It looks like today’s main G2 feature in the Guardian is pretty much a distillation of the Stop Boris campaign into G2 article form.

It seems appropriate, then, that this should be what will probably be the very last link to an article to appear before we all go to the polls to do our best to keep the Conservative clown, the blond buffoon, the incompetent imbecile out of City Hall.

Because if he gets in, as the headline says:

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

P.S. This article’s tactical voting advice, at the bottom of that page, is not as comprehensive or based on such detailed psephology as ours. It’s essentially accurate but ignores the role of Brian in the most dedicated of Boris-stoppers’ voting tactics.

guardian.co.uk has coverage of the fallout from the Telegraph article we blogged about last night, in which Simon Heffer tore Boris to shreds.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne has also attacked Boris, so Boris-backers are quite annoyed with them both for daring to reveal the truth about their naked golden boy.

It’s also interesting to see a bit more gaffophobia creeping in on the last day of the campaign:

Johnson has been accused of attempting to avoid press scrutiny by BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine.

"Have any listeners seen a tall man with yellow hair in a blue suit?" the presenter asked his audience after the Conservative candidate failed to appear on his lunchtime show. "He’s called Boris Johnson. Because if we don’t hear from him in one minute we’re doing a mayoral debate without him."

He added: "It’s very odd that noone can find Boris a day before the mayoral election. Has he just walked past that cafe you’re sitting in? Call us if you spot him."

It’s pathetic that even at this late stage he still doesn’t feel sufficiently on top of his brief to bother turning up to things like this. Let’s hope enough people reach the realisation that he ‘has no clothes’ before they put their crosses in boxes tomorrow.

Let’s hope the Labour MP quoted in this item from this week’s guardian.co.uk ‘Backbencher’ e-mail is a fair summary of the situation with voters. It certainly should be.

"Boris isn’t wearing any clothes"

Joan Ryan [is] MP for Enfield North, […] one of the suburbs the Person Formerly Known as Boris is supposed to have tended on the advice of Lynton Crosby. "Sure - he’s visited four or five times but what usually happens is he arrives, by public transport, does a press conference and leaves." Out and about in her constituency she describes the London elections thus: "the Emperor’s New Clothes. All the way though we’ve been warning people ‘Boris isn’t wearing any clothes’ and only now are voters coming to us and saying, ‘oh my goddddd, he’s not wearing any clothes… and it’s disgussssting’". The P.F.K.A.B. Naked. Think on.

I’d really, really rather not ‘think on’ about that.

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.

They’re all in agreement today that Boris would be a disaster. That’s always good to see.

Unsurprisingly, Polly’s not a fan of Boris.

Actually, despite the headline and the article’s web address, her piece primarily focuses on positive reasons to give one of your two votes to Ken, but since that’s now our advice too it’s well worth a read if you’re having any doubts about whether it’s a good idea.

Here’s the main anti-Boris bit:

When Londoners vote on Thursday, surely it’s a no-brainer? Here is an effete and frivolous Tory only doing it for fun and fame. Never known for passionate commitment to anything but himself, his strongly rightwing views are contemptuously ignorant of all social policies: we know this from his writings. His bewilderingly few policies are to stop Ken’s requirement that developers include 50% affordable housing in new building projects; to replace bendy buses at a cost he cannot name; to abandon local policing; to cut costs; and … well, that’s it.

That’s it, indeed. It should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately Lynton Crosby’s been lobotomising armies of outer Londoners (and I write as one myself, who has fortunately managed to avoid the brainwashing), who will happily overlook Boris’s total inadequacy and incompetence as they march to the polls chanting his meaningless "time for a change" mantra. I suppose it’s a no-brainer in the sense of there evidently being no brains engaged in those voting for Boris!

Dave Hill looks at Ken’s and Boris’s respective transport policies and draws the only sensible conclusion: Boris would be hopeless.

The Sunday Times follows its sister paper by endorsing "time for a change" Boris, without providing a single positive reason why. In fact, again, they provide instead some reasons why he should not be trusted with the job:

Many have doubts about whether he is the right man for the job. His campaign has shown that the qualities that have endeared him to voters as a political clown do not translate easily into being a powerful executive mayor. […]

Mr Johnson knows that this is his last shot at demonstrating that he can be a serious politician after many false starts.

"Many" occasions when Boris has completely messed up being "a serious politician", and a failure to translate his undoubted clowning abilities into executive abilities, are not reasons to give him four years’ major power.

Indeed, as the Observer (which, like the Guardian yesterday isn’t exactly glowing about any of the candidates) puts it:

The unavoidable choice is between an incumbent whose record and character are familiar from many years in office and a challenger whose image and beliefs have been cynically manufactured for the campaign.

London is not a focus group for national parties to test their tactics, it is a city in need of a competent mayor. The only way to guarantee it has one is to cast a [second preference] vote for Ken.

The Observer is the only paper I’ve seen offering a full recommendation for the use of both preference votes: they encourage readers to put Siân first, and Ken second, making them a ‘number 2′ type in our tactical voting advice.

Ah, the Sunday Telegraph’s leader has just appeared online and, in stark contrast to yesterday’s Daily Telegraph’s leader, does explicitly (and at great length) endorse Boris. In fact it reads like some sort of party election broadcast for Boris. The only hint that he might be an incompetent, risky candidate – a doubt which I have yet to see anyone independent seriously dispute (that is, say that he definitely isn’t risky) – is the tiny phrase:

In all modesty we cannot claim that his past as a journalist was the ideal preparation for political responsibility.

That’s certainly a "modest" way to describe the huge risk inherent in electing a clown to manage an £11bn budget!

Does Boris have particularly good friends in particularly high places at the Sunday Telegraph? Following their meticulously calculated bit of front-page electioneering on his behalf three weeks ago, to find them publishing a lengthy leader apparently written on an extremely rose-tinted computer screen does make me wonder if this ‘newspaper’ might be trying to be even more pro-Boris than the Evening Standard, which would certainly take some doing.

So, now we know where nearly all the newspapers stand. (I guess one or two more may be saving their leaders for polling day itself, or shortly before.)

A defeat for Boris would be a defeat for the most reactionary and cynical instincts of the Murdoch, Mail and Telegraph press. Yet another reason to vote against Boris on Thursday!

Have you ever attended an amateur debate, in which people have been given things to argue in support of which they don’t really believe themselves? They’ll give it their best shot, but underneath their rhetoric, it’s plain that they don’t really believe in the argument they’re putting across.

Which brings me to today’s newspaper leader columns.

The Times

The Times spends some time highlighting Ken Livingstone’s achievements in office, then bizarrely talks about him offering "more of the same" (which surely doesn’t sound too bad in the light of his achievements?).

They gloss over Brian Paddick as an acceptable alternative, without really explaining why: "He has at no second offered compelling reasons why he should be in the mayor’s chair", a statement which could equally describe the overwhelmingly negative campaign of Boris Johnson.

Then they alight on Boris.

There is plainly an element of risk in backing Mr Johnson. Newspapers have fretted about endorsing him precisely because journalists know Mr Johnson, a fellow journalist, so well and they know he has a history of letting people down.

That a sentence like that can appear in a leader called Boris Johnson for London is extremely revealing about how little their heart is in this recommendation.

They say that "the thrust" of Boris’s "policy suggestions" (it’s true, they aren’t fleshed-out enough to be called policies!) is sensible, and that he is "alive to Londoners’ … concerns about drugs, stabbings and gangs", which is hardly the same thing as being the right person to do anything about them.

Most breathtakingly, their final paragraph even admits that electing him would be an "experiment", and that "if it fails", "London and the country will have learnt something of immense value". Too right: not to trust the Times’s leader column ever again.

In fact, this whole column is so weak in its support for Boris, readers could be forgiven for thinking that an edict was issued from Murdoch Towers that the editor was to print a leader column backing Boris, then left to come up with the arguments himself, despite not believing Boris capable of the job. But surely that would never happen, would it?

Daily Mail

As the Evening Standard’s sister paper, not to mention the bible of the right, it was always inconceivable that they would back anyone but Boris, and so it proves, but as with the Times their support is in extremely measured terms.

Again, a surprising measure of praise for the incumbent is present, given his nemesis status at Daily Mail group HQ:

Ever since he became Labour’s leader in London he has outfoxed opponents, including those in his own party.

In office, he has proved a rather more substantial figure than his critics predicted. Love it or loathe it, his congestion charge is now being studied by cities all over the world.

He was commendably steady after the terrorist attacks on London. And he has proved more friendly to business than you might expect, given his rabidly hard Left past.

Of course they then dwell on some criticisms in the less substantive areas which their Standard cohorts have beaten Londoners around the head with for the past nine months. For instance, apparently the £25 gas guzzler charge is "class spite", which seems strange when there are cars of every size which don’t have to pay it and actually the more wealthy you are, the easier it will be to trade in your luxury car for a less polluting model.

We also learn that Ken’s politics are divisive, which isn’t reflected in the level of racially aggravated crime, which has fallen hugely in London in recent years, while rising outside it; and besides, it’s hard to think of a more divisive politician than Boris Johnson anyway, with his numerous gaffes over the past few years offending everyone from races to cities to entire countries. I suppose at that rate he could soon unite the entire world, against him!

The Mail are keen to point out that Boris "has some highly competent people behind him". It’s interesting that they’re so confident about this, when he has repeatedly refused to name any of them so we have no evidence of this whatsoever.

He "seems genuinely concerned to do something about London’s broken society". Ahh, the old Mail favourite, the "broken society". But if crime is highest and society at its most "broken" in the most deprived areas, which are broadly located in inner London, and Boris is the man to sort this out, why is Boris so unrecoverably far behind Ken in the polls in these areas? Could it be because the people with the biggest fear of a "broken society" are actually those who read the Mail’s baseless ranting but live in the relative safety of the outer boroughs, so can gamble on Boris’s police cutbacks and removal of crime reduction targets without fearing for their own security?

So let’s put our cards on the table. We believe London and Britain would be best served by a vote for Boris - and not simply because the Mail is instinctively conservative.

Yes, I’m sure you gave a great deal of consideration to backing Red Ken!

Indeed, one of the attractive aspects of Mr Johnson’s campaign is his promise to put London first, even if it means disagreeing with national policies.

And this is certainly not something that could be had elsewhere, perhaps from a Mayor who opposed the Iraq war and the abolition of the 10p income tax rate…

We support Boris because he offers change. … Eight years of Ken Livingstone haven’t solved London’s problems. A new, serious Johnson should be given a chance.

"given a chance"? What do they think this is, some sort of game? There’s no such thing as "a chance" in this job: you have to hit the ground running from day one and work flat out for four solid years, showing competence and abilities which are far beyond the reach of even the newest, most serious Johnson imaginable. And don’t forget, this "new, serious Johnson" is an illusion created for the duration of the election campaign only, through a ban on alcohol and minders paid in inverse proportion to the number of gaffes Boris commits.

So with even the Mail’s best arguments for voting in Boris being so weak and couched in expectation-lowering terms, can anyone be left in any doubt as to how little trust there is in his abilities among newspaper journalists?

Daily Telegraph

If you are in any doubt, let Boris’s own colleagues at the Telegraph remove it.

The journalists and editors at the newspaper where Boris has worked for two decades can’t actually bring themselves to back Boris!

Instead, they spent half their column building up London as the most important place in the world, and the other half ruthlessly attacking Ken Livingstone. The only mention of any success whatever is, in full, "the Oyster card, better buses".

Essentially this leading article adopts the Boris campaign tactic of attacking Ken Livingstone while not drawing too any attention to Boris’s own hopeless manifesto of police cuts and impossible promises, but at least Boris has learnt a few short lines about his (to use the Times’s terminology) "policy suggestions". The Telegraph appear to be so nervous of endorsing this buffoon that they can’t even bring themselves to print his name!

In conclusion

With supporters like this mealy-mouthed bunch of leader-writers, who needs opponents? The Guardian have a more sensible line on things, although their endorsement for Ken is not a great deal more ringing than the others’ for Boris, although they are able to point to Ken’s strong record in various areas, which is certainly more than anyone examining Boris’s hopeless record of gaffes, incompetence, lies and sackings could do. Their verdict on Boris is as follows:

The Conservatives have fought a strategic campaign and benefited from Mr Livingstone’s weaknesses. That is not the same as setting out a solid case for office. Mr Johnson has offered celebrity and noise, but nothing very substantial, or even all that brave, his policies in many instances being modified versions of ones pursued by Mr Livingstone. … he has not shown himself equal to the mayor’s strengths. At the end of the campaign Mr Johnson still looks an accidental candidate who has stumbled into his position and is making the best of it, but might not make very much of being mayor. He promises better buses, less crime and a greener city, but cannot explain how he would bring these about.

That sounds about right to us.

What all this highlights is that here in the Stop Boris camp we are certainly up against it. We have the might of Murdoch and the Mail against us, as well as the Evening Standard and Telegraph, although all their support for Boris is half-hearted at best.

What we mustn’t do is become disheartened by this media onslaught. In a democracy, it is we the people who have the final say on polling day. We must not allow sections of the media with vested interests to bully and coerce us into electing another who has no proven abilities at all and would damage London’s reputation around the world as well as managing its huge budget with the incompetence for which he is so well known among everyone he’s ever worked with.

We need a final push this week, Boris-stoppers. E-mail all your friends to warn them about the mendacious campaign Boris has been fighting, and the huge risk this inept clown would pose to the serious business of running London. Get into arguments and discussions about it with anyone you speak to. Convince them to vote tactically to keep Boris out.

We can do this, with all your help. Good luck, everyone.

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!

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.

Soumaya Ghannoushi writes on Boris and race relations in yesterday’s Guardian.

What a difference a mayoral race can make. Only two years ago, Johnson’s writings – readily available in the online archives of the Spectator and Daily Telegraph – were peppered with talk of the "paranoia of the Muslim mind", of Islam’s "medievalism", "heartlessness" and "disgusting arrogance". Islamophobia was, he maintained, "a natural reaction" to "any non-Muslim reader of the Qur’an". We must, therefore, dispose of the "first taboo", he counselled, and accept "that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem."

This article gives yet more evidence that Boris is completely inappropriate to lead a multicultural city like London.

Here’s one particularly interesting fact (my emphasis):

Given Johnson’s record on minorities, his endorsement by the far right as a second-preference candidate seems understandable, shocking though it may be. This signifies a worrying precedent in the history of the BNP - notwithstanding Johnson’s claim that he has no wish "to receive a single second-preference vote from a BNP supporter". Never before has the BNP felt sufficiently fond of a mainstream mayoral candidate to lend him or her its support.

And for those who think quotes from Boris on race are ’smears’ being taken ‘out of context’, someone has compiled a load of links to some of the original articles the quotes come from and posted them into the second comment under the article, so you can see for yourself that there’s no contradictory context for them at all.

The choice before Londoners could not be more serious. What is at stake on May 1 is the spirit of this vibrant cosmopolitan city with its unique mix of races and cultures and its vision of itself – nothing less.

His G2 column today is devoted to his desire to stop Boris.

I wouldn’t trust Boris to operate a mop, let alone a £10bn Crossrail project.

On a related note, I don’t believe in my gut that Boris gives even the faintest hint of a wisp of a glimpse of a toss about London, or indeed humanity in general. Both of which are fairly important in a job like this.

Good to have him on board. I wonder if he’s aware of our campaign.

Whenever the national media covers the London Mayoral election, a handful of complaints from people outside London arrive to protest that “it doesn’t affect 90% of the UK” (not strictly true, when about one in every six people in the UK lives or works in London).

The media respond along Westminster-focused lines, about this election setting the scene for future General Elections, and so forth, but are they missing a trick? Could it actually be that the outcome of this election would have a serious impact on not just London, and not just the UK, but the very future environmental sustainability of the entire world?

It’s an argument that is gaining ground among environmentalists at the moment, and it runs like this.

Setting aside whether or not you like Ken Livingstone, and whether or not you agree with any of his other policies, no serious environmentalist disputes the fact that – at least in comparison with the vast majority of other politicians in positions of genuine power – the current Mayor of London has a good record on the environment.

London is now recognised around the world as the city that has gone furthest to address climate change, and Livingstone’s manifesto plays on his record. It is the only major world city, he says, to shift from private car use to public transport; it is setting standards in the UK on renewable energy; it has led the way on the congestion charge; it is forcing all buses, heavy lorries and cabs to improve air quality, and he claims an 83% increase in cycling.

Livingstone promises new green-belt protection and a £25-a-day congestion-zone charge on gas guzzlers, and offers a £500m set of bike corridors, a bike rental scheme with 6,000 machines and free passage for the greenest cars, with a London-wide low-emission zone to keep the worst polluting lorries out. “As for tree planting, we already plant more than Boris promises and we will plant more,” he says.

The Guardian’s John Vidal

Of course, some of the details can be argued about, but on the big issues – a firm, environmental lobby-approved target for reducing London’s CO₂ emissions, for instance – it is broadly agreed that the current Mayor is heading in the right direction, more so than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Boris, on the other hand, has still not withdrawn his support for President George W. Bush over the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. In other words, Boris agrees with Bush that we should not be doing everything we can to curb our emissions and so prevent catastrophic climate change causing death and destruction the world over. In the emotive terms I’ve arguably slipped into, Boris is a climate change denier.

Johnson effectively passes on climate change. He opposes the CO₂ charge on gas guzzlers within the congestion zone and calls the new low-emission zone “the most punitive, draconian fining regime in the whole of Europe”, and aims to scrap it. Instead, he says he would “work towards” the 60% cut in the city’s emissions that Livingstone has pledged to reach by 2025 by incorporating the Tory party’s plans for more microgeneration and decentralisation of electricity, combined heat and power plants and energy saving. His critics point out that he is one of the few people in the developed world who still oppose the existing Kyoto climate change agreement and question his commitment to tackling climate change.

The Guardian’s John Vidal

In political terms there is a big difference between a firm commitment to 60% cuts in emissions and agreeing to “work towards” it. Essentially, the latter is the way you cancel the former in a political climate [no pun intended] in which an explicit commitment to cancel it would not go down well with the majority of the electorate. Boris knows that Londoners are too committed to tackling climate change to elect someone who admits he wants to do nothing about it, so instead he conceals his true intentions with that meaningless phrase: “work towards”.

The argument you hear against a city like London taking a lead on climate change is that it’s like creating a no smoking area in an open-plan room. If London stopped emitting overnight, climate change would not suddenly be averted. Of course, this argument is true, but only if taken at its literal face value.

The key thing overlooked by those making this point is London’s international influence.

In October 2005, representatives of 18 leading world cities met in London to discuss joining forces to tackle global warming and climate change.

The representatives saw the need for action and cooperation on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pledged to work together towards achieving that goal.

At the end of the conference, a communiqué was signed which recognised the need for cities to take action and to cooperate on reducing climate emissions.

C40 Cities web site

The Mayor of London is Chair of C40 Cities – Climate Leadership Group, and it’s pretty clear from the Londoncentricity of their News page that London is leading the way within this group.

The result of this is that around the world, London is known as a world leader in pushing ahead with policies to address climate change. And as policies become proven in our city, other places around the world begin to gain in confidence to implement them there too.

It’s here that we return to Boris. If Boris, a renowned opponent of Kyoto, is elected Mayor of London, by the time George W. Bush leaves office in January Boris will be the most powerful, highest-profile climate change denier in the English-speaking world.

And within C40 Cities, and in the wider world generally, politicians will see that the electorate in trailblazing London, previously thought to be years ahead of the rest of the world on dealing with climate change, have thrown out of office the man largely responsible for that work, in favour of someone elected on a platform of undoing and freezing what’s been done.

“Aha,” worldwide politicians will cry in unison. “Here we have hard proof that the electorate simply isn’t ready for the policies needed to tackle climate change. If we put our heads above the parapet with anti-emissions policies, we’ll be the next to lose an election to someone whose only nod to the environment is a few ‘green-lite’ gesture policies from the 1980s about parks and dog muck.”

The work of the Greens, of Ken, of the Stern report and of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be discarded, as will the planet’s prospects for long-term sustainability, as the idea that green policies can be an election-winner is sent straight to landfill.

This isn’t – or, re-reading it, isn’t just – a puff piece for Mr. Livingstone’s environmental policies. The real point here is that replacing Ken with Boris would send the worst possible message to the rest of the world. For instance, there’s a good case to be made that the Liberal Democrats are a greener party than the Labour party on a national basis, and I’ve no reason to suppose that Mayor Brian would damage the green cause to anything like the extent Mayor Boris would. And clearly if the environment is your number one concern, a certain Ms. Berry might be hoping for your first preference vote, and in the unlikely event she can overturn the polls in the coming weeks, Mayor Siân would presumably boost London’s environmental credentials still further.

The key thing to remember next time someone claims the result of this election doesn’t affect them as they live outside the capital is that this election has the potential to affect everyone outside the capital. A Boris victory would be a disaster for the planet.

Further reading and listening

• John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor, assesses the eco-credentials of London’s mayoral candidates
• Jonathon Porritt on the battle for London Mayor
• C40 Cities – Climate Leadership Group
• Greenpeace UK’s executive director on “Why blond isn’t green”
• Ken Livingstone on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast (general studio discussion covering some of the issues raised in this blog post fairly early on, then interview with Ken towards the end)
• Brian Paddick on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast (Brian’s in the studio throughout the podcast)
• Boris Johnson on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast… “coming next week… if we can persuade him to break his silence to the national press… we phone him every morning…”

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.