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

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

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

Some of the highlights from the comments are:

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

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

I thought he was going to walk it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slippage

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

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

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

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

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

Experience

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

Bus black hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoilt

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

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

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

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

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

Boris: Can I just say…?

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

Boris: Why not?

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

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

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

According to a quick item on the BBC News 24 newspaper preview just now, tomorrow’s (well, today’s now) Telegraph has a lengthy profile of Boris which doesn’t sound like it’s the glowing praise-athon you might expect from his former employer.

It’s not online yet, but what I could glean from the television was that part of its headline was “Running for Mayor… and running from the Press?”, which is a nice gaffophobia reference, illustrated by a photo of a journalist (the author of the piece?) trying to grab him as he walks away.

Apparently the piece also focusses on some of his gaffes and some of the racist articles published in the Spectator when he was editor of it – which he issued another apology for this week, having previously only apologised for the things he’d written himself, rather than the out-and-out racism from the pen of Taki, which he waved through to the newsstand countless times during his editorship.

I don’t suppose even a StopBoris.org-worthy hatchet job would change some Telegraph readers’ minds about the columnist they lapped up for two decades until last year – and however surprisingly negative this article might be, it’s probably not that harsh – but you never know, it might just make some of their readers think twice about backing him.

We look forward to seeing the article when it appears online.

Update: It appeared while I was writing that! I’m a bit confused because although I think this must be the article they were referring to, I can’t see any references to the Spectator racism in it. Indeed, it’s one of the milder articles I’ve read - exactly as one would expect from his former employer.

It’s not without its revelations, though. Did you wonder what the underlying motivation for Boris to become Mayor was? What incident had propelled him to do all he could to get into City Hall? Was it his passion for the city’s diverse population? Perhaps his desire to dream up exciting policy plans to improve the city? Or some overarching vision for the greatest capital on Earth? Er, no. It all dates back to one brief encounter on his bike:

I was almost killed by a bendy bus and can remember pulling over, shaking, to the kerb and thinking, ‘Who did this? It must have been Livingstone, it must have been that man.’ And I remember thinking I would do anything I could to secure his removal from office.

Knowing that that was the real motivator explains rather a lot about his ridiculous campaign, actually.

When Boris’s team decide to change their strategy, they certainly do change it: it’s just been announced that BBC Newsnight will host the first televised debate between the three leading candidates next Tuesday, 8 April.

Submit your questions for Boris now on this page, which contains one of the most enticing invitations I’ve ever seen:

What questions would you like Jeremy Paxman to ask Boris Johnson?

Goodness me – where does one begin?

Since gaffophobia hit the mainstream media, there have been a couple of interesting announcements.

Apparently Boris will now take part in a couple of TV debates with the other candidates in the coming weeks.

On last night’s BBC London they announced a forthcoming pre-recorded debate with the main candidates, including Boris, being recorded on (if I remember correctly) 14 April. You may be able to join the audience for this if you e-mail to register your interest.

And a short time ago on this evening’s Question Time on BBC One, David Dimbleby announced that on 24 April, the show will come from London and will also feature the main candidates for Mayor taking questions from the audience. Should be a must-see programme, coming just one week before London goes to the polls. If you want to be among those putting questions to them, register your interest via the Question Time web site.

Congratulations to everyone who covered the determination of the Boris campaign to keep him out of the spotlight: it looks like the coverage has shamed him back into it!

Earlier this evening I was watching a recording of Boris rambling and talking over an unimpressive interviewer on BBC London.

The interview dated back to last November, and it was the Boris we know and fear. Bumbling and incompetent, he would shout down his interviewer to finish whatever meandering point he was stumbling towards at the time, no matter how unworthwhile the point turned out to be. It was less cringe-making than his interview on the Andrew Marr show in February, but only because the interviewer was not a hard-hitter and just let him walk all over her rather than challenging him. Marr desperately tried to maintain some kind of coherence in his interview and looked like he didn’t know whether to cry, laugh or just smack Boris around the head by the end of it, as Marr inched ever closer to the edge of his seat to plead desperately for Boris to reach the end of his sentence.

Anyway, by a strange coincidence, less than an hour later I was watching Boris on this evening’s BBC London programme, being interviewed by the same presenter as before. I could have suffered from a sense of déjà vu, were it not for the fact that Boris has had one hell of a makeover in the past few weeks.

Looking at the date of that Andrew Marr appearance, I wonder if that was the straw that broke the Conservative camel’s back, actually. Cameron and co must surely have been watching that through the gaps between their fingers, egging on the clock towards the end of the programme, and really must have been thinking, “This can’t go on.”

And so it seems they determined it wouldn’t. Boris has been told to stop drinking completely until after 1 May, and has clearly spent what time his friends in the media let him have out of the spotlight being intensively coached in being a politician, rather than a clown.

Of course, there is no substance underneath the new exterior. Tonight’s interview was notable, like Boris’s manifesto, for how little information was actually imparted through it. If lesson number one was “Don’t be a clown”, lesson number two was evidently “Don’t tell anyone anything about what you’ll actually do if you’re Mayor”. Very politician-like, but not very helpful to anyone who wants to pick a candidate based on policies. Which is of course perfect for a campaign with no worthwhile policies to offer.

The trouble for London is that, if elected, Boris won’t be able to stay off the drink for four years, he won’t be able to keep the serious politician act up for four years, and he won’t be able to avoid making policy decisions and doing the serious business of being Mayor of London for four years. So don’t fall for the current “I’m serious after all” act: what you saw in November, or even in February, is what we would get in Mayor Boris, not the character he was acting out tonight.

Last night’s edition of This Week has an interesting little discussion starting 26-and-a-half minutes in. Prominent former Conservative minister Michael Portillo, regular guest pundit alongside Diane Abbott, struggles to reply to questions about whether Boris is now a serious politician, or just a joke - indeed, he is completely lost for words for some time!

Eventually he goes as far as to state that, prior to a clip they’d just shown of Boris moaning about crime, Portillo hadn’t seen Boris talking about any serious areas of policy at all - and that even in the clip he wasn’t actually putting forward any proposals to indicate how he would actually deal with the problems he was describing.

Portillo is speaking here as someone who’s obviously a Conservative through and through, but has stepped down from party political activity so is freer to speak his mind than most Conservatives. How many other Conservatives are sitting on similar views, keeping them to themselves?

As Portillo also pointed out, if Boris wins this election, he will become the most powerful Tory in the country for over a decade. “He will be in power over 7 million Londoners while Cameron is still just talking about power - which would be quite an extraordinary situation!”

Extraordinary indeed - can fellow Conservatives really afford for Boris to be their figurehead?

On a related note, this week’s Guardian Politics Podcast has some discussion about the Mayoral election contest (about 14-and-a-half minutes in), and it’s well worth a listen. The related point is made by their correspondent Allegra Stratton, who’s seen Boris in action on the campaign trail.

I’m not saying I think it’s a good thing, but I think he possibly can [stay more serious/bury his buffoonishness] for the election campaign; I think over the period of a year, to a year and a half, to two years, that would see us go from the London Mayoral election to the probable general election, I think that there is a question mark over whether Boris wouldn’t become the biggest problem for the national Conservatives.

If I were a Conservative supporter, I’d want to keep Boris as far away from City Hall as possible, so as not to damage Cameron’s chances in couple of years’ time. And, of course, I’d start by downloading the Conservatives against Boris poster…

Tonight’s London news programmes’ election coverage was centred on Gordon Brown’s unsurprising endorsement of Ken Livingstone, what with him being in the same party and all. (They have ‘history’, of course, but some of the coverage would make you think Brown would seriously have refused to endorse him, which hardly seems likely.)

Both ITV and the BBC made reference to Metronet (which will bring me to Boris shortly, don’t worry). One of the most ill-informed questions I’ve seen on the news in recent memory was put to Brown by Alistair Stewart, whom I think I’ve mentioned my dislike for before, but really, this was just amateur. He said, “Do you really think Londoners can trust Ken Livingstone with a £5bn budget [don’t know where he got that figure from - I’ve always heard of it being £9-11bn] after the Metronet fiasco?”

Seriously. A supposedly respected veteran news broadcaster asking Gordon Brown whether Ken Livingstone could be trusted with big budgets after Metronet!

(For anyone as unenlightened as Stewart appeared to be, Brown forced the Metronet Tube deal on Livingstone against his loudly publicised wishes - and against a legal challenge Ken brought against the government in the courts to try to prevent them pushing it through.)

Anyway, this site is called Stop Boris, not Stop ITV’s London Tonight Being So Atrocious, so you’ll be pleased to hear that when I switched over to BBC London I was soon presented with The Blond himself, putting across a point about Metronet so convoluted that it must have taken quite some time for his campaign team to dream it up.

Apparently the current Mayor is indeed to blame for wasting money in relation to Metronet. Boris declares that Ken wasted the money he spent taking the government to court in the early days of his tenure to try to prevent the whole Metronet debacle from ever happening!

Now, StopBoris.org is already under enough suspicion of being a front for the Ken campaign (a commenter on PoliticalBetting reckons we’re Ken’s £100k-salaried ‘cronies’ - not a figure I’m ever likely to see on my payslip!) without me doing too much defending of Ken, but honestly! Boris has come out with some rubbish in this campaign, and this can certainly join the heap of nonsense. Had Ken been successful in the courts, he’d've saved many times over the money he’d spent on legal fees. And perhaps if he hadn’t opposed it, Gordon Brown wouldn’t have coughed up the £2bn to bail out Metronet from central government funds quite so readily, risking Londoners having to bear the whole bill themselves instead.

More evidence that Boris will say anything, no matter how illogical or downright nonsensical, if he thinks it will add to his chances of winning.

Needless to say, by the way, his point wasn’t challenged by anyone on BBC London. This is becoming a regular and worrying feature of the election coverage in all media. (Except StopBoris.org, obviously.)

On last night’s BBC London news I witnessed what must surely be a conscious tactic being adopted by Boris Johnson’s campaign: soundbites which are not just putting a spin on the issue at hand, but actually make no logical sense in response to the subject at hand.

This post is rather long so I’m going to make use of the ‘More’ feature on this blog. (You’ll have to excuse my lack of brevity - I’m new to this blogging business…)

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