If…

Oh good, we are at the Neasdenburg Rally all week. Here’s today’s instalment:

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!

The Guardian followed up on the Tory Troll’s scoop earlier: Give second vote to Johnson, BNP tells supporters.

It seems Team Boris did manage a rebuttal in the end, but Brian Paddick’s opening sentence was the best:

Clearly the BNP have recognised Boris’s talent for causing offence and creating division.

The Guardian article then strays on to the astonishingly offensive remarks of the BNP candidate for the London Assembly who was sacked this week when someone unearthed an old piece of writing he’d done on a blog, stating that rape was no worse a crime than “force-feeding a woman chocolate cake”, among other things.

The interesting thing about this is the BNP’s comments about this sacking, which sound remarkably similar to the defences Boris wheels out when someone raises his own offensive writings, be they on homosexuality, race or whatever. The BNP said:

It was felt that no matter how much Nick Eriksen’s blog comments, written back in 2005, had been distorted and taken out of the context of a blog which reflected our tough stance on all sorts of crime, they could still be perceived as trivialising the issue in a manner that many women in particular could have found extremely offensive.

Written some time ago, taken out of context, could have been found offensive… all the words of an insincere apology, and all just the kind of words to be found in most of Boris’s apologies (and there have been many). No wonder the BNP have warmed to him.

I’m delighted to see that the Guardian have given over the whole of page 3 of today’s paper to the ‘Bottler Boris’ story, calling it “A diary clash, a prior engagement, the wrong issues. Boris Johnson shuns mayoral hustings“. It begins:

It is a crude, if effective, campaign strategy for a frontrunner. Keep your candidate on a tight leash, stop him saying anything controversial and avoid the opposition.

That, it seems, is the theory behind Boris Johnson’s bid to become the mayor of London. Yesterday it emerged he has failed to appear at a series of clashes with rival candidates Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, raising suspicions that the famously gaffe-prone Tory is being protected from himself.

And so it continues, covering the issues involved perfectly. Boris’s team get a couple of lines to restate their strongly disputed reason for his absence from tonight’s hustings, but their words sound just as hollow in print as they did in the light of Time Out’s rebuttal yesterday.

The piece also carries an interesting profile of Lynton Crosby, Boris’s campaign strategist, who’s even more objectionable than I thought (which takes some doing):

He was accused of running “wedge” campaigns which divided voters by focusing on emotive issues such as abortion and immigration. A 2001 campaign advert suggested, falsely, that a shipload of refugees had thrown their children overboard in an attempt to enter Australia. He is said to advocate “push polling” - phoning voters on the pretext of conducting a poll and then spreading damaging rumours about a rival candidate.

Sounds like he’d be quite at home campaigning with the BNP, given his favoured tactics and indeed issues.

So, read this article, enjoy it, then click “Send to a friend” to pass on the news. The anti-Boris backlash, after weeks of him getting an easy ride in the media, starts now!

If there were any doubt that Boris’s minders are rather paranoid about the media seeing him when he’s off his guard, out of his ‘serious politician’ act, one Guardian journalist’s account of her experience should soon remove it.

Boris wants to negotiate a no-strike deal with the RMT union.

This is the union that rarely agrees to even fairly reasonable demands, instead going on strike at the slightest sign of problems.

The idea that Boris - of all people - can persuade them to give up their right to strike ever again is one of the most ridiculous things in his whole manifesto.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of trying to stop them striking, promising to achieve this in his manifesto makes one wonder how seriously we should take any of his other pledges - it’s just so unlikely to happen!

Tony Travers, who’s doing booming business in media appearances trading on his undisputed expertise on London government, told the Guardian

that the RMT would prefer a Johnson victory because the union believed that despite his posturing the Tory candidate would be easier to beat than Livingstone, who had been “hard and canny” in negotiations.

“If they [the Tories] really are going to bring in a union-busting transport leader he or she is going to have to be very tough because the RMT are lethally strong,” added Travers.

So who’s he going to call in? And if Boris antagonises the RMT from day one, can we look forward to even more RMT walk-outs over the next four years if he’s Mayor?

Over the weekend, a bit of a heated debate broke out on the Guardian’s blogging site Comment is Free between Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, with Siân Berry and even George Galloway also joining in.

Notable by his absence, as the linked article mentions, was Boris, who a spokesman informed the Guardian was ”out there meeting real people” - not to be confused with the pretend people who use the internet of course.

This highlights an important part of Boris’s strategy: don’t engage in meaningful discussions of policies.

A month after David Cameron called for live TV debates during elections, Boris has been refusing to participate in any sort of televised debate with his opponents in the Mayoral contest. Cameron taunted Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Question Time last month, asking him “What on earth are you frightened of?”, and it now seems that question would be more pressingly addressed to his own Mayoral candidate, Boris Johnson.

But then, we know the answer: Boris is frightened of the other candidates wiping the floor with him in a discussion of the issues, because unlike him, they have a grasp of them and are competent, capable politicians who can engage in debates properly, rather than reeling off soundbites and expending much of their concentration on trying not to smirk.

Boris is in the lead in the polls, and as such a debate would be his to lose - and lose it he most certainly would. A televised debate would expose his cluelessness to a viewing audience of thousands (of “real people”, no less), who would quickly switch their allegiance to someone more worthy of a vote.

I suppose it’s hard to blame Boris for being terrified by the idea of a debate. After all, if I had a manifesto as thin on policy and heavy on meaningless waffle as his, I’d want to steer clear of anything that might bring any scrutiny to bear on it.

Sorry, that’s an awful pun, I know.

There’s an interesting idea in today’s Guardian: Martin Kettle suggests Vince Cable would be a better Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor than Brian Paddick.

He certainly captured the imagination of the political classes during his brief temporary tenure acting as Lib Dem leader. Would he capture the imagination of Londoners more than Boris seems to be? It’s certainly food for thought.

Really we’re into fantasy territory now, I would have thought, though - it’s got to be almost unprecedented for a party to change its Mayoral candidate halfway through the campaign.

(I say ‘almost’, because who could forget the first election for Mayor of London, when the Conservatives picked Jeffrey Archer, only to have to substitute in Steve Norris when Archer was charged with perjury? Hey, there’s an idea. Does anyone have any evidence of Boris committing any crimes that might lead him to have to stand down before nominations close in a few weeks’ time? We can only hope!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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