Further to my previous post on the subject, The Tory Troll has an interesting update.

Yesterday saw the Evening Standard running a number of anti-Boris articles, primarily the two referred to in my previous two posts.

It could be that the editor and/or Andrew Gilligan had the day off so the journalists who’ve managed to hold on to some integrity felt able to try to do some proper election coverage for once.

It could also be that they’re starting to get a bit nervy about how desperate they’ve been sounding. Certainly the Guardian’s Michael White picked up on this the evening before in his blog, suggesting that they’re hell-bent on a Boris win now not least because they have invested so much of their reputation in ousting Ken Livingstone.

Some newspapers take pride in backing honourable losers. Others only like winners.

It’ll be interesting to see how balanced their coverage continues to be, or not to be, in the remaining couple of weeks of this fierce election campaign.

Yesterday saw Boris’s minders again having to try to conceal Boris’s real position after he let it slip in a web chat. This time the subject area was the smoking ban.

Surprisingly, the Evening Standard actually ran with this story (did the normal editor have the day off yesterday or something?) pointing out that he was paid £5-10,000 by the Association of Tobacco for a speech last year and now is coming out against the smoking ban – what a coincidence!

His minders have since issued all kinds of twisting ‘clarifications’ trying to mop up the mess. Paul Waugh – again at the Evening Standard! – has a good summary of how the events unfolded.

Brian Paddick has a good turn of phrase:

First of all Boris Johnson says that he will overturn the smoking ban. Then he issues a press release denying that he ever meant what he said. As with his comments on whether or not he snorted cocaine, Johnson continues to drop himself in it and his team have to follow him with a bucket and shovel.

How can Londoners trust someone who has received money from the tobacco industry to be objective about the smoking ban? Most Londoners agree with this initiative. There are two possible explanations for Boris wanting to overturn it: either he is out of touch with Londoners or he is in the pocket of the tobacco industry.

I love that bucket and shovel image. Spot on.

Dave Hill blogs from his Cornish retreat:

this reminded me of Pippa Crerar’s recent blog on the subject of Johnson’s apparent acknowledgement of his coke use to Janet Street-Porter and subsequent denials that he’d done such a thing. She gently pointed out that, "Boris was sacked from the Tory frontbench by former Tory leader Michael Howard in 2004 not for having an affair, but for failing to tell the truth about it." Frankly, I couldn’t give a hoot or toot if Boris powdered his nose illegally when aged 19 - after all, I did and look what a terrific fellow I’ve turned out to be - and wouldn’t blame him if he’d fibbed about it later. But just imagine if the Evening Standard was conducting a vendetta against Johnson rather than against Livingstone. We’d hear of nothing but denials and evasions and insinuations of profound untrustworthiness from now until polling day.

He’s right, of course, but that’s the Evening "Double" Standard for you.

And, because we are running a vendetta against Boris Johnson, of sorts, I feel I would be neglecting my duty were I not to take this opportunity to point out that Boris is evidently a liar and therefore should certainly not be trusted with running London, etc etc.

I had something else Dave Hill-related to blog about tonight but time has slipped away from me. Tomorrow will have to suffice. He won’t mind: he’s on holiday.

The latest YouGov poll for the Evening Standard shows that Boris’s lead has been cut in half since their previous weekly poll. He now leads Ken Livingstone by 6%, where last week he led by 13%.

Additionally, more people now think Boris isn’t serious enough to be Mayor than think he is - a position which has reversed since last week.

While it may be boastful to think StopBoris.org has played a role in making people start to move away from the blond buffoon, you never know, we might have done. So keep up the good work, Boris-stoppers - we can do this if we keep on spreading the message in these last two-and-a-bit weeks of campaigning!

This week’s set of If… cartoon strips by Steve Bell drew to a close today:

I don’t know if he’ll have changed anyone’s mind about voting for Boris, but he’s certainly kept those of us who already weren’t voting for him entertained all week.

The closer the election gets, the more shockingly biased Associated Newspapers’ propaganda pamphlets – printed with ink that won’t rub off onto your bum-cheeks – become.

Dave Hill’s been behaving like a thoroughly professional journalist throughout this campaign, giving each candidate a fair hearing, carefully weighing up their policies’ pros and cons and reporting things as he finds them throughout. He certainly hasn’t come to his blog with any particular axe to grind, unlike, say, a certain blogger sitting very near my computer at this moment, who’s only too happy to grind an axe (or preferably to bury it in Boris’s head) at any opportunity.

But even non-partisan Dave lost his rag with the latest Evening Standard bias yesterday; I say ‘lost his rag’, but that is perhaps overstating things somewhat, given that the title of his article is merely "Tut, Tut, Evening Standard". (Mind you, I’ve just noticed that his permalink, i.e. the link I just put in, gives away that that wasn’t the title of his first draft!) But it’s clear that the Daily Mail group of newspapers, for so long desperate to be rid of Ken Livingstone, are hell-bent on getting their crony Boris [who, don’t forget, saved Andrew Gilligan’s career when he was sacked from the BBC by offering him a job at the Spectator] into City Hall, no matter what the cost to their journalistic reputation.

So, how would they cover last night’s Newsnight debate, which by common consent no-one did stunningly well in but Boris definitely lost, in their evening freesheet, London Lite?

The answer is that they:

• freeze-framed through the debate to find a still where Boris looked serious, Paddick looked reasonable and Ken looked a bit silly;
• mentioned, for the headline and opening, that (unlike a certain other candidate) Boris has pledged only to serve two terms as Mayor (which is irrelevant anyway when he couldn’t possibly get re-elected after four years of incompetence and gaffes);
• spent two-thirds of the article bigging up the pledges Boris has announced, which are a checklist of the things the Evening Standard has been moaning about in relation to Lee Jasper etc.;
• mentioned one single topic from last night’s debate, namely Ken’s promise to resign if he breaks his word by putting up the Congestion Charge for sub-band G cars if re-elected;
• somehow managed to segue this into a reference to a poll finding that Ken is the candidate considered least honest by the Londoners questioned;
• er…
• that’s it.

Seriously. No mention of Boris’s bus-based blathering, when Jeremy Paxman had to ask him the same question 12 times and still didn’t get an answer. Nothing. No coverage of the debate at all. This is a propaganda effort the Chinese government would be proud of.

They claim to be "London’s Quality Newspaper", but on the evidence I’ve been seeing, even despite its lightweight content and short articles, the only one of the big four to come close to deserving that title is thelondonpaper, which is at least even-handed in its treatment of the candidates in this election. Better to have one or two fair paragraphs about each candidate than 20 grossly distorted ones, after all.

Mind you, even thelondonpaper is short on coverage of last night’s debate. It goes some way to making up for this with an intriguing nugget of information about Boris’s fundraising:

It has emerged Johnson met up with old pals from the Bullingdon Club—an exclusive Oxford University set which includes Tory leader David Cameron—to appeal for funds for his campaign.

The Bullingdon Club, lest we forget, is renowned for its members’ disgraceful behaviour in Oxford. David Cameron and Boris Johnson were in the club together, and essentially what they did was:

• Book a posh restaurant, using an assumed name (their reputation preceded them);
• Turn up to dine – and get completely and utterly drunk;
• Smash up the place, causing as much damage as possible;
• Ask your rich parents to foot the repair bill to appease the distraught restaurateur;
• Repeat at will.

Another famous Bullingdon alumnus is Darius Guppy, by the way: a lovely bunch, all in all.

So now it sounds like Boris has been catching up with his fellow Bullingdon thugs to try to get cash out of them. Makes sense: after his woeful performance on Newsnight last night, his campaign is looking pretty damaged, so I’m sure they won’t mind throwing money at it to try to restore it. What’s good enough for a restaurant…

PoliticalBetting.com has some interesting coverage of the details of today’s YouGov poll for the Evening Standard, which again shows an extraordinary lead for Boris. They have him on 49%, to Ken’s 36% and Brian’s 10%.

Particularly interesting are the figures around the one singled out by YouGov’s Peter Kellner in response to criticism – or at least questioning – of his methods. Kellner says:

To my mind, the key fact in this campaign so far is that around one-in-five people who “generally speaking” think of themselves as Labour say they would vote for Boris Johnson. If Livingstone can get most of this group to return to the fold (plus do better on second preferences), he might still win; if he can’t, he loses.

The figures showing how people seeing themselves as generally supporting a particular political party intend to vote are indeed interesting.

What we can see from them are how Boris is doing so well: he’s somehow managed to lure over people who usually support other parties to vote for him instead.

Of course, most Conservatives (86%) intend to vote for him. The 14% who don’t are of course the only ones who have realised what a dangerous idea for their party making Boris their most powerful representative in the country is, and we can only hope that between now and 1 May some more of the 86% majority will see the light too!

Perhaps more surprising is that a fairly large 22% of people who normally support Labour intend to vote for Boris. Quite why anyone of a left-wing persuasion would want to support a nasty, selfish right-winger who’s spent the past 20 years pandering to upper-middle-class Daily Telegraph readers’ prejudices through his often offensive regular column is beyond me. Indeed, the idea that anyone who normally supports Labour could possibly think that Boris Johnson will have the first clue about how to address their social justice priorities would be laughable, were the danger of our great capital sleepwalking into four long years of an incompetent Boris Mayoralty not so threatening.

The final column of these figures is especially interesting, and must be bitterly disappointing to Brian Paddick. When asked who they would be voting for, the 114 people who identified themselves as Liberal Democrat supporters answered in the following proportions: Ken 24%, Brian 31%, Boris 40%. One third more Liberal Democrats intend to vote for Boris than for Brian.

Again, I’m rather at a loss to explain this. From what I’ve seen of Brian’s pronouncements, he hasn’t done anything to alienate the more right-leaning side of his party: opposing the £25 CO₂ charge using rhetoric about it penalising ‘family cars’, for instance, should have easily kept them on board, I would have thought. So is it the moderate Lib Dems, or the left-leaning Lib Dems who are abandoning their own candidate and turning to Boris? Brian seems competent and articulate; why desert him for a bumbling buffoon who would make London a laughing stock?

What seems clear from these figures, assuming they are broadly accurate, is that Boris is the only main candidate who is currently managing to keep nearly all his party’s supporters on side. Both Ken, and to an even more alarming extent Brian, are seeing some of their own parties’ supporters crashing other parties, particularly Boris’s.

So if you know anyone who you think you can rely on to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat, and therefore haven’t bothered mentioning StopBoris.org to them, or checking they’ve registered to vote, there’s no time like the present to get them on board.

If Boris is elected Mayor on 1 May, the people who’ve crashed his party will find themselves waking up the morning after with a terrible hangover, wondering why they ever left their own party behind as they look on in horror at the four-year-long fallout of the night before. We need to get people to reach that realisation as soon as possible now, so that they return safely to their own parties before the election!

Looks like Steve Bell’s If… cartoon strip in the Guardian is turning its attention to the Mayoral election this week.

Here’s his first offering:

I have no idea if he’ll be focussing on a different candidate each day or if we’re at the Neasdenburg Rally all week!

Perhaps it will be easier to report the rare occasions Boris does turn up to an event than the numerous things he bottles out of in the coming weeks.

Last night he went to an actual hustings with actual members of the public and TV cameras and everything - extraordinary! It’s almost as if he’s campaigning properly in an election or something!

There was a catch, though. This hustings was organised by the Evening Standard (and the almost-as-objectionable ITV London Tonight), and was held in Knightsbridge, far and away one of the wealthiest areas of the capital, which also happens to be in the more recently added half of the Congestion Charge zone, and home to a lot of 4×4-drivers who’d be liable to Ken’s proposed £25 CO₂ Charge.

So, guess what the outcome was at the end of the debate when they held a vote to ask the audience who they thought would be getting their vote? You’ll be gobsmacked to learn that the winner was Boris.

I wonder why he decided this was the event to turn up to, rather than the Time Out hustings tomorrow or Radio 4’s Any Questions?

On the Time Out front, Boris’s team last night tried to cover their gaffophobia by blaming Time Out themselves; Time Out have since responded at length to set the record straight. Of course, it’s their word against his, but their account is pretty detailed, and there’s clearly a lot of nannying and manipulation going on from Boris’s side.

And let’s face it, who are you going to believe, some journalists, or, er, another journalist, who’s now also a politician, who’s additionally desperately trying to get elected, using what looks to be the second most dishonest campaign of this election (after the BNP, of course)?

Nearly forgot to mention: another YouGov poll (PDF) was published today.

There’s little change from last week: Boris is down to 47%, Ken’s still on 37% and Brian’s slipped down to 10%.

Ken’s team have apparently started questioning YouGov’s polling methodology, which seems a bit pointless, although I did also see him dismissing the poll as irrelevant and pleading as usual for the media to focus on the issues, so mixed signals from him about these figures.

Even if the figures are a bit biased, it’s hard to imagine a poll being out by as much as the entire Lib Dem vote, so we can assume Boris is in the lead. And as such, Boris-stoppers, we still have much work to do - not least in spreading the news of this poll result to ensure people realise they need to turn out and vote against this incompetent man.

Boris has been grabbing the headlines today by pledging to plant 10,000 trees around London over his first four years as Mayor.

But in 2002, the current Mayor launched the Million Trees Campaign, which aims to plant - surprisingly - a million trees around London by 2012. By the end of the 2006/7 planting season, the fifth year of the campaign, a total of 425,000 new trees had been planted in London.

By comparison with this total of nearly 100,000 per year, Boris’s 10,000 trees in four years looks utterly pathetic.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the media lauding the plan as some kind of eco-revolution. Get serious, please - this is the man who wholeheartedly supports George W. Bush’s policy of boycotting the Kyoto agreement to combat climate change. (The USA under Bush is the only developed country in the world not to sign up to this, in case you thought this might not be a particularly extreme stance to take.)

Everyone knows Boris hasn’t a green bone in his body, and offering to plant a handful of trees over a long period of time goes no way whatsoever towards demonstrating otherwise.

P.S. To pay for the trees, Boris has pledged to scrap the Mayor’s newspaper, The Londoner, which is basically his equivalent of those newsletters/magazines that most local authorities send out from time to time to update their residents on what they’ve been up to - and, of course, to put their own spin on things. You know the sort of thing: the local media are up in arms about library closures, then you receive the Borough News which tells you how the council are consolidating some of their library resources into one much better library which will save you Council Tax, and so forth.

So The Londoner is biased, of course. But goodness me, to read some of the things Boris has been saying about it, you would think it was literally nothing but outright lies from the front cover to the back. In a city where the only city-wide paid-for newspaper and two out of the three freesheets are produced by the Daily Mail group, between whom and the Mayor there is little love lost, it’s not surprising he might want to point out a few falling crime figures or other things the Standard and its offshoots may ‘overlook’.

And of course, Mayor Boris wouldn’t need the Londoner anyway. Why invest time and money putting together a newspaper that looks like the Evening Standard but talks up your achievements instead of knocking them, when you can just let the Evening Standard do the work for you?

I’ve heard much about the article in today’s Evening Standard which states that Boris is “holding secret talks with potential executives to run City Hall” if he becomes Mayor, but unfortunately the Standard’s web site appears to me to be down at the moment (long may it continue) so I can’t read it for myself.

What I can do is link to a MayorWatch article with a headline of the “Pope: ‘I am Catholic’” variety: Labour: ‘Boris isn’t up to the job’. Hardly a surprise that Labour might think that, but it sounds like this story certainly does lend itself to this interpretation.

The report claims senior Tories are concerned that a badly run capital would have an adverse impact on David Cameron’s chances of winning the next General Election.

Speaking this afternoon Tessa Jowell MP, Minister for London, said […] “David Cameron is asking Londoners to elect someone he is determined won’t be allowed to exercise power.”

Rumour has long had it that Cameron never expected that Boris would actually end up winning the Mayoralty, and now he’s the clear front-runner it’s understandable that he might be nervous about the impact on the Conservative party’s reputation. The General Election is widely expected not to be held until May 2010 now, which would give voters more than enough time to see what an atrocious buffoon the party has put forward for Mayor of London, potentially damaging the party’s credibility.

So Cameron - who, it should be acknowledged, Boris’s team have denied “is directly involved” in the discussions (presumably in the same way as Gordon Brown was never “directly involved” in those regular attempts to destabilise Tony Blair’s premiership) - has now had to enter damage limitation mode rather hastily and endeavour to find people with the skills Boris so obviously lacks, like, er, pretty much all the skills needed to run London.

Heh, I’ve just realised - does this story remind you of any particular Stop Boris poster? We hadn’t realised any of them would come quite so literally true, quite so quickly.

This is the new Stop Boris blog. What better impetus to start a blog than the news that the latest opinion poll suggests that Boris will easily win the election to become Mayor of London on 1 May. Not so funny now, is he?

Anyway, strangely there doesn’t appear to exist a WordPress theme which looks like the Stop Boris web site, so I’m having to invest rather too much time in attempting to convert the default theme.

Normal business will get underway as soon as that’s sorted out…