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.

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!

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.

Blairwatch has had a closer look at that Standard article I blogged earlier. Their conclusion? It’s a load of rubbish.

Apparently we’re one of three blogs that Tom from Blairwatch would recommend, by way of contrast with the Standard, for ‘good journalism’. It’s enough to make me feel a bit sad that I’ll be quitting journalism this weekend to return to the obscurity and spare time I enjoyed prior to the Conservative party foisting a terrifying Mayoral candidate on the city I love.

Apparently we’ve been providing "all at the Standard with hours of family entertainment".

They’ve certainly been providing us with entertainment too, in various genres. Mainly Comedy, Fantasy and Horror, but certainly not Factual.

There’s been a lot of speculation during the campaign as to what big ‘revelation’ Andrew Gilligan would be saving up for the day before the vote, which then couldn’t be refuted in time to stop people fleeing from Ken in droves and into the arms of Gilligan’s on-off "pal" Boris.

The Tory Troll reports that Gilligan claims in today’s Evening Standard that the congestion charge has brought in 96% less money than Transport for London say it has.

That’s one hell of a big claim. I mean, couldn’t they have come up with something a bit more believable, 50% or something? Surely no-one will buy the idea that TfL would over-report their revenue by that much?

Ah, but of course, they’ll have shown their workings in great detail and it will be based on calculations and assertions by renowned experts in the field, so it will be believable on that basis, won’t it? Er, no.

They don’t disclose any detailed calculations, and the figures are based on an anonymous banker – he has that much faith in his figures that he fears for his job if he’s named – and a Tory councillor, active in the campaign to elect Boris, who is so out of touch with transport issues that he thinks Oyster bus fares are 67% higher than they really are.

So, was this supposed to be the big revelation that would make us delete our web site in shame at ever considering voting against Boris? I think we’ll keep the site up.

Addendum:

As Gilligan himself points out in the comments, he didn’t actually write this article. I must confess to having based my post primarily on The Tory Troll’s post, only clicking through to the main article to check a few figures, so I didn’t notice that it wasn’t actually written by the usual suspect.

That doesn’t make the Standard’s article any less rubbish, but it does leave open the possibility that Gilligan still has his ‘big one’ saved up for tomorrow’s paper, perhaps not thinking the Standard has yet abused its position enough in an attempt to affect the election’s outcome, and therefore that it’s imperative to cover their advertising boards with one last inverted pyramid of piffle as an onslaught on commuters heading home to vote. Time will tell, but he commented through his employer’s internet connection so he’s certainly working late tonight on something.

Gilligan also thanks us for hours of entertainment. If he and his Standard cohorts have been reading the blog for a while, and this is the first time he’s been moved to comment about an inaccuracy, I suppose we do at least have their tacit admission that everything else we’ve said is accurate Which is certainly more than can be said for those Standard advertising boards…

This looks very interesting from a first skim.

Unfortunately it’s 1am and I do still have a day-job to try not to fall asleep during.

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.

The rumour was true.

One of the interesting bits of information in there, though, is that Brian Paddick is apparently getting the most second preferences. The second preferences of people voting for Ken or Boris first almost certainly won’t be counted anyway (but Brian is a good use for them as last-ditch insurance against the other main candidate), but if anyone else is putting Brian second it’s almost inconceivable that that isn’t just a wasted vote.

To get the best use of your two votes, if your first choice isn’t Ken/Boris, you need to put whoever you want for Mayor first and then Ken second to stop Boris (or vice versa if you’re insane ).

More voting advice is, as you probably know by now, here.

I bet you think there’ll be some clever twist in this post which will mean that the heading is completely the opposite of the truth – a bit like an Evening Standard advertising board.

Think again!

The Standard have given their team of reporters – the ones who haven’t come out on BBC News as self-proclaimed "Boris Johnson supporter[s]" (Andrew Gilligan on Question Time Extra last night, in case we weren’t sure) – the three leading candidates’ manifestos and asked them to pass judgement on their pledges.

In fact, they have largely interpreted their brief to be to pick as many holes as possible in the manifestos, but it’s interesting how easy a job they’ve had doing this with Boris’s.

The article opens well, pointing out that he is completely hopeless on the Tube:

1. there’s no chance of Aslef or the RMT signing up to a no-strike deal ("it will immediately lead to a strike" if he suggests one!);
2. his air-conditioning plans just amount to what is already being done or isn’t really possible; and
3. they question whether he’s really understood the Metronet contracts.

The piece goes on to criticise him on a further fourteen separate issues:

4. his bus costing;
5. his lack of detail on "reform" of the Congestion Charge;
6. the difficulties of his proposals to fine utility companies who dig up the roads;
7. his possible optimism about how far he could stretch money saved on advertising;
8. the "major headache" of enforcing his Tube alcohol ban (which "will not necessarily help" with cutting crime anyway);
9. his return to the days of stop and search;
10. his crime mapping potentially creating crime-ridden ghettos;
11. his pathetically low number of pledged tree-plantings;
12. his complete ignoring (ignorance?!) of climate change;
13. his hypocritical position on airport expansion which "would dramatically increase emissions from air travel and damage local wildlife";
14. the risk of his house-building policy letting "poor performing councils off the hook";
15. the fact that his supposedly ‘affordable’ housing scheme would require a household income of £60,000, which apparently puts it out of reach to 80% of London households!;
16. his complete misunderstanding of the empty homes situation – empty homes are at their lowest in 30 years and the majority may only have been empty for weeks: "the housing market can’t operate without a reasonable degree of turnover".

As well as all that, and particularly interestingly, they have this – we’ll call it no. 17 – to say about his promise to chair the Metropolitan Police Authority:

His pledge to run the MPA, and hold the Commissioner to account, is well intentioned but can he cope with being chairman of the body which oversees the biggest force in the country? Previous holders put aside three days a week.

Given that most people doubt Boris’s ability to run an alcohol-based event in a brewery, and certainly can’t imagine how he’ll cope with trying to run London, the idea that he could take all that on and cope with the burden of a chairmanship which would require as much as three days a week of his time is stretching credibility to breaking point.

Of course, given how little is left in his manifesto that the Standard haven’t exposed as fundamentally or seriously flawed in this article, one has to wonder why on earth they’re so keen to get him elected as Mayor. Nothing to do with a petty squabble with a certain incumbent, is it? As it happens, Ken’s manifesto comes off comparatively well under their scrutiny. (They even admit his crime reduction target is "realistic" and that "latest figures show crime fell by six per cent last year"!) No wonder they’re trying to distract voters from the actual issues in their more high-profile day-to-day election coverage!

It seems the colourful character protruding from the front of the book Ken took to the Time Out hustings isn’t the only puppet called Boris.

The Tory Troll’s analysis of today’s in-depth Boris coverage in the Guardian is spot on. Among the revelations:

Boris Johnson was effectively chosen as the Tory candidate by The Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley.

Boris’ minders are being paid on a commission basis. The fewer the gaffes, the higher the pay.

Boris admits that even he is intimidated by his minders.

Lynton Crosby is paying a PR company to ’round on journalists who fail to portray Johnson in a flattering light.’ Hmm does that sound familiar to you?

It all gives further evidence of how tightly managed Boris is being at the moment, which is all very well for a campaign but can’t possibly last for four years, particularly not when his Crosby-imposed drinking ban will end after the election. So we’re being asked to elect someone we won’t actually be served by in office if he wins. How dishonest; how Crosby.

(Don’t forget, Lynton Crosby’s renowned for his BNP-like campaign tactics of simply saying whatever it takes to get elected, no matter how untrue it may be: when working in Australia he falsely claimed that immigrants had thrown their children overboard from a boat, in order to stir up anti-immigrant feeling and get his right-wing employer elected. It worked.)

The front-page Guardian article (the first one of the two linked above) details how Boris has raised (and presumably spent) about a million pounds, most of it going on campaigning in the outer boroughs. The mayoral election spending limit is £400,000, but Team Boris spent a small fortune before the official campaign period kicked in, so they’ve been able to get around that restriction without too much difficulty. I seem to remember reading that Ken has struggled to raise even as much as the spending limit.

Will Boris manage to buy the election? It depends which opinion poll is right, really – a new one came out today suggesting a lead for Ken, but Boris had that same lead in a poll on Monday, and several other polls have shown just a handful of votes between them, in both directions. The result really could go either way, and every single vote counts, so it’s vital that we make the best use of our votes to stop Boris!

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!

Tut, tut. For someone so keen on highlighting alleged, but unproven, ’sleaze’ in City Hall, and who delights in whipping up complaints about Ken’s campaign funding, which is not breaking any rules, Boris should really (to coin a phrase) sort out his own tangled hair before trying to comb other people’s.

Today, the Evening Standard broke the news that Boris Johnson has been in breach of Parliamentary rules for 18 months, having never declared to Parliament that he owned a third of the shares in a TV company – more than double the 15% threshold that makes declaration compulsory.

Labour MP Karen Buck today referred the breach to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards John Lyon for a full investigation.

The Regent’s Park & Kensington North MP said: "This shows both hypocrisy and incompetence. Londoners can’t afford to have someone who has such ‘oversights’ in charge of the multi-billion pound responsibilities of Mayor… Ignorance of the law is no defence at all. If he can’t run his MP’s office properly, how can he run London?"

Cabinet minister Peter Hain was forced to quit this year for failing to declare donations to his office in full.

In other words, in Government this could easily be a resignable offence. It also follows a reprimand for Boris from the Electoral Commission earlier this year for failing to declare correctly £45,000 in donations.

What these incidents show is that Boris is completely incompetent, and can’t follow the basic rules with even his own financial affairs. Quite how anyone will believe he can be trusted with London’s £11bn budget is beyond me!

It’s also interesting that it was the Evening Standard which broke this story. It certainly looks like they’re trying to claw back some standards after realising they were really doing themselves a lot of damage with their relentless bias.

Sure enough, the Evening Standard web site is now carrying the results of this week’s YouGov poll.

Boris Johnson has maintained his lead over Ken Livingstone in the race to be Mayor - despite increasing doubts over his seriousness for the job, a poll reveals today.

The Evening Standard/YouGov poll found that the Tory candidate is still on course to oust his Labour rival from City Hall.

Mr Johnson leads Mr Livingstone by 44 per cent to 37 per cent on first preference votes, with Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick third on 12 per cent.

But the gap between Mr Johnson and the Mayor for the final "run-off", when second preferences are taken into account, has narrowed to its closest in the race.

The Tory MP’s lead over Mr Livingstone in the "run-off " is 53 per cent to 47 per cent, a gap of six per cent. Last week, YouGov found the gap was eight per cent (54-46), a fortnight ago it was 12 per cent (56-44) and four weeks ago it was 14 points (57-43).

Liberal Democrat voters appear to be turning away from Mr Johnson, giving him his lowest level of their support since our polls began at the start of the mayoral campaign.

Only 29 per cent of Lib-Dem supporting Londoners say they are likely to give the Tory contender their first preferences, with 29 per cent also set to give them to Mr Livingstone.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of voters are worried that Mr Johnson is "not serious enough" to make an effective mayor. Those who question the Tory candidate’s seriousness has risen from 34 per cent two weeks ago, to 40 per cent last week, to 43 per cent this week.

YouGov says that this appears to be the main reason why his lead in the runoff continues to narrow.

So we’re chipping away at his lead, but are we chipping hard enough and fast enough to knock him off course by the election, which is now just ten days away?

If YouGov’s analysis (last line above) is correct, we need to keep emphasising to anyone thinking of voting for him that he really is an incompetent man who couldn’t run for a bus, let alone run a city with an £11bn budget. Sharing the campaign song/video around may help with this, but it may not be enough: challenge anyone you think might vote Boris and remind them how unreliable he really is and how it’ll be their money and their city’s reputation he throws away if he doesn’t manage his Mayoralty properly, which of course he isn’t capable of doing.

Keep up the pressure, Boris-stoppers – this battle is going to the wire.

Well, here’s a surprise:

Coming soon to the Vatican web site, a poll on which religion local residents think is best; and to a bears’ social networking web site, a poll on which natural environment is users’ preferred location for emptying their bowels.

Hopefully actually coming soon, a new and somewhat more scientific (YouGov) poll for the Standard: they’ve published one every Monday for some time now, so I’m expecting one to appear this afternoon too. We’ll keep you posted.