Dave agrees, in some detail, with our assessment of the Times’s unconvincing pro-Boris leader.

He also agrees with us about the Sunday Times’s similar leader today.

Martin from Mayorwatch’s comment about the Times one is also good:

I love the subheading

"Two terms is enough for Livingstone. Johnson should be allowed his chance"

it’s just insane to suggest that democracy is best served by voters being told they can’t elect the same person person three times (not sure that was the Times line when Maggie won three elections) and that offices should pass to new holders on a ‘his turn now’ basis.

Absolutely. Please, for goodness’ sake, this Thursday, think about how you’re voting and use your votes in a sensible way, not based on ridiculous statements like "time for a change"!

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.

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’s hardly a surprise that someone called ‘Labourboy’ should suggest Boris would not be a good Mayor, but it is an interesting point he makes, that the media appear to be setting the bar far lower for Boris the clown than they would be for anyone else.

Of course it is a minor miracle that he’s managed to go so many months without any major gaffes, but he has said a few moderately ill-advised things, and more to the point he certainly hasn’t said anything that would qualify anyone else to be taken seriously as a Mayoral contender. Like, you know, some properly thought-through policies, or evidence of relevant experience for managing an £11bn budget and 105,000 staff.

There’s a general consensus on a large number of blogs that last night’s Question Time debate was a huge let-down. As Dave Hill says:

I was disappointed. Several policy areas fundamental to the mayoralty - housing, transport and the environment - went completely unexamined. I sincerely believe we’ve gone over the Al-Qaradawi and "watermelon smiles" territory quite often enough and there were too many questions on the emotive subjects of crime, race and immigration. Perhaps the QT team was worried about being too London-centric, but I thought the emphasis was wrong.

As someone looking forward to seeing Boris’s policies exposed as the hollow shams they are on live national TV, I can only agree! There was minimal focus on policy detail, which is what matters in the end.

Liberal Conspiracy have another take on the show:

The BBC1 Question Time special last night, featuring “the three main London mayoral candidates”, was as depressing a tit-for-tat charade as I’ve seen for some time. The ratio of insult to fact or argument was far, far too high.

Their blogger is particularly disappointed by Brian Paddick, but that doesn’t change our tactical voting advice! He does come on to Boris at the end though:

As for Boris Johnson, well it’s hardly any news that he is a complete buffoon, but his performance was shockingly bad. Tory or not, how anyone can consider backing him (other than as a childish prank or a cipher for the return of county squire politics) is astonishing. The final questioner of the evening noted that he couldn’t even figure out how to answer a question without getting into a mental scramble. But he fluffed that one, too.

As do some of the commenters:

there are no positive reasons for Boris to get the job, while Ken’s record has plenty. It’s quite the oddest election campaign I’ve ever seen, since it seems to be run solely in order for a newspaper editor to revenge herself on an elected politician who pissed her off, without any thought that there’s actually a large city to be run at the end of it.

So what did we here at Stop Boris make of the programme?

To be honest I think Question Time was such a big let-down that it’s barely worth me writing about it, particularly when the above quotes are all spot on, so I’ll keep my additional thoughts brief.

This was the umpteenth televised mayoral debate and Boris still hasn’t got the hang of taking turns to speak, since he’s so self-absorbed and self-centred that he has no concept of other people’s right to be heard. Brian Paddick got huge applause when he told him to "shut up and let somebody else speak for once!" (quoted from memory), and I’ve seen mixed reactions to this outburst online but he’s had to put up with seeing Boris in even more debates than I have, and frankly I don’t blame him at all for finally snapping!

What Boris has got better at with practice is sticking to his cynical brief, but that means he still doesn’t properly answer questions or tell anyone any details about his policies. His cynical brief is to spout brief, hollow, scripted lines about issues (primarily crime), then turn around whatever has been asked of him into an opportunity to attack the incumbent Mayor, Ken Livingstone.

And so it was that last night we saw him turning everything into an attack on Ken as quickly as possible, and heard almost no information about Boris’s own plans. It was particularly noticeable in the final, ‘off-the-wall’ question: which type of food would each candidate say best represented his leadership style? There is no way on earth that any normal person would turn this into an attack on someone else, but somehow Boris attempted to do so, having barely touched on an answer about himself, to cries of derision from most people in the studio.

In the end, under significant pressure to answer the question for once, he mumbled some nonsense about Tesco Value cornflakes, which certainly sounds about right: they’re all right if you’re primarily concerned with cutting expenditure (as Boris is on instigating big police cutbacks, for instance), but the results aren’t quite as good as ‘proper’ cornflakes (hence his complete lack of targets on crime reduction) and you can’t help feeling you’ve bought into a pale imitation of the real thing (for ‘the real thing’ read ‘a competent politician’). Perhaps he was on to something there with his one unscripted answer of the evening, after all.

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!

A few weeks ago, the Telegraph ran its appalling Boris campaign puff piece masquerading as front-page news, in which we learned, amid sentences worded carefully under the watchful eyes of lawyers, that Boris had been the victim of ‘dirty tricks’ and his e-mail system had been hacked. (No further details or evidence of the hacking were provided, nor do they report that the police were called in, despite this being a criminal offence if true, which makes you wonder if it even happened.)

They mixed phrases about the ‘dirty tricks’ and ‘hacking’ with phrases about Ken’s campaign, implying that he had been involved in one or both of these things without ever actually saying as much.

The overriding message of the article was that poor, innocent Boris had been the victim of evil hacking and other skulduggery at the hands of brutal, law-breaking Ken.

Now, let’s see, what happened last night? Harriet Harman’s web site was hacked, and publicly plastered with Back Boris logos. There’s no doubting that this happened – that article has the screenshot to illustrate it – and there’s equally no doubt what the motivation of the hackers was. So how is this reported in that article by The First Post?

"It is unbelievable that her digital security is so weak," says a Westminster source. "I mean if they can hack the deputy PM they can hang anyone, even Gordon Brown."

Brilliant - if Boris claims he’s been hacked, it’s basically Ken’s fault, but if a Boris supporter hacks someone in Ken’s party, it’s her own fault.

If Boris wins this election – and I still firmly believe he need not do so if we sustain our campaigning efforts, Boris-stoppers – it will be as a result of one of the most flagrant abuses of media power (primarily that of the Evening Standard and their mendacious advertising boards) ever involved in getting anyone elected in this country. Thanks, Lynton Crosby.

Excuse me for posting something with no anti-Boris angle at all, but I do think Channel 4 News make the best news reports in the business, and tonight they showed Cathy Newman catching up with the three leading contenders as they campaigned around London. Her report, available as a video by clicking Watch the report, is well worth spending a few minutes of your time with.

Eight-and-a-half hours until tonight’s Question Time special, with Boris, Ken and Brian up against each other. It will almost certainly be the most widely watched debate yet, so we’ll all be on the edges of our seats with longing for Boris to make a monumental gaffe – or at least just to repeat the rudeness, lack of policy grasp and outright lies that have characterised most of his previous TV debating appearances!

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!

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.

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.

The Tory Troll has a good analysis of why the Sun has today decided to throw its weight behind Boris in the Mayoral election.

I suppose ‘the Scum’ and Boris do have a lot in common. They’re certainly both very popular in Liverpool.

The Sun is not known for backing losers: indeed, they tend to wait until as near to polling day as possible to come out for anyone, so they have the maximum possible opinion poll information on which to base their ’support’, ready to claim it was them ‘wot won it’ a few days later.

Unfortunately the result of their track record at backing winners is that I’ve heard a few people expressing defeatist sentiments today in the wake of their endorsement of the blond buffoon. People are saying "this is it, it’s all over, we’re going to have to accept that Boris will be Mayor," which is a very disappointing stance to be taking with over a week to go until the election.

And in this election, the polling evidence is extremely mixed. There is a tendency towards Boris being in the lead, but there have been several polls where he isn’t, and in many of the ones where he is it’s by less than the margin of error, making his lead in those statistically meaningless.

So don’t let the Sun trick you into thinking this is all over. It’s very far from over. We still have nine more days until the polls close and there is not a moment to waste in spreading the message to everyone we know in London.

Remember the key points here:

• Boris is not serious enough to do the important job of Mayor of London and manage an £11bn budget. This is the most important point to drive home as it’s this fear that is getting progressively stronger in the opinion polls as time goes by and people see how bumbling he is on TV etc.
• Boris can’t be trusted to get decisions right: he denied climate change was a problem for years, opposed gay marriage, supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, campaigned actively for George W Bush to get elected in the USA in 2000 and 2004… you know the list by now. On many of these things he has come around to the mainstream way of thinking, but not for years after getting them wrong and basing his political actions on having them wrong. As Mayor he has to get his decisions right first time or he’ll waste millions on erroneous policies.
• Boris has been renowned for his incompetence in every job he’s ever done. He was sacked from his first job for making up a quote to print in the Times. He was sacked from the Tory front bench twice! And one of his staff when he ran the Spectator recently wrote that even suggesting he used to choose where to take the staff to lunch overstated his level of involvement in managing the organisation.
• Lots of Boris’s policies are completely undeliverable: his manifesto is a fantasy document, not something that can be taken seriously. Promising an airport he can’t build in an area he doesn’t control, or a no-strike deal with a union who’ve insisted in response that they’ll never sign one, or a Routemaster bus that hasn’t even been designed and might well not be, is wishful thinking, not a political manifesto.

I say those are the key points, but really they’re just the ones that came to mind just then. There are so many: this is the 122nd post on this blog so there are quite a few others knocking about here. So really, tell whoever you’re speaking to whatever reasons there are to oppose Boris which you think will appeal to that particular person.

Just don’t give up on the campaign now. We can do this.

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!