To some extent, I agree with Dave Hill’s coverage of Tuesday night’s debate, which did indeed take place in a bit of a "bear pit atmosphere".

I think a lot of the criticism for the ineffectiveness of the debate has to be levelled at the completely unbriefed host, though. In BBC debates, the host has tended to know what the truth is of things like the bendy bus costing fiasco and what Boris has really written and signed off as editor in the past, but Alastair Stewart – who I’ve little time for anyway since he usually comes across as some sort of Daily Mail columnist reject – never seemed to know what the reality of the situation was when contentious allegations were flying about.

One error in Dave’s account is that the audience member who questioned Boris about his publication in the Spectator of comments about blacks having lower IQs did not say Boris wrote them himself, only that he had recently apologised for them, which is at least as true as anything else published in the Evening Standard.

Boris’s reaction to this being mentioned by the audience member was shocking. He went into full-on indignation mode, looking apoplectic and saying the audience member was making it up, then veering towards personally insulting by spitting out, as if discovering vermin in his kitchen or dog excrement under his shoe, "I don’t know how you came to be in this studio"!

Other points of note include the fact that he has no firm targets on crime reduction at all. When pressed on this the best he could do was to suggest that he wanted to see muggings "substantially reduced" and that he would "like to see a 100% reduction in crime on the buses"! I’d like to see world peace: perhaps I should stand for Mayor and put that in my manifesto too.

Pressed further about why he wouldn’t state a target on crime, he came out with:

There is absolutely no point in having a target unless you’re going to give the police the means and resources to do it.

Just think about the logic of that statement for a moment. The only way that can possibly work as a justification for Boris not having any crime reduction targets is if he has no intention "to give the police the means and resources to [achieve] it"! I mean, we all know he’s said on numerous occasions that he wants to find ‘real savings’, i.e. cuts, in the police budget, but this is an exceptional admission which shows he is the weakest candidate of all on crime, despite his much-trumpeted claims about it being his key focus.

He also pledged to sell off some council houses, by the way. That’s always worked well as a way to solve housing crises… Oh, wait, I mean as a way to initiate housing crises. Silly me.

And of course good old Rude, Interrupting Boris was present throughout the show, shouting over others and never shutting up when asked to. At one point the host had to point out to him that he was chairing the debate. Although, to be fair, it wasn’t always easy to tell.

The highlights of the debate are on YouTube, with a guide to skipping through the file to find the bits you want in the ‘video info’ bit on the right.

ITV London are recording a debate between the main three candidates tonight, for transmission on ITV1 in London tomorrow evening at 22.40. It’s a full hour long so should provide more space for exploring the issues than any of the TV debates during the campaign have done so far – and so hopefully more chance for Boris to get a good skewering.

As you may already be aware, that’s followed on Thursday night at 22.45 on BBC One by a near-live TV debate between the three, again for an hour, in a special edition of Question Time.

I think there’s also a debate on Sky News next Monday evening, 28 April, just three days before the polls near closure.

It’s all go! Fingers crossed for some election-losing Boris gaffes on all three programmes!

Did I know this was happening? It’s all a bit of a blur. Well, anyway, it is, right now, on ITV1 London.

Review: Well, that was a bit of a waste of time. All previous half-hour debates have been too short to do justice to the issues, so why on earth did the London Tonight team, who had only 25 minutes’ air-time (including a summary of other news), decide that even that wasn’t short enough, and so include a pointless voters’ panel segment?

It was particularly ironic that one of the most vocal people they spoke to on the voters’ panel said that none of the candidates had convinced her at all because "there wasn’t enough detail" about any of their policies. Perhaps if they hadn’t wasted a chunk of their air-time speaking to people like her, the candidates could have fitted in some more detail!

Serious Boris just about held it together. He’s getting slightly better at resisting his selfish urges telling him to interrupt everyone. There was a strange moment when the presenters were throwing to clips of voters in the street asking questions (another time-wasting device) and Boris turned to the camera looking rather annoyed and muttered something, but sadly his microphone was off so I don’t know what that was all about.

But it was basically a rushed mess, so if you missed it through lack of warning from this blog, I make no apology, because you didn’t miss anything worth seeing!

ITV London have got in on the act and are hosting a TV debate on Monday 21 April.

If you’d like to be in the audience and throw some tough questions about the Kyoto protocol or the cost of his own stupid buses at Boris, call 020 7261 3969 or e-mail londondecides@itv.com.

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)?

Tonight’s London news programmes’ election coverage was centred on Gordon Brown’s unsurprising endorsement of Ken Livingstone, what with him being in the same party and all. (They have ‘history’, of course, but some of the coverage would make you think Brown would seriously have refused to endorse him, which hardly seems likely.)

Both ITV and the BBC made reference to Metronet (which will bring me to Boris shortly, don’t worry). One of the most ill-informed questions I’ve seen on the news in recent memory was put to Brown by Alistair Stewart, whom I think I’ve mentioned my dislike for before, but really, this was just amateur. He said, “Do you really think Londoners can trust Ken Livingstone with a £5bn budget [don’t know where he got that figure from - I’ve always heard of it being £9-11bn] after the Metronet fiasco?”

Seriously. A supposedly respected veteran news broadcaster asking Gordon Brown whether Ken Livingstone could be trusted with big budgets after Metronet!

(For anyone as unenlightened as Stewart appeared to be, Brown forced the Metronet Tube deal on Livingstone against his loudly publicised wishes - and against a legal challenge Ken brought against the government in the courts to try to prevent them pushing it through.)

Anyway, this site is called Stop Boris, not Stop ITV’s London Tonight Being So Atrocious, so you’ll be pleased to hear that when I switched over to BBC London I was soon presented with The Blond himself, putting across a point about Metronet so convoluted that it must have taken quite some time for his campaign team to dream it up.

Apparently the current Mayor is indeed to blame for wasting money in relation to Metronet. Boris declares that Ken wasted the money he spent taking the government to court in the early days of his tenure to try to prevent the whole Metronet debacle from ever happening!

Now, StopBoris.org is already under enough suspicion of being a front for the Ken campaign (a commenter on PoliticalBetting reckons we’re Ken’s £100k-salaried ‘cronies’ - not a figure I’m ever likely to see on my payslip!) without me doing too much defending of Ken, but honestly! Boris has come out with some rubbish in this campaign, and this can certainly join the heap of nonsense. Had Ken been successful in the courts, he’d've saved many times over the money he’d spent on legal fees. And perhaps if he hadn’t opposed it, Gordon Brown wouldn’t have coughed up the £2bn to bail out Metronet from central government funds quite so readily, risking Londoners having to bear the whole bill themselves instead.

More evidence that Boris will say anything, no matter how illogical or downright nonsensical, if he thinks it will add to his chances of winning.

Needless to say, by the way, his point wasn’t challenged by anyone on BBC London. This is becoming a regular and worrying feature of the election coverage in all media. (Except StopBoris.org, obviously.)