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.
Starring two or three horses and an elephant in the room.
(Use this link to jump straight to our advice without reading the full post.)
This post has been brewing for a while now, as we’ve monitored the opinion polls throughout the campaign, and by coincidence this morning I received an e-mail from a Stop Boris campaign supporter urging us to make a post along these lines. So here it is.
The Stop Boris campaign was started and has been run with one objective: to do whatever it takes to keep Boris Johnson out of City Hall. I won’t list again the reasons why this is so important – there are 125 other blog posts, a web site and a group and application on Facebook that do that.
One thing we have been clear about from the outset is that this campaign is not seeking to endorse any particular alternative candidate to Boris: we’ve provided links to all but the BNP’s manifestos and other information, and been as meticulous as possible in retaining our non-partisan status throughout the campaign.
It also seems prudent at this juncture to remind readers that Dave Hill of the Guardian has independently confirmed that we are not a ‘Team Ken front’, without breaking the anonymity that we’ve (often frustratingly) had to maintain for personal reasons throughout this campaign. No-one is paying us to run Stop Boris – indeed no-one is even asking us to run it – and in fact only our close friends and family members even know who we are! We’re running this campaign in a personal capacity out of a genuine fear of the damage Boris would do if given control of London and its £11bn budget for four long years.
But now, at this point in the campaign, with barely a week until election day, we have to face facts. We have to acknowledge the elephant in the room: an elephant which the opinion polls suggest is not about to reach for its jumbo coat and leave the room.
While the opinion polls throughout the election have varied significantly, the overall picture is that Boris is at worst in the lead by quite some way, or at best pretty much exactly level with Ken Livingstone. Brian Paddick is bringing up the rear with only a fraction of the votes of either of these front-runners. In other words, this election is (some might say bafflingly!) proving to be a two-horse race.
In any normal, first-past-the-post (FPTP), one-vote-per-person election, the course of action for stopping Boris in these circumstances would be obvious and straightforward, if not to everyone’s liking: vote for Ken. But the election for Mayor of London gives each voter two votes.
LiveJournal user publicansdecoy has a dispassionate analysis of what this means for those of us wishing to stop Boris.
From his analysis (and further clarification among the comments) we see that using either your first or second preference vote for Ken is equally helpful in an attempt to stop Boris. It also does no harm to the chances of your genuine first choice if you put Ken as your second choice.
In the comments on that post, someone by the name of matgb (who sounds to be something of an expert psephologist based on publicansdecoy’s reference to him in his main post) goes one step further, offering advice on the ultimate Stop Boris pair of votes:
Use your first vote for the person you most want to win. Use your second for either Ken or Boris, unless your first vote is for one of them, in which case your second should be for Brian (there’s still an outside chance he could take a second place position, in which case he probably wins).
[…] if you really want to stop either Ken or Boris, then Brian 1st choice is the best way to go psephologically.
So if your only consideration is stopping Boris, Brian first, Ken second is the way to vote. It’s also your best hope of stopping Boris but keeping Ken out as well, although I wouldn’t want to overstate the likelihood of that happening, given how far ahead Boris and Ken are of Brian. But if enough people vote Brian 1, Ken 2, it’s certainly within the realms of technical possibility that it comes to a Boris v Brian run-off, with Brian taking the prize. Perhaps there are three horses in this race after all.
Before concluding this post, I would like to pre-emptively defend us against some potential attacks.
The Stop Boris campaign is not telling anyone how to vote. We are not endorsing a candidate, or indeed two candidates. We are simply advising our readers, from a psephological point of view, about how to vote in order to stand the best chance possible of stopping Boris.
That said, assuming the opinion polls aren’t unprecedentedly, enormously, wildly inaccurate, there’s no getting away from that aforementioned elephant in the Stop Boris living room: because this election is so very likely to come down to a run-off between Boris and Ken on second preferences, putting neither of your crosses against Ken does seem unlikely to have any more impact than a spoilt ballot paper would. But it’s still preferable to spoil (or effectively spoil) your ballot paper than to vote for Boris!
So in summary, here’s our advice, (to which this is a permanent link, which you are very welcome indeed to publicise):
If you want to use your ballot paper specifically to stop Boris, and…So, with all that in mind, let the final week of campaigning commence.
Best of luck, Boris-stoppers!
For a candidate who likes to play up his image as a cyclist, Boris isn’t doing very well on the policy front: the London Cycling Campaign have analysed all the candidates’ policies and concluded that Ken and Siân’s policies are more pro-cycling than are Boris’s.
Just come across this audio clip masquerading as a video clip over on YouTube:
It’s worth a listen as it shows Boris blustering into an argument in which he hasn’t the first clue what he’s talking about and eventually having to completely back down and withdraw his original point. (Does anyone know what the clip is from, by the way?)
You would kind of think that you might do a bit of basic homework on your two main opponents in an election where the three of you will be parading around debating things with each other, but clearly Boris’s dog ate his homework on this one. We can look forward to Boris’s metaphorical dog also eating, for instance, billions of pounds of our money as he mismanages the Crossrail project after he fails to do any work around that either if he’s elected next week.
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!
Today’s Telegraph gossip column brings us an anecdote from Saturday’s Stonewall hustings:
Boris’s bloomer
Convivial chap that he is, Boris Johnson - the Tories’ candidate in the London mayoral election - bounded up to his Lib Dem opponent Brian Paddick at the Stonewall hustings on the South Bank yesterday. "How are you, old fruit?" Boris greeted the homosexual former police chief.
One of Paddick’s associates started to giggle. Boris blushed. "Oh Lord, I didn’t mean it like that, honestly," Boris blustered. "I meant it as in ‘old bean’ or ‘old chap’." Paddick smiled stoically.
He really does manage to put his foot in it at the slightest opportunity, doesn’t he? And this is while he’s off the drink.
Imagine him trying to run City Hall when he’s back on the booze. Imagine that, imagine the embarrassment, imagine the shame – and keep that all in mind when you’re voting next week!
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!
Those of you looking at our YouTube channel may have spotted a video called “Ken Livingstone for London” appearing in our Favo[u]rites, and thought “Hah! This campaign does support Ken after all!”. So I thought I’d better explain why I’ve added it.
The video, apparently made by an ‘anon Ken admirer’, contrasts Ken’s handling of that extraordinary 48 hours in July 2005 which I’m sure most Londoners can still vividly remember, with the idea of Boris trying to cope with similar events.
The Tory Troll has written about this video too, so have a read of what he had to say, but the reason it’s appeared in the Stop Boris favourites is that the point the video is making is valid regardless of the competition for Boris. Yes, Ken handled it really well, but I’m sure there are other politicians who would have done too. The key point here is that Boris is obviously, definitely, clearly not one of them.
So, with that in mind, here’s the video:
Every election blogger worth reading has linked to Vote Match, so why should we be any different?
In principle, we shouldn’t be. I think sites like this are a brilliant idea in any election, and always use them to check my voting intention against my beliefs and ensure I’m not backing the wrong horse. Vote Match is easy to use, presents the results clearly, and works really well.
But in the context of the Mayor of London election 2008, I think there is one problem with Vote Match: it’s built on the assumption that candidates’ stated policies are all that matters.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they don’t matter, but the problem is that this approach overlooks some of the most important reasons not to vote for Boris.
Boris is renowned for his unreliability, his lack of commitment and his liability to commit offensive and embarrassing gaffes which (unlike rival candidates quoting things Boris has written back at him) would demean the office of Mayor.
He also has a history of saying whatever he thinks will get him elected, regardless of what he really thinks or will really do when in office: in his university days, to get elected as Oxford Union president, he pretended to be a supporter of the then fashionable SDP, rather than declaring his true allegiance to the Conservatives. This leaves a large question mark hanging over anything he says now.
But it’s that unreliability, that buffoonishness, that is the main, clear reason why the Stop Boris campaign’s recommendation about using Vote Match is as follows: use it by all means, but if Boris comes out on top just ignore him and vote for whoever came next.
Whichever statements Boris claims to agree with – and he was the third most dithering candidate, answering ‘neither’ to five of the questions on big issues like Council Tax and unemployment – it’s important that we don’t allow people to forget that he fundamentally can’t be trusted to represent our great city or do a competent job as Mayor. It’s the idiocy, stupid!
Whenever the national media covers the London Mayoral election, a handful of complaints from people outside London arrive to protest that “it doesn’t affect 90% of the UK” (not strictly true, when about one in every six people in the UK lives or works in London).
The media respond along Westminster-focused lines, about this election setting the scene for future General Elections, and so forth, but are they missing a trick? Could it actually be that the outcome of this election would have a serious impact on not just London, and not just the UK, but the very future environmental sustainability of the entire world?
It’s an argument that is gaining ground among environmentalists at the moment, and it runs like this.
Setting aside whether or not you like Ken Livingstone, and whether or not you agree with any of his other policies, no serious environmentalist disputes the fact that – at least in comparison with the vast majority of other politicians in positions of genuine power – the current Mayor of London has a good record on the environment.
London is now recognised around the world as the city that has gone furthest to address climate change, and Livingstone’s manifesto plays on his record. It is the only major world city, he says, to shift from private car use to public transport; it is setting standards in the UK on renewable energy; it has led the way on the congestion charge; it is forcing all buses, heavy lorries and cabs to improve air quality, and he claims an 83% increase in cycling.
Livingstone promises new green-belt protection and a £25-a-day congestion-zone charge on gas guzzlers, and offers a £500m set of bike corridors, a bike rental scheme with 6,000 machines and free passage for the greenest cars, with a London-wide low-emission zone to keep the worst polluting lorries out. “As for tree planting, we already plant more than Boris promises and we will plant more,” he says.
Of course, some of the details can be argued about, but on the big issues – a firm, environmental lobby-approved target for reducing London’s CO2 emissions, for instance – it is broadly agreed that the current Mayor is heading in the right direction, more so than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Boris, on the other hand, has still not withdrawn his support for President George W. Bush over the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. In other words, Boris agrees with Bush that we should not be doing everything we can to curb our emissions and so prevent catastrophic climate change causing death and destruction the world over. In the emotive terms I’ve arguably slipped into, Boris is a climate change denier.
Johnson effectively passes on climate change. He opposes the CO2 charge on gas guzzlers within the congestion zone and calls the new low-emission zone “the most punitive, draconian fining regime in the whole of Europe”, and aims to scrap it. Instead, he says he would “work towards” the 60% cut in the city’s emissions that Livingstone has pledged to reach by 2025 by incorporating the Tory party’s plans for more microgeneration and decentralisation of electricity, combined heat and power plants and energy saving. His critics point out that he is one of the few people in the developed world who still oppose the existing Kyoto climate change agreement and question his commitment to tackling climate change.
In political terms there is a big difference between a firm commitment to 60% cuts in emissions and agreeing to “work towards” it. Essentially, the latter is the way you cancel the former in a political climate [no pun intended] in which an explicit commitment to cancel it would not go down well with the majority of the electorate. Boris knows that Londoners are too committed to tackling climate change to elect someone who admits he wants to do nothing about it, so instead he conceals his true intentions with that meaningless phrase: “work towards”.
The argument you hear against a city like London taking a lead on climate change is that it’s like creating a no smoking area in an open-plan room. If London stopped emitting overnight, climate change would not suddenly be averted. Of course, this argument is true, but only if taken at its literal face value.
The key thing overlooked by those making this point is London’s international influence.
In October 2005, representatives of 18 leading world cities met in London to discuss joining forces to tackle global warming and climate change.
The representatives saw the need for action and cooperation on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pledged to work together towards achieving that goal.
At the end of the conference, a communiqué was signed which recognised the need for cities to take action and to cooperate on reducing climate emissions.
The Mayor of London is Chair of C40 Cities – Climate Leadership Group, and it’s pretty clear from the Londoncentricity of their News page that London is leading the way within this group.
The result of this is that around the world, London is known as a world leader in pushing ahead with policies to address climate change. And as policies become proven in our city, other places around the world begin to gain in confidence to implement them there too.
It’s here that we return to Boris. If Boris, a renowned opponent of Kyoto, is elected Mayor of London, by the time George W. Bush leaves office in January Boris will be the most powerful, highest-profile climate change denier in the English-speaking world.
And within C40 Cities, and in the wider world generally, politicians will see that the electorate in trailblazing London, previously thought to be years ahead of the rest of the world on dealing with climate change, have thrown out of office the man largely responsible for that work, in favour of someone elected on a platform of undoing and freezing what’s been done.
“Aha,” worldwide politicians will cry in unison. “Here we have hard proof that the electorate simply isn’t ready for the policies needed to tackle climate change. If we put our heads above the parapet with anti-emissions policies, we’ll be the next to lose an election to someone whose only nod to the environment is a few ‘green-lite’ gesture policies from the 1980s about parks and dog muck.”
The work of the Greens, of Ken, of the Stern report and of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be discarded, as will the planet’s prospects for long-term sustainability, as the idea that green policies can be an election-winner is sent straight to landfill.
This isn’t – or, re-reading it, isn’t just – a puff piece for Mr. Livingstone’s environmental policies. The real point here is that replacing Ken with Boris would send the worst possible message to the rest of the world. For instance, there’s a good case to be made that the Liberal Democrats are a greener party than the Labour party on a national basis, and I’ve no reason to suppose that Mayor Brian would damage the green cause to anything like the extent Mayor Boris would. And clearly if the environment is your number one concern, a certain Ms. Berry might be hoping for your first preference vote, and in the unlikely event she can overturn the polls in the coming weeks, Mayor Siân would presumably boost London’s environmental credentials still further.
The key thing to remember next time someone claims the result of this election doesn’t affect them as they live outside the capital is that this election has the potential to affect everyone outside the capital. A Boris victory would be a disaster for the planet.
This week’s set of If… cartoon strips by Steve Bell drew to a close today:
I don’t know if he’ll have changed anyone’s mind about voting for Boris, but he’s certainly kept those of us who already weren’t voting for him entertained all week.
This morning’s LBC debate wasn’t worth getting up early for.
There were one or two good moments, like the opportunity to remind people that not only would Boris be bumbling and incompetent in a crisis, but also in the immediate aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings, he wrote a piece criticising Islam and stating that the Koran was inherently violent.
This reminder sent him off into the most over-the-top display of mock outrage, accusing Ken, who’d quoted him, of "demeaning the office of Mayor" by issuing such a "smear". Once again, Boris claims that it’s a smear to simply read back what he himself did genuinely write.
But overall, this morning’s debate did little to further the Stop Boris cause. That’s not to say Boris performed brilliantly – obviously, that will never happen because he is incapable of doing so – but there were no quotable gaffes or idiotic cock-ups.
Being on the radio presumably helped, as it meant he could read from whatever notes he wanted without having to look away from the viewers’ gazes; undoubtedly what also helped was the fact that the show was hosted by Nick Ferrari, the right-wing talk radio host who was David Cameron’s first choice for Conservative Mayoral candidate, before he worked his way through several other people who rejected him and ended up scraping the bottom of the barrel by begging Boris to take on the job.
Ferrari is a militant motorist who loves taking his 4×4s around London, and has a history of falling out with Ken Livingstone. As such it was pretty hard to see how he would be unbiased, and certainly he didn’t hold back: when the subject of apologising for London’s role in slavery came up. Ken famously did this last year, and Brian Paddick agreed that this was right, he incurred instant strong scorn from Ferrari. Naturally Boris didn’t think an apology was necessary for decades of treating ethnic minorities as a secondary race – hardly a surprise given his own record in the area of race relations – and there was no disputing this from Ferrari.
So basically Boris got an easier ride here than the others, because the show’s outspoken host is just the kind of reactionary that Boris’s campaign is targeting. Indeed, it sounds like Ferrari spends much of his time on air ranting in an effort to bring his listeners around to his right-wing way of thinking about the world, so he might just have created some Boris voters over the years!
Even in a friendly environment, though, Boris still kept interrupting and talking over other people. He just can’t control his manners.
Roll on the next few televised debates, when we shall hopefully once again see the real Boris slipping out from behind the façade!
The closer the election gets, the more shockingly biased Associated Newspapers’ propaganda pamphlets – printed with ink that won’t rub off onto your bum-cheeks – become.
Dave Hill’s been behaving like a thoroughly professional journalist throughout this campaign, giving each candidate a fair hearing, carefully weighing up their policies’ pros and cons and reporting things as he finds them throughout. He certainly hasn’t come to his blog with any particular axe to grind, unlike, say, a certain blogger sitting very near my computer at this moment, who’s only too happy to grind an axe (or preferably to bury it in Boris’s head) at any opportunity.
But even non-partisan Dave lost his rag with the latest Evening Standard bias yesterday; I say ‘lost his rag’, but that is perhaps overstating things somewhat, given that the title of his article is merely "Tut, Tut, Evening Standard". (Mind you, I’ve just noticed that his permalink, i.e. the link I just put in, gives away that that wasn’t the title of his first draft!) But it’s clear that the Daily Mail group of newspapers, for so long desperate to be rid of Ken Livingstone, are hell-bent on getting their crony Boris [who, don’t forget, saved Andrew Gilligan’s career when he was sacked from the BBC by offering him a job at the Spectator] into City Hall, no matter what the cost to their journalistic reputation.
So, how would they cover last night’s Newsnight debate, which by common consent no-one did stunningly well in but Boris definitely lost, in their evening freesheet, London Lite?
The answer is that they:
Seriously. No mention of Boris’s bus-based blathering, when Jeremy Paxman had to ask him the same question 12 times and still didn’t get an answer. Nothing. No coverage of the debate at all. This is a propaganda effort the Chinese government would be proud of.
They claim to be "London’s Quality Newspaper", but on the evidence I’ve been seeing, even despite its lightweight content and short articles, the only one of the big four to come close to deserving that title is thelondonpaper, which is at least even-handed in its treatment of the candidates in this election. Better to have one or two fair paragraphs about each candidate than 20 grossly distorted ones, after all.
Mind you, even thelondonpaper is short on coverage of last night’s debate. It goes some way to making up for this with an intriguing nugget of information about Boris’s fundraising:
It has emerged Johnson met up with old pals from the Bullingdon Club—an exclusive Oxford University set which includes Tory leader David Cameron—to appeal for funds for his campaign.
The Bullingdon Club, lest we forget, is renowned for its members’ disgraceful behaviour in Oxford. David Cameron and Boris Johnson were in the club together, and essentially what they did was:
Another famous Bullingdon alumnus is Darius Guppy, by the way: a lovely bunch, all in all.
So now it sounds like Boris has been catching up with his fellow Bullingdon thugs to try to get cash out of them. Makes sense: after his woeful performance on Newsnight last night, his campaign is looking pretty damaged, so I’m sure they won’t mind throwing money at it to try to restore it. What’s good enough for a restaurant…