First, thanks to Mrs. Stop Boris for holding the fort so well all day yesterday. I did get home in time for the result but she clearly had things under control here so I didn’t need to face posting myself in the deeply depressing circumstances.

Awful

What a truly awful outcome.

Boris Johnson will become Mayor of London at midnight tomorrow night, and the BNP’s odious thug-in-a-beige-suit Richard Barnbrook will take a seat on the London Assembly at the same time.

There’s no point beating about the bush in summing up what this means for our nine months’ work, and for our every spare minute of the past two:

The Stop Boris campaign failed in both its headline objective and its additional appeal.

On the plus side, given our final voting recommendation (which has been viewed by 1,700 unique web-users), I think it would not be immodest to claim that we did have some effect on the voting. Turnout was up by around 20% on 2004, and Ken Livingstone received over 200,000 more votes – about 25% more – than in 2004, after reallocation of second preferences. (His first-preference voting figures were boosted by a similar number, representing around a third more votes than last time.)

These figures suggest that the threat of Boris, promoted by us and others, did motivate more people to the polls and more people to vote against him. So why, despite such success, did we ultimately fail?

Impossible to overcome

The trouble is, for all our voluntary efforts, and the grassroots movement against Boris – and notwithstanding the £400,000-odd spent by the Labour party promoting Ken – the sheer scale and organisation of the Back Boris campaign in all its guises simply proved impossible to overcome. They doubled the number of first-preference votes cast for the Conservative mayoral candidate in 2004.

It’s well known that the official campaign spent around £1million on putting across their ‘time for a change’ message. On top of this, you had the ‘money-couldn’t-buy-it’ support of a range of right-wing media outlets, most effectively the Evening Standard, whose advertising boards are seen by millions of potential voters, day in, day out, as they walk around the city. While only 180,000-odd people [should that hyphen be there? The statement works in an equally valid sense without it ] buy the paper, the value of those boards should not be underestimated. Their often shockingly misleading headlines, taken in by passers-by over a period of months, fuelled a grossly overstated perception of ’sleaze’ and ‘corruption’ in Ken Livingstone’s administration, and a positive perception of Boris’s chances and suitability for the role as a replacement Mayor.

And where did that £1million campaign budget go? It went on Lynton Crosby’s cynical and manipulative campaign, which was designed to build up strong anti-incumbent feeling through half-truths and repeated attacks, while giving as little detail as possible on a bland and vague manifesto containing focus group-tested phrases and sweeping, undetailed pledges on unarguable issues like wanting to cut crime. The money also went on regular, targeted, glossy leaflets and letters to encourage out the core vote and tempt over the swing voters. More controversially it also went on paying people as far afield as Australia to conduct a covert campaign of ‘astroturfing‘ against opposing journalists and bloggers.

The combined might of the Mail/Standard, Telegraph and Murdoch groups of newspapers, the motorists’ lobby, the anti-environmentalist lobby, BNP supporters’ second-preference votes, the anti-Ken protest vote, the anti-Labour protest vote, the Lynton Crosby cynical marketing effort and of course the LOLBorisROFL!!!!1! contingent, simply couldn’t be fought back against successfully enough.

Vague feelings and meaningless pronouncements

Contrary to a pro-Boris comment on one of Mrs. Stop Boris’s posts yesterday, we will not now be eating and choking on our words. I stand by everything I’ve blogged and written on StopBoris.org over the past two months. I would challenge anyone to find factual inaccuracies or unfounded opinions on this blog, were it not too late for it to matter now anyway, and were I not intent on taking a considerable break from blogging and getting involved in Boris-related arguments from today.

At the end of the day, this election was not fought and won by Boris on the policy details that matter. Who would vote against the idea that affordable housing should be available to households with a joint income of £30,000, rather than the £60,000 Boris’s planned scheme requires (putting it out of reach of 80% of Londoners)? Who would vote for an erroneously costed bus plan rejected by just about every bus expert in the industry? The list of such things is already well known and now academic, but it’s illustrative of the fact that this election was fought and won on vague feelings and meaningless pronouncements.

Where now?

So where does this leave London now? We can only wait and see how Boris runs his Mayoralty, but if this is how he treats his own supporters, it doesn’t look good for the open and inclusive leadership he promised.

In all fairness (perhaps too much fairness!), his acceptance speech last night was moderate and inclusive-sounding. Interestingly, in his speech he essentially offered Ken Livingstone a job in his administration, and in Ken’s speech he basically accepted the offer. Giving Boris a helping hand with not completely messing up London through maladministration is undoubtedly in the best interests of the city, so I won’t dwell on my nagging gut feeling that it would in some sense be more satisfying to see Boris left to his own devices to preside over a complete farce for four years. The less of the progress made in the past eight years that is set back in the next four years, the better, however frustrating it could be if an unexpectedly stable administration threatens a re-election of Boris in four years’ time.

But what can we really expect to happen over the next four years?

Unachievable promises

Boris has made a lot of unachievable promises. We will see increased strikes on the Underground if he attempts to impose a no-strike deal on the RMT union. We’re unlikely ever to see a new open-backed Routemaster-style bus hitting London’s streets. His ‘big idea’ for a Thames Estuary airport is almost unthinkable. And his proposed police budget cuts and lack of firm proposals or targets on cutting crime risk a return to rising crime, or at best merely a slowdown in crime reduction, rather than the falling crime enjoyed for the past five years.

With Boris as Mayor and the BNP on the Assembly, we could also see race-hate crime on the increase in the capital for the first time in many years, following years of the capital bucking the national trend with a fall, versus a rise elsewhere.

(The significance of the BNP’s Assembly win should not be overstated, however: while it represents a depressing level of BNP support, and a symbolic victory for a bunch of racist thugs, their single Assembly seat gains them minimal public expenditure and virtually zero power, so the fact they didn’t gain two seats and thus a staffed office offers some comfort.)

We can also expect Boris to be far less pro-active on environmental matters, and more motorist-focussed. News footage of him leaving his home for City Hall this morning showed him being driven away in a huge people-carrier, in stark contrast with the exiting Mayor’s use of public transport to get around in almost all circumstances. We know he plans to rephase traffic lights to favour cars over pedestrians: let’s see if pedestrian road casualties continue to fall under his leadership or, as seems more likely, not.

Continued scrutiny

It’s important that we Boris-stoppers continue to scrutinise him now he has been elected Mayor. There’s clearly a lot of scope for broken promises, and more scope still for the undermining of progress in this world-leading city in any number of policy areas.

Some have suggested that we at Stop Boris are well placed to exercise this scrutiny. We’re certainly better placed than his official scrutineers, the London Assembly, who are completely toothless due to Boris’s own party holding more than the third of seats needed to be able to nod through his budgets without reading them.

We are, however, also exhausted, demotivated, upset, depressed and above all thoroughly fed up with watching this objectionable man blathering on in news bulletins and statements, after two months of non-stop, often painful Boris-watching – and in dire need of a break.

There’s no harm admitting at this stage what many of you will have read between the lines over that period: Stop Boris has essentially been a one-man operation, ably assisted (not to mention at times lovingly tolerated!) by that one man’s wife. Sure, the Facebook group has nearly 2,000 members, and we’ve had plenty of supporting comments, e-mails and even some active on- and off-line campaigning for the cause, but the vast bulk of the work has taken place in a single suburban (Zone 6, no less – ‘put that in your pipe and smoke it’, Mr. Crosby ) living room.

I don’t rule out an active return to the web in the future (so keep us in your RSS reader or check back from time to time), but for now this is it, the last post on the Stop Boris blog.

Thanks

Before I sign off for the last time, I’d like to thank a number of people for their help, support and information over the past few months.

• Mrs. Stop Boris, for everything!
• The donor of the StopBoris.org domain and web space, without which we would have had far, far less impact.
• The Tory Troll for setting up exactly the kind of blog I would probably have set up if I’d ever bothered before Stop Boris, and breaking lots of interesting news throughout the campaign, including being first to the news of the BNP backing Boris. I’d suggest the Troll as the best place to go if you’re looking for a blog to plug the gap left by the Stop Boris blog.
• Dave Hill for running by far the most comprehensive and broad coverage of the entire election anywhere on the web.
• Liberal Conspiracy for giving us some good promotion in the crucial last couple of weeks of the campaign.
• All the other bloggers who’ve linked to us and helped spread our message – I daren’t try to list them all as I will undoubtedly miss some out, but I seriously appreciated every single bit of promotion of this site.
• The Guardian for, contrary to many of the more outraged comments on pro-Ken or anti-Boris articles, covering the election with for the most part moderation and balance. I think the people who’ve criticised this newspaper as a mouthpiece for the Ken campaign, contrasting it unfavourably with the Evening Standard, have really engaged their typing fingers rather more quickly than their brains.
• All the Boris-stoppers who’ve been in touch with us, tipped us off about articles, played an active role on- and off-line in spreading the anti-Boris message, even singing our campaign song for us or creating other songs/videos, and just generally offered their support to our efforts.
• And of course you, the Stop Boris blog readers, all 3-5,000 (understanding webstats seems to be an imprecise science) of you. Thanks for justifying my outpourings’ worthwhileness by reading them!

That’s it

So for now that’s it for the Stop Boris blog.

I wish all Londoners the best in coping with yesterday’s disastrous result, and above all I hope Boris is not as bad as we’ve feared he will be. For someone so convinced everything I’ve blogged about Boris over the past two months has been fundamentally correct, for London’s sake, I now hope just as strongly to be proven wrong about the consequences of his election for the city I love.

I’ve never liveblogged before in my life, but hey, we have to try new things don’t we? I’ve currently got BBC London 94.9 on audio, and ITV London Tonight on video, with a variety of election web sources on refresh.

18:29

Paddick on BBC London 94.9 has just confirmed his second preference went to the Left List. A surprise, and an ultimately pointless gesture, but interesting all the same.

18:38

Bit of a news catch-up:
Again on BBC London 94.9, Peter Kellner, head honcho of YouGov, has also called the election for Boris, and will resign if he’s wrong. He’s predicted a 55/45 split between Boris and Ken after 2nd preferences.

The BNP are reported to be doing well in the ExCeL count, taking fourth place ahead of the Greens in the assembly list vote in three of the constituencies being counted there. Barnbrook is also doing well in the mayoral ballot there. Of course the BNP are never happy, and are currently claiming the ballots were tampered with and that if they don’t hit 5% in the list vote they will take legal action, going to the High Court if necessary.

18:54

Boris is currently leading on first preferences in 8 constituencies; Ken in 6. This is a marginal improvement on the earlier 9 to 5, but nothing to get excited about. Boris-preferring constituencies do seem to have higher turnouts as well.

19:10

The time estimated for the announcement of the result has been bouncing about all day. The latest I’ve heard is now midnight, apparently from Nick Robinson of the BBC. Who has heard insiders at both Labour and Conservative HQ saying they’re sure Boris will win. Did I mention it’s not looking too good?

19:39

It’s all gone a bit quiet. Apparently some constituencies are nearly finished (e.g. City and East is past 90%) so we might get some assembly results soon.

20:08

The Evening Standard has called the election for Boris. However they’ve said that his rivals have conceded, which isn’t true just yet - Brian said it looked like Boris was ahead last I heard (and certainly didn’t think that he had a chance any more), while Ken’s been pretty quiet all day to my knowledge, with official Labour spokespeople waiting for the result before saying any more. No idea what’s going on behind the scenes of course.

20:13

As I mentioned earlier, a couple of constituencies are nearly ready to announce their assembly seat results: City and East, and Enfield and Haringey. Labour won these last time. We can’t get the mayoral result or the list assembly members result until every single vote is counted of course. Apparently Barnet and Camden had some computer problems this morning, so they’re currently holding everything else up.

20:21

Sian Berry, Green mayoral candidate is being interviewed on BBC London 94.9 as I type. She is confident they’ve held on to their two assembly seats but there’s no longer any mention of gaining seats, and is also unsure whether or not the BNP will get seats. Kellner of YouGov thinks it’s touch and go whether the Greens keep seats or not, but it sounds like this is speculation as the list calculations are ‘fiendishly complicated’ (Berry). She hopes the assembly will scrutinise the mayor more now and encourage take-up of green policies. She doesn’t think she’d work with Boris in his administration as she knows too many environmentalists who’ve had their ‘fingers burned’ by Conservatives asking their advice then quietly chucking it out. They could at least recycle it…

20:36

Just received the following from a Boris-stopper about what happened when they went to vote yesterday:

The polling station should’ve been at Lewisham station, but was relocated overnight to the Lewisham Centre and no signs were there to tell people where to vote! No-one could find the new venue…

First I’ve heard of this. I doubt any of this will make a difference to the overall result, but there seem to have been far more administrative cock-ups than usual in this election, with BBC London (TV) reporting that some people had found polling clerks writing their ID numbers on their ballot papers and therefore voiding their votes. All very worrying.

20:42

Speaking of election irregularities… A Labour party member has just reported on BBC London 94.9 that she’s seen over 200 Lambeth votes spoiled because the polling clerk has written voters’ ID numbers on the ballots. She says votes for all parties were affected and that she’s never seen spoiled votes on such a scale. Again I’m certainly not saying these votes would’ve made a difference overall but it is deeply worrying that there appears to have been widespread misinterpretation of the voting procedures.

20:48

The Conservative party has taken Bexley and Bromley’s assembly seat - not a surprise as it was Tory before as well, so it doesn’t tell us much. Boris v Ken numbers for them should be available soon.

20:53

Labour has narrowly taken Brent and Harrow. This was Conservative before.

21:02

Full Bexley and Bromley results from London Elects.

Bit of light relief from the Guardian liveblog:

“Are you saying that a performing monkey in a Conservative rosette could have won this race?” asks the Beeb [when interviewing Steve Norris]? Are you saying one hasn’t?

21:10

They’re coming thick and fast now. Apparently Labour has comfortably held the North East constituency (a doubling of majority according to the winning candidate but I doubt that takes increased turnout into account). It was Labour by a fair bit last time too. Dunno what’s happened to City and East which has been 99% ready for about an hour!

21:25

City and East has remained Labour. Not sure what the Beeb is up to - no results at all on their site, unless I’m looking in the wrong place.

21:32

Havering and Redbridge has stayed Conservative with an increased majority, apparently mainly with votes previously given to smaller parties. If this is repeated in the Mayoral vote, Boris will romp home. And we know he’s good at romping. (sorry, cheap joke, I’m getting tired).

21:40

Enfield and Haringey held by Labour, but with a fairly small majority over the Conservatives.

Doug (in comments): thanks for confirming it’s not just me who can’t see any updates on the BBC site. London Elects seems to still only have the Bexley and Bromley result to boot.

Will: I feel your pain.

1st pref mayoral votes are finally coming in: Bexley and Bromley has gone for Boris; City and East and North East have gone for Ken. No surprises there really. Sorry, I didn’t type quickly enough to get the numbers down!

21:53

Brent and Harrow has gone slightly for Ken too - not surprising given the assembly result.

Current numbers from the Guardian liveblog:

Boris Johnson: 378,239 votes
Ken Livingstone: 343,770 votes.

And the majority of constituencies so far have been pro-Ken, I think. Oh dear.

22:06

London Elects has finally put some more results online, and the BBC had one last time I looked.

22:15

Aha! guardian.co.uk is posting assembly results as they get them, and seem to be quicker at data entry than both London Elects and the Beeb.

Dave Hill points out that if the Conservatives only get 8 Assembly Members (it looks more likely they’ll have 9, but 8 is possible), Boris will have to get co-operation with another party to get his budget through. Who would that be? Lib Dems seem most likely, he concludes.

22:23

What on earth’s happening on the London Elects site? Some results that were up a minute ago seem to have gone again. I’m assuming this is due to a technical cockup rather than inaccuracy in figures. Sorry, this is rather boring, I’ll try and stop complaining about the display of results on other websites!

James (in comments): We’re not completely certain Boris has won; it’s just extremely likely. We don’t know anything about second preferences yet, but the consensus seems to be that the gap on first prefs will be too large to be crossed using second prefs, especially considering the BNP are polling relatively well on first prefs and we all know where their second ones are likely to go…

22:31

More results: BBC London TV news says Labour’s held Lewisham and Greenwich, and the Conservatives have held West Central. I assume results will soon appear on one or all of the sites linked above.

22:37

Latest numbers nabbed from Guardian liveblog (and I think they’re just nabbing them off rolling news channels!):

7 of 14 constituencies declared.
FIRST PREFERENCE VOTES:
Boris Johnson: 46%
Ken Livingstone: 40%
Brian Paddick: 9%

22:52

Doug’s asked about how the BNP is polling. I don’t think we have list votes available yet, but here’s the mayoral 1st prefs I could find:
Bexley and Bromley: 8,950 4.41%
City and East: 10,214 5.45%
North East: 3,776 1.90%
There’s been more mayoral results coming in on the radio but again I can’t find them in print anywhere and can’t type fast enough to catch the figures accurately.

23:01

BBC London 94.9 and Sky say 10 of 14 constituencies are done. I’m getting seriously fed up of having no reliable written source of results or figures - anyone got any ideas? The latest figures are 43% Boris, 39% Ken, 10% Brian on 1st prefs, but I have no idea what that means because I don’t know which constituencies are covered and so whether we have more Conservative or Labour ones yet to declare.

23:07

Ah, here we go, the radio says that the 4 left to declare are expected to all be Boris, so looks like we are doomed. Good news is that slowpoke Barnet and Camden has finished counting and is just going through verification, so we should be put out of our misery fairly soon. I’m suffering a bit of brain fatigue (cue Boris supporters saying I always have, I just didn’t know it before) so have forgotten the other bit of news I was going to pass on here. I’m sure it’ll come back as soon as I publish this update.

23:17 

Ealing and Haringey has stayed Conservative, as has Croydon and Sutton, as has Merton and Wandsworth. I *think* this means all the constituencies are in, so a mayoral result should come very soon. Current assembly list calculations being done on the hoof by Kellner of YouGov and announced on BBC radio look like the Conservatives will pick up top-up seats so Boris won’t need a coalition, and it’s looking very possible that the BNP will pick up a seat too. Looks very likely that One London is out.

23:23

The mayoral results are now being aggregated to find out if Boris has won on first prefs. If he has, expect a result extremely soon. If not, expect one fairly soon.

Whatever happens, at least we can soon get some sleep.

23:30

Doug: sorry for not being clear - it looks like One London is out and won’t be replaced by UKIPs either, which leaves room for other top-ups.

The constituency assembly seats have been confirmed as 8 Conservative, 6 Labour.

Kellner of YouGov is repeating his prediction: Boris leading but not with over 50%. Roughly half of minority 2nd prefs wasted, the rest splitting fairly evenly between Boris and Ken, so not enough to close the gap. YouGov were right last time, and it looks like we were wrong to pooh-pooh their polling this time. Time will tell of course, but that’s rapidly running out!

23:52

Tessa Jowell: “Everyone in the Labour team is preparing themselves for the worst.” (on BBC London 94.9) Result should come in approx 5 minutes. She sounds dreadful.

23:58
After 2nd prefs, Boris wins with 1168738 votes vs 1028966 for Ken - majority of 139772.

Thanks for trying, Boris-stoppers.

01:03

Bet you thought I’d gone, didn’t you? Well, I’m still here, not-so-patiently waiting for the list results. Couldn’t help but update here to say that Boris just said in a BBC News interview that we were welcome to ‘kick him out with gusto’ in four years. What a kind offer!

Just remembered we promised to put the winning video from the poll on LondonVids.com up as our top post today. As an excuse to get our own video in here, as well as a more serious message than either ours or the winner’s, I’m going to post the videos which came first, second and third. They’ve all been posted before but they’re worth a look before you cast your vote today.

Winner: Boris Johnson’s Reputation

Second: Ken Livingstone for London

Third: MYR of LDN (that’s our one!)

Please go and vote against Boris today. We can stop him if we get turnout up high enough.

The Tory Troll earlier posted a summing-up at the end of a 50-post campaign against Boris, which has been one of the best-researched and most strident on the web.

Here at the Stop Boris campaign, we have also been blogging for some time now, as a way of spreading the word about why we need to vote against Boris Johnson today.

Our campaign started in July last year, when it was first announced that Boris Johnson was going to put himself forward for the Conservative Mayoral candidacy. While most people dismissed him as a joke, it was clear to us that in modern politics, in a personality-driven campaign, there was a very real threat that Boris could be elected.

The Stop Boris group on Facebook was set up, and its Posted Items and Wall remained the focus of the campaign until March this year, when the idea of stepping things up with campaign posters first dawned.

Somewhere to host the posters was needed, and before we knew it we’d had the StopBoris.org domain and a nice chunk of web space donated to us, so it seemed rude not to set up a web site too.

Mrs. Stop Boris suggested she should create an accompanying application for Facebook users, which she did with aplomb, and tonight sees its user base on the verge of hitting 1,000.

A static web site proved, within just a few days of launch, inadequate for tracking a fast-moving campaign, rich in developments and arguments against Boris, so that’s where the Stop Boris blog came in, and it’s on researching and writing for this I’ve spent nearly every free moment for the past six weeks.

So I’m now able to look back over the 183 posts prior to this one that I’ve written on this blog, and bring you a summary of the compelling case against electing the woefully unsuitable Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, divided into 15 headings which seemed vaguely appropriate at the time…

Some links to posts are in bold/larger type, indicating some sort of relative importance in their subject area. I don’t pretend it’s been done in a scientific way, though.

The people who know Boris know he’s completely inappropriate to be Mayor

Of course, only those who aren’t desperate to get him elected are admitting it publicly. Even plenty of people who are in or support his own party are worried about the damage he’ll do to the Conservative brand if he becomes the most powerful Tory politician in Britain.

• Portillo squirms - are other Conservatives worried too?
• Cameron starts the damage limitation
• Manchurian Boris
• Boris ‘underwhelming and nervous’
• Monsieur de Parris
• Simon Heffer wants to stop Boris too!
• Tories’ enemy’s enemy is also their enemy

He holds offensive views that make him unsuitable to lead a diverse city

For years he filled his writing with outrageous statements, many of which he has refused to apologise for. Even when he has said sorry for things, it’s been a grudging apology riddled with caveats. Issues include homophobia and pandering to racists. No wonder the BNP have called on their voters to give him their second preferences.

• Three men and a dog
• More evidence of Boris’s cluelessness
• In the Stop Boris inbox today…
• Gay Shame poster
• BNP say vote Boris
• More on the BNP recommendation
• A bit of Jewish empathy
• The Voice speaks
• The problem is Islam
• Boris can’t be "out-ethnic"ed by an Asian
• Stonewall hustings
• More on today’s Stonewall hustings
• Boris’s "big idea"
• Fruity gossip
• Littlejohn backs Boris
• A bit of class

His flagship policy is a complete and utter mess

The main policy associated with Boris for many months was his plan to replace bendy-buses with a "new Routemaster". It’s been discredited on so many grounds it’s extraordinary he’s still persisting with it.

• Bendy bus-lovers of the city, unite
• The bendy-bus - no, Routemaster - menace
• The last word on Boris’s bus black hole?
• Bashing Boris on buses
• Boris’s bus idiocy, part 99999
• Boris’s routemaster plan “non-starter”

He is by far the weakest candidate on tackling crime; his Mayoralty will see more deaths

He’s the only main candidate with no pledged target on cutting crime (he just whips up fear about it without being able to tackle it), and his Freudian slip shows this is because he knows his planned budget cuts will mean they can’t cut crime at all.

And while crime may well rise under Boris, so will pedestrian deaths on the roads as he reverse the progress that has been made in making London more pedestrian-friendly over the past few years.

• Some deaths are more equal than others
• ITV London’s Mayoral debate

He is atrocious on the environment

There’s a general consensus among environmentalists that Boris, a climate change denier and anti-Kyoto campaigner, would be a disaster on green issues the world over.

• Boris’s environmental pledge: plant far fewer trees
• Boris’s next enviro-pledge: encourage more waste and energy use
• Jonathon Porritt
• Boris “stuck in the 80s” on the environment
• The whole world in our hands

His entire campaign has been fake and micromanaged by Lynton Crosby, and he has never focused on the issues

He just knows a few focus-group tested lines but has no substance behind any of the sentences he’s learnt and certainly has no concrete policies to back them up. When asked about his own policies he instead turns everything into a tenuously linked and generally unfounded attack against Ken Livingstone.

• Don’t mention the issues
• Logic problem
• Surreal Metronet coverage
• Serious business
• Gaffophobia in action
• Any questions? Tough, Boris won’t be answering them
• What a difference abstaining makes
• Manchurian Boris
• Boris’s own TV fakery scandal
• Divide – and conquer?
• Boris shamed out of ‘under the radar’ strategy?
• Boris turned up to something!
• The gaffophobia issue arrives in the national media!
• Time Out hustings
• ‘Bottler Boris’ strikes again
• Nannied state
• Boris’s Party Election Broadcast - a review
• Boris on PM
• Boris’s "big idea"
• The return of gaffophobia!
• Boris the puppet
• Irrelevant question time
• The astroturfing continues
• Boris on PM - transcript
• Still running scared
• Today? I’ll get back to you tomorrow
• Sky News debate
• The main candidates’ last TV appearance
• "Boris isn’t wearing any clothes"
• A reason to vote for Boris

Most of his policies are the stuff of cloud cuckoo land

He promises a no-strike deal with the RMT union. The RMT say they would never, ever, ever sign such a deal. It’s almost certain that they will go on strike if he tries to impose one, in fact. And that’s just one of his policies: the majority of the others are also fanciful. Or just rubbish.

• Who’s he gonna call? Union-busters!
• BoozeTube no longer
• Boris’s "big idea"
• On your bike, Boris!
• Evening Standard lays in to Boris’s rubbish manifesto
• Dave Hill on transport policies

He can’t be taken seriously

He’s built his entire career on being a buffoon, an idiot, a fool, a clown. He simply can’t be taken seriously. Imagine him trying to address the city after a terrorist attack? "How many are dead? Oh, cripes!"

• Business leaders: vote with your heads
• Boris, terror attack, Cripes!

He simply isn’t up to the job

He has a track record of incompetence, gaffes, sackings and not being able to take anything seriously or dedicate himself to anything for a prolonged period of time. And he’s barely managed to find anyone who’s willing to join his administration so who knows who’d end up doing any of the real work?

He only entered into this contest for a bit of self-publicity – he never actually wanted the job, but now he’s in too deep…

• It was never meant to go this far…
• Manchurian Boris
• Et tu, Tele?
• Empty canvass
• “Boris to homeless: my house is worth shedloads”
• Newsnight debate
• Newsnight- reaction and video
• If Boris gets in, we ‘can always move to Scotland’
• Charlie Brooker wants to stop Boris too
• Monsieur de Parris
• Boris’s dream team
• Smokescreen
• Boris’s "big idea"
• Won’t anyone join his team?
• Irrelevant question time
• Video: Boris’s incompetence with figures
• Caitlin Moran wants to stop Boris
• Polly Toynbee wants to stop Boris as well
• Dave Hill declares
• Simon Heffer wants to stop Boris too!
• Zoe Williams wants to stop Boris – and so do loads of other people 

People have been underestimating his chances

Many anti-Boris people think he’s just a joke and there’s no serious chance of him getting the job. These people are complacent and might not get out and vote. They need to be alerted to the danger urgently and dragged to the polling stations!

• Ruin your friends’ evenings

He claims to support ‘zero tolerance’ but has broken the law a number of times himself

Evidently he thinks the law only applies to the little people, not VIPs like himself.

• Dangerous driving
• Drugs
• Boris breaks the rules on financial declarations, again
• A bit of class

His campaign is riddled with outright dishonesty

His campaign team have been paying people to comment on blogs such as ours and The Tory Troll’s, pretending to be normal members of the public. Fortunately we exposed them and they then left us largely in peace.

Aside from that, the team have also been spreading various lies and half-truths to scare people into voting for Boris, who has let a number of lies slip himself.

• Hit the road, Zach
• Rewriting history in Epping Forest
• Lies, damned lies and ignoring statistics
• What goes up must come out
• Boris’s answer to Tube crime fears: keep staff shut away from passengers
• The lies just keep coming
• All-day Freedom Pass ‘mad’ claims Team Boris

His media cronies have run half his campaign for him

Certain nasty parts of the media have made no attempt at balanced coverage of this election, instead doing everything they can to discredit the current Mayor and promote Boris, despite there being no case for doing so. Just about all the newspaper leaders endorsing Boris failed to give a single positive reason to vote for him.

The Evening Standard’s own journalistic team even tore Boris’s manifesto to shreds while managing to pick only modest holes in Ken’s, yet their billboards and pages have teemed with anti-Ken, pro-Boris propaganda for months.

• The pot calls the kettle a piccaninny
• Dirty tricks in the Telegraph
• La la la la not listening can’t hear you la la la la
• Vendetta
• Tribune
• Evening Standard web poll
• Don’t let it be the Sun wot wins it
• ‘Interesting’ times at the Evening Standard
• How the media works
• Lack of gaffes ≠ statesmanlike competence
• Weak leadership
• Sunday leaders
• Dave Hill on some of those leaders
• Link to Is this rubbish ‘the big one’ Gilligan was saving up?
• More on sub-Standard accounting

He doesn’t care about ordinary Londoners

He has no real roots here and is completely out of touch with the concerns and lives of everyday Londoners.

• Is Boris overplaying his London credentials?
• Those strong London credentials come to the fore again
• A change for the better off
• A bit of class

Campaign videos

Sometimes 25 pictures a second are worth 25,000 words a second, or something.

• 3am eternal
• Bremner, Bird and Fortune
• Stop Boris now on YouTube
• A leader, not a joker
• Not for the easily offended
• There’s a (slightly) less offensive video too!
• All at sea in the Stop Boris campaign song
• Newsnight Mayoral debate, children’s edition
• Boris criticises Brian’s record – because, er, um…
• The return of gaffophobia!
• Back this?
• London Election Cinema contest
• Another song/video
• Video: Boris’s incompetence with figures
• Return of the d***head

Campaign posters

They still hold true, seven weeks on from creating them.

How to stop Boris

So, all that said, here’s how to vote most effectively to stop Boris.

Good luck, Boris-stoppers.

This election is going to be extremely close. We need to get Boris-stoppers and Boris-sceptics to the polling stations in their millions.

Do whatever you can to encourage people to vote today and we can stop Boris.

A grassroots campaign taking on the might of the Standard and the Sun. Are you up for the fight? Let’s do it.

Boris has announced that Labour MP Kate Hoey would be on his Mayoral team if he became Mayor.

Apparently Gordon Brown doesn’t mind.

I wonder where that leaves everyone who’s said they have to vote against Ken (i.e. either literally or effectively for Boris) because they hate “New Labour” so much? Whichever way you vote you get a Labour party member in City Hall now, so you might as well go for the option that doesn’t put an incompetent clown in charge of the city, eh?

After providing several months of what I would wholeheartedly agree has been balanced, open-minded and fair in-depth coverage of this campaign, Guardian journalist and blogger Dave Hill has this morning declared he’ll be voting for Ken, and offered ten substantial reasons why.

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!

We’ve had a Stop the BNP too! page since StopBoris.org launched, but have been neglecting our duties in this important area somewhat in recent weeks.

Fortunately, Question That hasn’t, and has written this helpful post explaining the issues at stake and also helpfully pointing out that it is even possible to vote tactically in the proportional representation part of your ballot to minimise the impact of any BNP success.

You can [stop the BNP] by voting for any party or candidate (other than the BNP, of course) in the list election (using the peach ballot paper). Any vote will play its part in reducing the BNP’s percentage.

However, it will be more effective** to vote for a party that is likely to poll more than 5%. Partly because of splits, neither the moderate Euro-sceptic right nor the far left are expected to gain a seat on the Assembly. That means a choice between Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party.

** This is because candidates who poll less than 5% drop out of the count. Therefore, should the BNP overcome this threshold, only votes for another party polling more than 5% will help to keep their total number of seats down.

Excellent stuff. And I don’t just say that because he’s an all-too-rare sight in the libertarian blogosphere: someone considering holding his nose and voting for Ken to keep Boris out!

He’s not the first person to make this point (and I’m not saying we were either), but Paul Waugh puts it rather well on his Evening Standard blog.

George Psaradakis, the driver of the Number 31 bus that was bombed on 7/7, was on hand to introduce Ken. "Ken Livingstone gave London the leadership our city needed that day," he said, before receving a tearful hug from the Mayor.

Now, no one in the Ken camp is so crass as to want to make the events of 7/7 a centrepiece of his re-election campaign, but they do feel it encapsulates The Choice the capital faces on May 1.

The Mayor pointed out that just as the Olympic bid had needed years of detailed preparation to succeed, so the calm and efficient response to the terror attack had been long in the planning. […]

If another terror attack took place under Mayor Boris’s watch, what kind of speech could and would he give?

There are other good points in his post too, so give it a read.

It’s nice to see someone attempting balance at the Standard, which today continues its appalling, corrupt, biased coverage, penned by self-proclaimed "Boris Johnson supporter" Andrew Gilligan, which today sees him conjuring up more extremely tenuous links between Ken and some sort of fabricated corruption in ethnic minority communities.

Apparently, in one case, a Latin American newspaper in London has been running full-page ads from its own publisher encouraging its readers to vote for Ken. This is, we are assured by Mr. Gilligan, outrageous.

Can anyone think of any other newspapers, perhaps with bigger circulations and higher profiles, which have devoted page after page after page to attempting to influence the outcome of the Mayoral election? I’ll see if I can remember any such newspapers and perhaps offer a follow-up post later looking at their own corruption if so.

The First Post informs me that Boris Johnson’s minders have twice turned down invitations for him to be interviewed alongside his two main rivals on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The central aim of Johnson’s minder-in-chief, Aussie Lynton Crosby, has been to prevent his candidate from living up the his ‘Blundering Boris’ reputation. He has been more successful than many Tories feared but the maximum point of danger for Johnson has been whenever he appeared before the media on his own.

The contest between Johnson, Labour’s incumbent Livingstone, and the lacklustre Lib-Dem Brian Paddick has received daily news coverage on the BBC and ITV stations in the capital. Boris Johnson has twice been ‘kebabed’ by Neil and Paxman and looked like a rabbit on the headlights on Question Time with David Dimbleby as the assertive ringmaster.

So it’s no surprise that his minder Crosbie [sic] wants to avoid the possibility of gaffes in the last few days of the campaign - hence the desire to avoid Today. Under electoral law and BBC guidelines the programme producers only have to give him the opportunity to take part. If he fails to turn up, they can go ahead and interview his rivals leaving an empty chair and switched-off microphone for Johnson.

A late surge of gaffophobia, eh? Sounds like his team are getting very jittery in these final days. It’s all to play for, Boris-stoppers!

If you’re a Lib Dem who isn’t yet convinced that you should be a number 2 (or 3 or 4, which amount to the same vote for you!) in our tactical voting against Boris guide, I recommend Ken’s appeal to you today, particularly the well researched and clearly presented listing of policies on which the Liberal Democrats hold positions in agreement with him, while Boris has stated positions and views against them. For instance:

Cutting emissions from air travel

Ken’s policy:  Oppose new runway at Heathrow, Stansted, or Gatwick.

Lib Dem policy:  "Liberal Democrats believe that for the foreseeable future, and at least until 2030, limits on air flight capacity in the South East in particular should be set by limiting the amount of runway space to a level that is roughly equivalent to what is currently available. This is why we have opposed a second runway at Stansted and the third (and short) runway at Heathrow." A Soft Landing: Creating a Sustainable Market in Aviation, 21 December 2005

Boris Johnson’s policy:  Hoodwinked environmentalists by winning plaudits for coming out against Heathrow and then immediately announcing plan for new airport in the Thames Estuary, which he now calls his ‘big idea’ for London.

Civil Partnerships

Ken’s policy:  Ken introduced the first civil partnerships register, which was opened in 2001.  This paved the way for the 2004 Civil Partnerships Act.

Lib Dem policy: Supported civil partnerships register

Boris Johnson’s policy: Compared to gay marriage to the right to "the union between three men and a dog".

You get the idea.

Ken’s open letter to Lib Dem supporters is here. Thanks to Dave Hill for drawing it to my attention through his blog.

Sky News are really going to town for what will be the final televised debate of the campaign, just three days before the polls come to a close:

Decision Time: The London Debate will see Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick slug it out live from 8pm just three days before polling.

Sky’s political editor Adam Boulton will chair the debate, and more than 500 people will be at Cadogan Hall in central London to watch the action first-hand.

Coverage begins at 7.30pm with Decision Time: The London Debate Unplugged.

Sky’s Martin Stanford and a panel of experts will let you know what to look out for and size up the campaign so far.

Unplugged will continue on Sky News Active and online during the TV ad breaks and for an hour after the end of the debate at 9pm.

The panel will include a range of political bloggers, sadly not including me. I mean, I’d've worn a disguise and asked for my voice to be digitally altered, so perhaps their budget wouldn’t have stretched to it, but really, you’d think they’d've asked, wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately some personal and family commitments may well mean I won’t get to watch this until late Tuesday evening, which is rather frustrating, particularly as I’m not sure how easily I could record the ‘Active’ stuff. Hopefully Dave Hill and the Tory Troll will be able to sort you out with some coverage of the debate in the mean time.

A keen Boris-stopper just tipped us off about Time Out’s final verdict on the race to be Mayor, which is a very fair and balanced article, weighing up and comparing various aspects of both contenders.

The only down side is that it doesn’t actually give a recommendation of how to vote at the end, but to the eyes of both us and our correspondent, it’s pretty clear that there’s nothing in here to suggest voting Boris, and plenty to suggest not doing so.

I’ve been impressed during this campaign by how well Time Out ‘get’ London; of course, one would expect them to do so, but it’s nice to find they are so in tune with this great city and all it stands for. Unlike, I am duty-bound to add, a certain Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

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.

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.