of course.

20:13

As I mentioned earlier, a couple of constituencies are nearly ready to announce their assembly seat results: City and East, and Enfield and Haringey. Labour won these last time. We can’t get the mayoral result or the list assembly members result until every single vote is counted of course. Apparently Barnet and Camden had some computer problems this morning, so they’re currently holding everything else up.

20:21

Sian Berry, Green mayoral candidate is being interviewed on BBC London 94.9 as I type. She is confident they’ve held on to their two assembly seats but there’s no longer any mention of gaining seats, and is also unsure whether or not the BNP will get seats. Kellner of YouGov thinks it’s touch and go whether the Greens keep seats or not, but it sounds like this is speculation as the list calculations are ‘fiendishly complicated’ (Berry). She hopes the assembly will scrutinise the mayor more now and encourage take-up of green policies. She doesn’t think she’d work with Boris in his administration as she knows too many environmentalists who’ve had their ‘fingers burned’ by Conservatives asking their advice then quietly chucking it out. They could at least recycle it…

20:36

Just received the following from a Boris-stopper about what happened when they went to vote yesterday:

The polling station should’ve been at Lewisham station, but was relocated overnight to the Lewisham Centre and no signs were there to tell people where to vote! No-one could find the new venue…

First I’ve heard of this. I doubt any of this will make a difference to the overall result, but there seem to have been far more administrative cock-ups than usual in this election, with BBC London (TV) reporting that some people had found polling clerks writing their ID numbers on their ballot papers and therefore voiding their votes. All very worrying.

20:42

Speaking of election irregularities… A Labour party member has just reported on BBC London 94.9 that she’s seen over 200 Lambeth votes spoiled because the polling clerk has written voters’ ID numbers on the ballots. She says votes for all parties were affected and that she’s never seen spoiled votes on such a scale. Again I’m certainly not saying these votes would’ve made a difference overall but it is deeply worrying that there appears to have been widespread misinterpretation of the voting procedures.

20:48

The Conservative party has taken Bexley and Bromley’s assembly seat - not a surprise as it was Tory before as well, so it doesn’t tell us much. Boris v Ken numbers for them should be available soon.

20:53

Labour has narrowly taken Brent and Harrow. This was Conservative before.

21:02

Full Bexley and Bromley results from London Elects.

Bit of light relief from the Guardian liveblog:

“Are you saying that a performing monkey in a Conservative rosette could have won this race?” asks the Beeb [when interviewing Steve Norris]? Are you saying one hasn’t?

21:10

They’re coming thick and fast now. Apparently Labour has comfortably held the North East constituency (a doubling of majority according to the winning candidate but I doubt that takes increased turnout into account). It was Labour by a fair bit last time too. Dunno what’s happened to City and East which has been 99% ready for about an hour!

21:25

City and East has remained Labour. Not sure what the Beeb is up to - no results at all on their site, unless I’m looking in the wrong place.

21:32

Havering and Redbridge has stayed Conservative with an increased majority, apparently mainly with votes previously given to smaller parties. If this is repeated in the Mayoral vote, Boris will romp home. And we know he’s good at romping. (sorry, cheap joke, I’m getting tired).

21:40

Enfield and Haringey held by Labour, but with a fairly small majority over the Conservatives.

Doug (in comments): thanks for confirming it’s not just me who can’t see any updates on the BBC site. London Elects seems to still only have the Bexley and Bromley result to boot.

Will: I feel your pain.

1st pref mayoral votes are finally coming in: Bexley and Bromley has gone for Boris; City and East and North East have gone for Ken. No surprises there really. Sorry, I didn’t type quickly enough to get the numbers down!

21:53

Brent and Harrow has gone slightly for Ken too - not surprising given the assembly result.

Current numbers from the Guardian liveblog:

Boris Johnson: 378,239 votes
Ken Livingstone: 343,770 votes.

And the majority of constituencies so far have been pro-Ken, I think. Oh dear.

22:06

London Elects has finally put some more results online, and the BBC had one last time I looked.

22:15

Aha! guardian.co.uk is posting assembly results as they get them, and seem to be quicker at data entry than both London Elects and the Beeb.

Dave Hill points out that if the Conservatives only get 8 Assembly Members (it looks more likely they’ll have 9, but 8 is possible), Boris will have to get co-operation with another party to get his budget through. Who would that be? Lib Dems seem most likely, he concludes.

22:23

What on earth’s happening on the London Elects site? Some results that were up a minute ago seem to have gone again. I’m assuming this is due to a technical cockup rather than inaccuracy in figures. Sorry, this is rather boring, I’ll try and stop complaining about the display of results on other websites!

James (in comments): We’re not completely certain Boris has won; it’s just extremely likely. We don’t know anything about second preferences yet, but the consensus seems to be that the gap on first prefs will be too large to be crossed using second prefs, especially considering the BNP are polling relatively well on first prefs and we all know where their second ones are likely to go…

22:31

More results: BBC London TV news says Labour’s held Lewisham and Greenwich, and the Conservatives have held West Central. I assume results will soon appear on one or all of the sites linked above.

22:37

Latest numbers nabbed from Guardian liveblog (and I think they’re just nabbing them off rolling news channels!):

7 of 14 constituencies declared.
FIRST PREFERENCE VOTES:
Boris Johnson: 46%
Ken Livingstone: 40%
Brian Paddick: 9%

22:52

Doug’s asked about how the BNP is polling. I don’t think we have list votes available yet, but here’s the mayoral 1st prefs I could find:
Bexley and Bromley: 8,950 4.41%
City and East: 10,214 5.45%
North East: 3,776 1.90%
There’s been more mayoral results coming in on the radio but again I can’t find them in print anywhere and can’t type fast enough to catch the figures accurately.

23:01

BBC London 94.9 and Sky say 10 of 14 constituencies are done. I’m getting seriously fed up of having no reliable written source of results or figures - anyone got any ideas? The latest figures are 43% Boris, 39% Ken, 10% Brian on 1st prefs, but I have no idea what that means because I don’t know which constituencies are covered and so whether we have more Conservative or Labour ones yet to declare.

23:07

Ah, here we go, the radio says that the 4 left to declare are expected to all be Boris, so looks like we are doomed. Good news is that slowpoke Barnet and Camden has finished counting and is just going through verification, so we should be put out of our misery fairly soon. I’m suffering a bit of brain fatigue (cue Boris supporters saying I always have, I just didn’t know it before) so have forgotten the other bit of news I was going to pass on here. I’m sure it’ll come back as soon as I publish this update.

23:17 

Ealing and Haringey has stayed Conservative, as has Croydon and Sutton, as has Merton and Wandsworth. I *think* this means all the constituencies are in, so a mayoral result should come very soon. Current assembly list calculations being done on the hoof by Kellner of YouGov and announced on BBC radio look like the Conservatives will pick up top-up seats so Boris won’t need a coalition, and it’s looking very possible that the BNP will pick up a seat too. Looks very likely that One London is out.

23:23

The mayoral results are now being aggregated to find out if Boris has won on first prefs. If he has, expect a result extremely soon. If not, expect one fairly soon.

Whatever happens, at least we can soon get some sleep.

23:30

Doug: sorry for not being clear - it looks like One London is out and won’t be replaced by UKIPs either, which leaves room for other top-ups.

The constituency assembly seats have been confirmed as 8 Conservative, 6 Labour.

Kellner of YouGov is repeating his prediction: Boris leading but not with over 50%. Roughly half of minority 2nd prefs wasted, the rest splitting fairly evenly between Boris and Ken, so not enough to close the gap. YouGov were right last time, and it looks like we were wrong to pooh-pooh their polling this time. Time will tell of course, but that’s rapidly running out!

23:52

Tessa Jowell: “Everyone in the Labour team is preparing themselves for the worst.” (on BBC London 94.9) Result should come in approx 5 minutes. She sounds dreadful.

23:58
After 2nd prefs, Boris wins with 1168738 votes vs 1028966 for Ken - majority of 139772.

Thanks for trying, Boris-stoppers.

01:03

Bet you thought I’d gone, didn’t you? Well, I’m still here, not-so-patiently waiting for the list results. Couldn’t help but update here to say that Boris just said in a BBC News interview that we were welcome to ‘kick him out with gusto’ in four years. What a kind offer!

They’re all on BBC London (on BBC One) right now if you want one last look at them.

Update: Not a lengthy appearance, but one which confirmed the general impressions created elsewhere in the campaign.

The final part summed them up really: the presenter gave each of them 30 seconds to tell voters one concrete thing they could "guarantee" would change if they were elected Mayor. In reverse order, Ken gave detailed and specific pledges on youth provision to lead to cuts in youth misbehaviour/crime, Brian talked about a culture change moving against crime, in semi-specific terms, using most of his time, and Boris used only half his time, to promise precisely nothing specific at all.

A vote for Boris "time for a change" Johnson is, ironically enough, a vote for someone with absolutely no idea how to change anything.

The First Post informs me that Boris Johnson’s minders have twice turned down invitations for him to be interviewed alongside his two main rivals on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The central aim of Johnson’s minder-in-chief, Aussie Lynton Crosby, has been to prevent his candidate from living up the his ‘Blundering Boris’ reputation. He has been more successful than many Tories feared but the maximum point of danger for Johnson has been whenever he appeared before the media on his own.

The contest between Johnson, Labour’s incumbent Livingstone, and the lacklustre Lib-Dem Brian Paddick has received daily news coverage on the BBC and ITV stations in the capital. Boris Johnson has twice been ‘kebabed’ by Neil and Paxman and looked like a rabbit on the headlights on Question Time with David Dimbleby as the assertive ringmaster.

So it’s no surprise that his minder Crosbie [sic] wants to avoid the possibility of gaffes in the last few days of the campaign - hence the desire to avoid Today. Under electoral law and BBC guidelines the programme producers only have to give him the opportunity to take part. If he fails to turn up, they can go ahead and interview his rivals leaving an empty chair and switched-off microphone for Johnson.

A late surge of gaffophobia, eh? Sounds like his team are getting very jittery in these final days. It’s all to play for, Boris-stoppers!

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

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

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

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

An extremely kind Boris-stopper has gone to the trouble of transcribing the whole of Boris’s interview on PM from just over a week ago.

The whole thing is behind the cut, but here are a few of the best questions:

• Who’s running for Mayor, old Boris or new Boris? The clown or the careful career politician?
• The RMT have called a tube strike today for April 28^th and 29^th. Your policy on strikes with regards to them is a bit of a joke isn’t it?
• Just on localism on smoking if I may, which was the topic in hand. Is localism more important than saving people from cancer and second-hand smoke?

All in all, we can see in this interview how desperate Boris always is to steer things back to his simplistic pre-learned lines on a few limited topic areas, and avoid any serious scrutiny of his policies, to the extent that he quickly becomes exasperated and angry-sounding as soon as anyone dares to question him. There’s plenty of evidence here of his propensity to interrupt, talk over and ignore people at any opportunity, too - congratulations to the transcriber for managing to decipher both sides of such talking clashes!

(more…)

There’s a general consensus on a large number of blogs that last night’s Question Time debate was a huge let-down. As Dave Hill says:

I was disappointed. Several policy areas fundamental to the mayoralty - housing, transport and the environment - went completely unexamined. I sincerely believe we’ve gone over the Al-Qaradawi and "watermelon smiles" territory quite often enough and there were too many questions on the emotive subjects of crime, race and immigration. Perhaps the QT team was worried about being too London-centric, but I thought the emphasis was wrong.

As someone looking forward to seeing Boris’s policies exposed as the hollow shams they are on live national TV, I can only agree! There was minimal focus on policy detail, which is what matters in the end.

Liberal Conspiracy have another take on the show:

The BBC1 Question Time special last night, featuring “the three main London mayoral candidates”, was as depressing a tit-for-tat charade as I’ve seen for some time. The ratio of insult to fact or argument was far, far too high.

Their blogger is particularly disappointed by Brian Paddick, but that doesn’t change our tactical voting advice! He does come on to Boris at the end though:

As for Boris Johnson, well it’s hardly any news that he is a complete buffoon, but his performance was shockingly bad. Tory or not, how anyone can consider backing him (other than as a childish prank or a cipher for the return of county squire politics) is astonishing. The final questioner of the evening noted that he couldn’t even figure out how to answer a question without getting into a mental scramble. But he fluffed that one, too.

As do some of the commenters:

there are no positive reasons for Boris to get the job, while Ken’s record has plenty. It’s quite the oddest election campaign I’ve ever seen, since it seems to be run solely in order for a newspaper editor to revenge herself on an elected politician who pissed her off, without any thought that there’s actually a large city to be run at the end of it.

So what did we here at Stop Boris make of the programme?

To be honest I think Question Time was such a big let-down that it’s barely worth me writing about it, particularly when the above quotes are all spot on, so I’ll keep my additional thoughts brief.

This was the umpteenth televised mayoral debate and Boris still hasn’t got the hang of taking turns to speak, since he’s so self-absorbed and self-centred that he has no concept of other people’s right to be heard. Brian Paddick got huge applause when he told him to "shut up and let somebody else speak for once!" (quoted from memory), and I’ve seen mixed reactions to this outburst online but he’s had to put up with seeing Boris in even more debates than I have, and frankly I don’t blame him at all for finally snapping!

What Boris has got better at with practice is sticking to his cynical brief, but that means he still doesn’t properly answer questions or tell anyone any details about his policies. His cynical brief is to spout brief, hollow, scripted lines about issues (primarily crime), then turn around whatever has been asked of him into an opportunity to attack the incumbent Mayor, Ken Livingstone.

And so it was that last night we saw him turning everything into an attack on Ken as quickly as possible, and heard almost no information about Boris’s own plans. It was particularly noticeable in the final, ‘off-the-wall’ question: which type of food would each candidate say best represented his leadership style? There is no way on earth that any normal person would turn this into an attack on someone else, but somehow Boris attempted to do so, having barely touched on an answer about himself, to cries of derision from most people in the studio.

In the end, under significant pressure to answer the question for once, he mumbled some nonsense about Tesco Value cornflakes, which certainly sounds about right: they’re all right if you’re primarily concerned with cutting expenditure (as Boris is on instigating big police cutbacks, for instance), but the results aren’t quite as good as ‘proper’ cornflakes (hence his complete lack of targets on crime reduction) and you can’t help feeling you’ve bought into a pale imitation of the real thing (for ‘the real thing’ read ‘a competent politician’). Perhaps he was on to something there with his one unscripted answer of the evening, after all.

Eight-and-a-half hours until tonight’s Question Time special, with Boris, Ken and Brian up against each other. It will almost certainly be the most widely watched debate yet, so we’ll all be on the edges of our seats with longing for Boris to make a monumental gaffe – or at least just to repeat the rudeness, lack of policy grasp and outright lies that have characterised most of his previous TV debating appearances!

Pippa Crerar from the Evening Standard was the guest newspaper reviewer on the BBC News channel last night at about 0.20.

When they came to a double-page spread in today’s Guardian about Ken Livingstone, she made a jokey comment about the poor quality of his teeth in the large photo included in the spread, and the BBC News host (the really good one who’s on last thing at night usually: Tim Wilcox, I’ve learned since posting this originally) joked back that of course that sort of comment is what we should expect from someone from the Evening Standard!

Her remarks just after this were revealing. I quote them from memory after a night’s sleep so excuse me if they’re not spot on.

Actually, I’ve always got on very well with Ken Livingstone. But yes, working there covering the election is… interesting at the moment.

I should think it is!

ITV London are recording a debate between the main three candidates tonight, for transmission on ITV1 in London tomorrow evening at 22.40. It’s a full hour long so should provide more space for exploring the issues than any of the TV debates during the campaign have done so far – and so hopefully more chance for Boris to get a good skewering.

As you may already be aware, that’s followed on Thursday night at 22.45 on BBC One by a near-live TV debate between the three, again for an hour, in a special edition of Question Time.

I think there’s also a debate on Sky News next Monday evening, 28 April, just three days before the polls near closure.

It’s all go! Fingers crossed for some election-losing Boris gaffes on all three programmes!

Warning: may make you fall off your chair laughing.

Via The Tory Troll.

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).

(No, not Boris for PM, like those terrifying Facebook groups.)

I’ve just heard that Boris will be interviewed live by Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM at some point in the next hour. Could be worth a listen, or a Listen Again if you’re reading this after it’s been on.

À la ITV London Tonight ‘debate’ yesterday, I’ll give you my thoughts on the interview after it’s been on.

Update: Well, that was rather good. Eddie Mair is a formidable interviewer and gave Boris a real grilling, with which he could barely cope.

He was really on edge throughout, and following his usual tactic of desperately trying to find a way back to one of his ready-prepared lines: in a discussion about his smoking gaffe he somehow tried to steer the conversation onto making the streets safer; and while covering his laughable policy on Tube strikes (which has already been dismissed by the RMT as being the stuff of ‘cloud cuckoo land’), he tried to steer things around to the debatable statistic he keeps chanting about relative mugging likelihoods in London and New York.

I recorded the exchange on DAB, so it’s in MP2 format at the moment, which most computer-based media players should handle, not sure about portable ones though. For a highlight, skip forward to 2:58 and you’ll hear Boris apparently coming rather close to losing his rag with his interrogator over the question of the great Bus Black Hole:

Eddie: At a cost of?

Boris: [finishes his meandering sentence, then] At or about £100m.

Eddie: Why did it take so long to get that figure out of you? Because you’ve said [Boris tries to interrupt – a common feature of this interview] all through the campaign it was £8m.

Boris: [Cuts his interruption short and draws breath, perhaps counting to ten very quickly in his head] I’m sorry – pay attention if you don’t mind!

You have to hear the way he says ‘mind’ - the amount of fury and frustration pent up in it is a sound to behold!

What we hear in this interview is yet more confirmation of the picture we’ve been building up throughout this campaign, of a self-centred man who’s been brought up to think he’s the most important person in any room and anyone questioning that is treated as astonishing or plain rude. Not to mention of course the usual picture of a man incapable of engaging on any given issue but instead hell-bent on returning to the handful of topics he’s learnt his lines on.

He’s a selfish, lightweight buffoon, with unimplementable, poorly thought-out policies, who couldn’t possibly cope for four years as Mayor.

Update: an extremely kind Boris-stopper has gone to the trouble of transcribing this interview!

Boris continued his record of blundering racial offence yesterday by telling an Asian presenter on BBC radio: "You can’t out-ethnic me".

Unfortunately I hadn’t heard that there was to be a three-way debate between the candidates on the BBC Asian Network yesterday morning (perhaps because I’m not Asian and their station advertising is very well targeted? ), but apparently there was, and the relevant part of the transcript reads:

Boris Johnson: Almost 100 years ago my Turkish great-great grandfather came to London and I’m very proud of that.

Presenter Nihal Arthanayake: What part of your Turkish culture do you maintain?

BJ: A lively … interest in Turkey.

NA: How often do you go and see your family?

BJ: It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London.

NA: Did you just find out when you needed it to get the ethnic vote?

BJ: I’m happy to say that lots of Turkish relations have been coming and going in our family for a long time.

NA: Are you down with the ethnics?

BJ: I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me Nihal.

NA: How many bhangra gigs have you been to over the last few years?

BJ: I can’t remember. But my children are a quarter Indian so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

NA: Okay, let’s not try to out-brown each other.

(I’ve taken that from the Evening Standard, which ran a surprising number of anti-Boris pieces yesterday (i.e. any). Their full article on this is here.)

As well as the obvious ‘out-ethnic’ gaffe, and his obvious complete lack of interest in and knowledge of the culture he claims to be so integral to him, I find the comment "It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London" particularly interesting, because of those first three words: "It turns out". That doesn’t sound like the phrasing of someone who’s taken a keen interest into his ethnic heritage throughout his life: it sounds very much like someone who has paid a lackey to do a quick bit of research to try and get more votes.

And of course the most laughably ridiculous bit is him saying "I can’t remember" when asked how many bhangra gigs he’s been to. I’d be prepared to place a large bet on the answer being an all too memorable zero. Strange that that should slip his mind so easily.

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).

The latest three-way debate is on tonight at 22.35 on BBC One.

It was recorded last night and sadly no tales of election-losingly momentous gaffes from Boris have leaked out, but it’s still got to be worth tuning in for.