Warning: may make you fall off your chair laughing.

Via The Tory Troll.

Sure enough, the Evening Standard web site is now carrying the results of this week’s YouGov poll.

Boris Johnson has maintained his lead over Ken Livingstone in the race to be Mayor - despite increasing doubts over his seriousness for the job, a poll reveals today.

The Evening Standard/YouGov poll found that the Tory candidate is still on course to oust his Labour rival from City Hall.

Mr Johnson leads Mr Livingstone by 44 per cent to 37 per cent on first preference votes, with Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick third on 12 per cent.

But the gap between Mr Johnson and the Mayor for the final "run-off", when second preferences are taken into account, has narrowed to its closest in the race.

The Tory MP’s lead over Mr Livingstone in the "run-off " is 53 per cent to 47 per cent, a gap of six per cent. Last week, YouGov found the gap was eight per cent (54-46), a fortnight ago it was 12 per cent (56-44) and four weeks ago it was 14 points (57-43).

Liberal Democrat voters appear to be turning away from Mr Johnson, giving him his lowest level of their support since our polls began at the start of the mayoral campaign.

Only 29 per cent of Lib-Dem supporting Londoners say they are likely to give the Tory contender their first preferences, with 29 per cent also set to give them to Mr Livingstone.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of voters are worried that Mr Johnson is "not serious enough" to make an effective mayor. Those who question the Tory candidate’s seriousness has risen from 34 per cent two weeks ago, to 40 per cent last week, to 43 per cent this week.

YouGov says that this appears to be the main reason why his lead in the runoff continues to narrow.

So we’re chipping away at his lead, but are we chipping hard enough and fast enough to knock him off course by the election, which is now just ten days away?

If YouGov’s analysis (last line above) is correct, we need to keep emphasising to anyone thinking of voting for him that he really is an incompetent man who couldn’t run for a bus, let alone run a city with an £11bn budget. Sharing the campaign song/video around may help with this, but it may not be enough: challenge anyone you think might vote Boris and remind them how unreliable he really is and how it’ll be their money and their city’s reputation he throws away if he doesn’t manage his Mayoralty properly, which of course he isn’t capable of doing.

Keep up the pressure, Boris-stoppers – this battle is going to the wire.

Well, here’s a surprise:

Coming soon to the Vatican web site, a poll on which religion local residents think is best; and to a bears’ social networking web site, a poll on which natural environment is users’ preferred location for emptying their bowels.

Hopefully actually coming soon, a new and somewhat more scientific (YouGov) poll for the Standard: they’ve published one every Monday for some time now, so I’m expecting one to appear this afternoon too. We’ll keep you posted.

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

I’m just calming down after 50 minutes of non-stop Mayoral fun on BBC One’s Politics Show.

The first half-hour national segment was a discussion between the presenter and the three main candidates, which was actually rather good.

One highlight was Boris claiming his writings in the aftermath of 7 July 2005 were being taken out of context, whereupon the presenter said, OK, here’s the context then, and proceeded to read back a huge extract of Boris’s appalling, divisive, anti-Islamic blatherings, which made it perfectly clear that the context was at least as bad as the individual quotes. These are the quotes about Islam being "the problem" and Islamophobia being "a natural reaction" to reading the Qu’ran, which Boris was spouting while the current Mayor and every faith leader and politician in London were frantically encouraging people of all faiths to stand together against the terrorists who they made very clear did not represent any faith.

Extraordinarily, after sitting looking extremely uncomfortable as his column was read back to him on national TV, Boris made no apology for anything he’d written, instead trying (and failing!) to justify what he’d said but in the process showing how he simply couldn’t be trusted to lead and unite London’s diverse communities.

This segment was followed by the London regional opt-out section, where this week it was Boris’s turn to be grilled by the local host.

This was also a satisfyingly thorough interview, in which we again saw Boris coming unstuck on his Routemaster costings: he’s clinging to his new-found £100m figure with the same illogical desperation that characterised his previous clinging to an £8m figure, despite the fact that even the new £100m price clearly doesn’t cover the cost of conductors or drivers, as the presenter made clear.

He was also caught out on his oft-repeated bleating about the Mayor’s council tax precept being too high: the presenter pointed out that 80% of that is spent directly on extra police to go on the beat, so there is very limited scope for cutting it without also removing police from the street.

Anyone, like me (oh how I long for May), who follows Boris’s media appearances very closely will have found much of what he bumbled on about in this interview familiar: his usual tactic of scrambling to reach one of his pre-learned lines was very much in evidence.

Particularly revealing was towards the end of the interview, when the presenter said that one thing the current Mayor had done early on which was a big, bold idea which separated him clearly from other politicians and the government, and had broadly been successful, was the introduction of the Congestion Charge. He then asked what Boris’s "big idea" would be, that would mark him out as an original and new Mayor and make his mark on the capital in a noticeable way.

First, Boris undertook the usual tactic, ignoring the question and leaping on the words "Congestion Charge" to cough up some scripted statements on "payment on account", "reform", and not introducing the £25 CO₂ charge.

Fortunately the presenter didn’t settle for that, repeating his question and insisting on a proper answer.

Boris bumbled a bit more before finally striking gold. His "big idea", he revealed, was a new airport in the Thames Estuary.

Seriously: Boris’s big idea for London is to put an environmentally damaging airport into an area which is pencilled in for a nature reserve. The Mayor doesn’t have control over building airports. The Mayor also doesn’t have control over the Thames Estuary, which is outside Greater London.

The chances of Boris getting such an airport built are even lower than the chances of the RMT agreeing to his promised no-strike deal. The fact that he can seriously put this forward as his main "big idea" shows just how short on ideas of all sizes he really is.

• You can watch the whole of today’s Politics Show, including the London opt-out, here (until next Sunday lunchtime).

(No, not Boris for PM, like those terrifying Facebook groups.)

I’ve just heard that Boris will be interviewed live by Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM at some point in the next hour. Could be worth a listen, or a Listen Again if you’re reading this after it’s been on.

À la ITV London Tonight ‘debate’ yesterday, I’ll give you my thoughts on the interview after it’s been on.

Update: Well, that was rather good. Eddie Mair is a formidable interviewer and gave Boris a real grilling, with which he could barely cope.

He was really on edge throughout, and following his usual tactic of desperately trying to find a way back to one of his ready-prepared lines: in a discussion about his smoking gaffe he somehow tried to steer the conversation onto making the streets safer; and while covering his laughable policy on Tube strikes (which has already been dismissed by the RMT as being the stuff of ‘cloud cuckoo land’), he tried to steer things around to the debatable statistic he keeps chanting about relative mugging likelihoods in London and New York.

I recorded the exchange on DAB, so it’s in MP2 format at the moment, which most computer-based media players should handle, not sure about portable ones though. For a highlight, skip forward to 2:58 and you’ll hear Boris apparently coming rather close to losing his rag with his interrogator over the question of the great Bus Black Hole:

Eddie: At a cost of?

Boris: [finishes his meandering sentence, then] At or about £100m.

Eddie: Why did it take so long to get that figure out of you? Because you’ve said [Boris tries to interrupt – a common feature of this interview] all through the campaign it was £8m.

Boris: [Cuts his interruption short and draws breath, perhaps counting to ten very quickly in his head] I’m sorry – pay attention if you don’t mind!

You have to hear the way he says ‘mind’ - the amount of fury and frustration pent up in it is a sound to behold!

What we hear in this interview is yet more confirmation of the picture we’ve been building up throughout this campaign, of a self-centred man who’s been brought up to think he’s the most important person in any room and anyone questioning that is treated as astonishing or plain rude. Not to mention of course the usual picture of a man incapable of engaging on any given issue but instead hell-bent on returning to the handful of topics he’s learnt his lines on.

He’s a selfish, lightweight buffoon, with unimplementable, poorly thought-out policies, who couldn’t possibly cope for four years as Mayor.

Update: an extremely kind Boris-stopper has gone to the trouble of transcribing this interview!

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.

Boris continued his record of blundering racial offence yesterday by telling an Asian presenter on BBC radio: "You can’t out-ethnic me".

Unfortunately I hadn’t heard that there was to be a three-way debate between the candidates on the BBC Asian Network yesterday morning (perhaps because I’m not Asian and their station advertising is very well targeted? ), but apparently there was, and the relevant part of the transcript reads:

Boris Johnson: Almost 100 years ago my Turkish great-great grandfather came to London and I’m very proud of that.

Presenter Nihal Arthanayake: What part of your Turkish culture do you maintain?

BJ: A lively … interest in Turkey.

NA: How often do you go and see your family?

BJ: It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London.

NA: Did you just find out when you needed it to get the ethnic vote?

BJ: I’m happy to say that lots of Turkish relations have been coming and going in our family for a long time.

NA: Are you down with the ethnics?

BJ: I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me Nihal.

NA: How many bhangra gigs have you been to over the last few years?

BJ: I can’t remember. But my children are a quarter Indian so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

NA: Okay, let’s not try to out-brown each other.

(I’ve taken that from the Evening Standard, which ran a surprising number of anti-Boris pieces yesterday (i.e. any). Their full article on this is here.)

As well as the obvious ‘out-ethnic’ gaffe, and his obvious complete lack of interest in and knowledge of the culture he claims to be so integral to him, I find the comment "It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London" particularly interesting, because of those first three words: "It turns out". That doesn’t sound like the phrasing of someone who’s taken a keen interest into his ethnic heritage throughout his life: it sounds very much like someone who has paid a lackey to do a quick bit of research to try and get more votes.

And of course the most laughably ridiculous bit is him saying "I can’t remember" when asked how many bhangra gigs he’s been to. I’d be prepared to place a large bet on the answer being an all too memorable zero. Strange that that should slip his mind so easily.

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.

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!

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.

The Times writer and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris writes about Boris in Thursday’s newspaper, and it’s really quite wonderfully damning:

Boris Johnson’s new, sobersided persona is working well; but happily there does remain the frisson of watching a man apparently dipping into a mental bran tub as he speaks, as mystified as the rest of us to know what bauble of opinion or information he may come up with next.

And (having been one of Mr Johnson’s stable of writers when he was editor of The Spectator) I must challenge Ken Livingstone’s complaint that as former editor of a small right-wing magazine, the only administrative decision Mr Johnson ever took was choosing a restaurant for lunch.

This paints an exaggeratedly hands-on picture of the Boris management style. His secretary did that kind of thing. You were just lucky if Boris came to the lunch.

As he says, he should know, he was there.

So don’t fall for any of this stuff about Boris having great management experience and expertise. It’s all utter nonsense, as it seems anyone who’s worked with him (and isn’t desperate for him to become Mayor, so keeping quiet) will acknowledge.

* Chambers Dictionary informs me that Monsieur de Paris is a euphemism for the public executioner (at the time of the French Revolution). Since these paragraphs amount to a public execution of Boris’s fantasies about having a managerial reputation, it seemed appropriate.

Here’s the front page of this week’s Tribune magazine:

Good stuff. I wonder what will be on the Evening Standard’s front page on 1 May. Any suggestions?

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.

Sky News have secured the final TV debate of the campaign, to be broadcast live, in front of an audience of over 300, on Sky News at 8pm on Monday 28 April.

That’s just three days before the election itself, so here’s hoping for an irrecoverably awful gaffe from Boris during the proceedings!