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.

Excuse me for posting something with no anti-Boris angle at all, but I do think Channel 4 News make the best news reports in the business, and tonight they showed Cathy Newman catching up with the three leading contenders as they campaigned around London. Her report, available as a video by clicking Watch the report, is well worth spending a few minutes of your time with.

A new series of Channel 4’s satirical show started this evening, and had some good Mayoral Election material in it, particularly a bit emphasising the sheer frothiness of Boris’s campaign strategy, which I’m contemplating attempting to get onto YouTube in some way.

In the mean time, here’s a reminder of one of the highlights of their previous series, after Boris had become the Conservative candidate for Mayor, which someone else has already posted on YouTube, so I don’t have to (fortunately, since I don’t have a recording of it any more anyway):

Where Richard and Judy and Blue Peter led, the Tory Troll has today noticed that Boris has followed.

It appears he got some figures wrong in his video, so they had to cut away and overdub him later giving the correct figures.

Hard to believe that Boris would ever get any figures wrong though, isn’t it? Er, no.

No wonder they wanted to keep him off live TV.

Channel 4’s excellent online FactCheck service has had a look at Boris’s costing of his pointless plan to replace bendy buses with conductor-dependent Routemaster-style buses, aka Boris’s bus black hole.

FactCheck rates each claim it examines on a scale from 0 to 5, where (rather counter-intuitively) 0 means it’s completely true, and 5 means there’s not a shred of truth in it anywhere at all. So how does Boris’s claim stack up?

The verdict

Even taking the unspecified costs of getting the new bus design on the road out of the calculations, the £8m figure is a vast under-estimate of the extra cost of staffing a new Routemaster.

Independent analysis puts the total cost of Johnson’s plans at £114m - in comparison to which, Johnson’s estimate looks like pretty small change.

FactCheck rating: 4.5

I’m just trying to work out where the 0.5 points’ worth of truth is located. Perhaps it’s the fact that he said it would cost £8m, and in fact it will cost £8m; it will just cost a further £106m as well!

Worth a read, anyway: they’ve certainly done their homework, unlike a certain Mayoral candidate, who clearly can’t be trusted to do his, even when it comes to his most highly publicised policy.

It really doesn’t bode well for Boris’s ability to control an £11bn budget as Mayor if he can’t even get the small sums right.

In the unlikely event you’re one of the tiny minority of Londoners to whom the type of bus operated on a small number of central routes actually matters enough to you that you agree that most of a Mayoral election campaign should be focussed on it, read on.

Channel 4’s FactCheck have had a look at one of Boris’s manifesto claims: “[Bendy buses] have twice as many collisions with pedestrians and cyclists than other buses.”

Ignoring the grammatically incorrect ’than’ (what did all those school fees buy?), you can certainly read some figures to suggest that this is true, which is why FactCheck give this claim a generous 50% accuracy score.

However, those figures compare bendy bus-operated routes against every other bus route in the entirety of London! This overlooks the obvious fact that bendy buses operate in central areas only, serving some of the most pedestrian-full streets in the city. Anyone who’s walked (or, I assume, driven) around central London will be familiar with how little attention many pedestrians pay to the red man signal and how prone they are to run out into the road to get to whatever exciting thing awaits them on the other side. Sheer volumes of pedestrians make these roads much riskier to operate any vehicle on.

When you compare bendy bus figures with a selection of non-bendy routes operating along similar roads in similar conditions, lo and behold, the figures become more or less identical (and certainly the difference is statistically insignificant, given the low overall numbers of accidents involving any types of buses).

And I’m delighted to see that those mischievous FactCheck researchers aren’t content to leave it at that, but instead deliver one final twist:

How do bendy buses score in contrast to accidents involving the old Routemaster?

Changes in routes mean that data isn’t directly comparable, but according to other figures TfL gave FactCheck, between January 1994 and September 2007 there were 0.05 fatalities per million km operated by bendy buses and 0.08 fatalities per million km operated by Routemasters.

For every dodgy use of statistics to support Boris’s bizarre obsession with abolishing bendy-buses, there’s an equally dodgy way to use statistics to prove his policies woefully misguided - hurrah!