This was the first of a number of televised three-way debates in the coming weeks, including a BBC London one next week and culminating with a Question Time special the week after that.

Boris’s opening speech was read out fairly competently, but he did keep having to suppress that smirk of his.

It was all downhill from there for him though, once the debate proper began.

Slippage

He did his best to hold in place the mask that Lynton Crosby has worked hard to cultivate on Boris over the past few months – the mask of a proper, competent politician – but there was no way this idiot could keep it in place over the course of a full half-hour.

So we saw it slipping to reveal parts of the old, bumbling Boris, who had no grasp of the figures, and indeed barely any grasp of how to construct a sentence: for instance, he told us that if issued with an ID card, he would

grind it up and eat it on my children’s cornflakes

which seems a bit mean to his children, who will presumably be left to go hungry. (Not to mention hazardous to his health – although he’s more renowned for snorting ground-up hazardous substances than eating them, of course.)

Boris also informed us that the people watching Newsnight are its “readers”.

Experience

One of the early wins for the other candidates was when Brian called his bluff on his much-trumpeted line about being the only one of the three with any experience of running a private organisation: Brian got his retaliation in first by turning it round on Boris, saying that the only management experience he had was managing a tiny organisation of about 20 people! Boris stammered his way to a mumbled correction of this but could only take it up to “at least 50 people”, which didn’t exactly make Brian’s point any weaker, when the job of Mayor involves managing 105,000 people!

Bus black hole

It was, as expected, his grasp of figures where Boris really came unstuck, though, particularly in relation to the legendary bus black hole.

Jeremy Paxman became increasingly frustrated by Boris’s apparent attempt to filibuster away the question of the cost of his hare-brained bendy-bus replacement scheme, by simply talking on, and on, and on, and on, and on, without really saying anything informative at all.

(In fact, Paxman gave him one minute and 47 seconds to come up with a figure, which is quite some time on live TV. In total, Paxman asked Boris 15 times to clarify his policy in this area, and in fact the last 12 of those times are straightforward pleading for the cost of the buses. It was like that classic Michael Howard interview – “Did you threaten to overrule him?” – all over again!)

Essentially, we were back to the good old days of the Andrew Marr Show interview, when Boris simply couldn’t answer what he was being asked and Marr literally found himself on the edge of his seat with exasperation at trying to get him to finish a sentence (preferably by actually answering what he had been asked).

Likewise, Paxman moved ever closer to the podium on which the three candidates were standing, begging Boris to give him a figure, but none was forthcoming. For a moment I thought Paxman might mount the stage and give him a slap, but sadly it didn’t quite come to that!

In the end, with extraordinary cheek – not to mention a revealing implicit admission about his arch-rival’s superior grasp of figures – Boris turned to Ken and asked him how much Ken’s bus plan would be costing, on the basis that he thought his own would cost a similar amount!

Spoilt

Even after all that, Boris still wouldn’t shut up, suddenly interrupting Brian (who had moved on to talking about trams) to ask to be allowed to say one more thing about his beloved uncosted buses. Paxman slapped him down thus:

No! No you can’t! You’ve said quite enough without enlightening us with a figure! You have a think about it: give us a figure and you can talk again.

Boris still continued to try to make his point as his microphone was faded out, providing evidence of the spoilt temperament that Janet Street-Porter hints at in her Marie Claire interview with him.

In that interview she suggests that people never say ‘no’ to him, and he is very uncomfortable and unsure how to respond. Tonight we saw the result of someone who’s spent his life surrounded by yes-men, underlings and hero-worshippers: a tendency to interrupt and talk over others repeatedly, and to assume that he was the most important person in the room.

This was clearly noticeable at the very end of the debate, when the debate’s allotted time on the programme had expired. Paxman held up his hand to signal to them to stop whichever bit of bickering was ongoing at the time.

Boris: Can I just say…?

Jeremy: No, I’m afraid, I’m very sorry, you can’t.

Boris: Why not?

Jeremy: [Somewhat taken aback by the question] Because we’re out of time!

“Why not?”? What kind of question is that? It was obvious to everyone else that their time was up, but apparently if Boris thinks what he has to say is important, it won’t do for anyone to try to stop him saying it.

A vote for Boris is a vote for a spoilt, incompetent and bumbling man with no relevant experience or grasp of the figures. For London’s sake, please vote for someone else.

PoliticalBetting.com has some interesting coverage of the details of today’s YouGov poll for the Evening Standard, which again shows an extraordinary lead for Boris. They have him on 49%, to Ken’s 36% and Brian’s 10%.

Particularly interesting are the figures around the one singled out by YouGov’s Peter Kellner in response to criticism – or at least questioning – of his methods. Kellner says:

To my mind, the key fact in this campaign so far is that around one-in-five people who “generally speaking” think of themselves as Labour say they would vote for Boris Johnson. If Livingstone can get most of this group to return to the fold (plus do better on second preferences), he might still win; if he can’t, he loses.

The figures showing how people seeing themselves as generally supporting a particular political party intend to vote are indeed interesting.

What we can see from them are how Boris is doing so well: he’s somehow managed to lure over people who usually support other parties to vote for him instead.

Of course, most Conservatives (86%) intend to vote for him. The 14% who don’t are of course the only ones who have realised what a dangerous idea for their party making Boris their most powerful representative in the country is, and we can only hope that between now and 1 May some more of the 86% majority will see the light too!

Perhaps more surprising is that a fairly large 22% of people who normally support Labour intend to vote for Boris. Quite why anyone of a left-wing persuasion would want to support a nasty, selfish right-winger who’s spent the past 20 years pandering to upper-middle-class Daily Telegraph readers’ prejudices through his often offensive regular column is beyond me. Indeed, the idea that anyone who normally supports Labour could possibly think that Boris Johnson will have the first clue about how to address their social justice priorities would be laughable, were the danger of our great capital sleepwalking into four long years of an incompetent Boris Mayoralty not so threatening.

The final column of these figures is especially interesting, and must be bitterly disappointing to Brian Paddick. When asked who they would be voting for, the 114 people who identified themselves as Liberal Democrat supporters answered in the following proportions: Ken 24%, Brian 31%, Boris 40%. One third more Liberal Democrats intend to vote for Boris than for Brian.

Again, I’m rather at a loss to explain this. From what I’ve seen of Brian’s pronouncements, he hasn’t done anything to alienate the more right-leaning side of his party: opposing the £25 CO₂ charge using rhetoric about it penalising ‘family cars’, for instance, should have easily kept them on board, I would have thought. So is it the moderate Lib Dems, or the left-leaning Lib Dems who are abandoning their own candidate and turning to Boris? Brian seems competent and articulate; why desert him for a bumbling buffoon who would make London a laughing stock?

What seems clear from these figures, assuming they are broadly accurate, is that Boris is the only main candidate who is currently managing to keep nearly all his party’s supporters on side. Both Ken, and to an even more alarming extent Brian, are seeing some of their own parties’ supporters crashing other parties, particularly Boris’s.

So if you know anyone who you think you can rely on to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat, and therefore haven’t bothered mentioning StopBoris.org to them, or checking they’ve registered to vote, there’s no time like the present to get them on board.

If Boris is elected Mayor on 1 May, the people who’ve crashed his party will find themselves waking up the morning after with a terrible hangover, wondering why they ever left their own party behind as they look on in horror at the four-year-long fallout of the night before. We need to get people to reach that realisation as soon as possible now, so that they return safely to their own parties before the election!

Will this put an end to the idea that the Stop Boris campaign is in some way endorsed (or even run, or funded – as if we even have any funding!) by the Labour campaign?

I’m gobsmacked by what I believe is now today’s Sunday Telegraph front page article, Boris Johnson: I’m the victim of dirty tricks in London Mayor race.

The amount of cheek present in anyone whose campaign is being run by Lynton Crosby accusing anyone else of dirty tricks is staggering.

The Telegraph even states as a matter of fact (without offering any evidence) that Boris’s opponents have used "push polling", which is a well known favourite technique of Mr. Crosby himself.

Boris also accuses his opponents of "sub-radar stuff", despite it being well documented that Crosby’s own strategy for Boris is specifically known as an "under-the-radar" campaign.

He continues:

They’ve read every column I’ve ever written to see if they can find something to turn into a smear about a position I don’t hold.

It’s extraordinary that Boris would suggest that simply by highlighting things that he himself has written, we opponents of his (I assume StopBoris.org counts as an opponent, even though we don’t have our own Mayoral candidate) are somehow misrepresenting him. If we mention that he thinks gay marriage is in some way comparable to a union between "three men and a dog", or that he spent column after column repeatedly attacking the Stephen Lawrence inquiry as unnecessary and "Orwellian", it’s unbelievable that his response is to say we are smearing him, and that he doesn’t hold positions that he himself has written that he does hold.

This is the man who was happy to employ and publish outrageous articles by out-and-out racist Taki; the man who’s taken six years to appreciate that "piccaninnies" might be an offensive word to ethnic minorities; the man who supported George W. Bush’s election and re-election; the man who strongly opposed the repealing of Section 28 because he thought it would lead to enforced "homosexual instruction" in the classroom; the man who promised to help an old fraudster friend track down and beat up a journalist; the man who is in the tiny minority of politicians in the developed world who still opposes the Kyoto protocol to tackle climate change (Bush being the only remaining developed world leader not to sign up to it); the man who opposed the National Minimum Wage; the man who claims he did or didn’t snort cocaine based on who’s listening at the time, and did or didn’t have an affair based on what evidence has so far emerged.

With so much evidence that Boris is an untrustworthy charlatan at odds with the vast majority of Londoners’ views, why would anyone need to make anything up to ’smear’ him?

And meanwhile, a single recent appearance of the Back Boris team involved them issuing outright lies on crime and likening Ken Livingstone to mass-murdering dictator Robert Mugabe. Do these things not count as ‘dirty tricks’?

The Sunday Telegraph’s front page article represents a desperate escalation of tactics by Lynton Crosby, attempting to deflect attention away from his own campaigns lies, smears and deceptions by screaming blue murder about vastly exaggerated ‘dirty tricks’ being used against him.

As Boris-stoppers we must do all we can to help our fellow Londoners cut through this thick layer of meta-lies, and see Boris’s campaign for the cynical charade it really is, yet again trying to keep the spotlight off Boris by pushing it back towards his opponents, and raising the dishonesty and bluster levels higher than ever.

As promised, we’ve got some audio and photos from the Time Out hustings on Wednesday.

The audio is not exactly of brilliant quality (it was recorded from quite near the back of the room) but if you’re really determined to hear what you missed, it’s just about listenable:

Time Out hustings full recording (MP3, 1hr20, 27.5MB)

The pictures are behind the cut:

(more…)

When the Daily Mail secured the serialisation rights to a new biography of Ken Livingstone, knowing it would reveal three children he’d kept private for years, this can’t have been the 24 hours they had envisaged they would see when the revelation was made.

For a start, Ken revealed it himself on BBC London last night, rather than letting the Mail put its own spin on the story first.

Second, I haven’t yet heard anyone who’s particularly bothered about it. At most, people express surprise that he managed so successfully to keep his private life away from the prying eyes of the media for so long.

But third, for some reason, today was also the day that the mainstream media finally caught on to the fact, reported here on Monday, that Boris has snorted coke and smoked dope.

On ITV London Tonight he’s just been trotting out the completely hypocritical ‘defence’ that the drugs he took were somehow not as bad as the drugs today’s kids take - as if today’s kids are somehow more depraved and have actively sought debatably stronger drugs for the sake of behaving more rebelliously than Boris and his friends ever did, as I covered on Monday.

But setting aside the charge of hypocrisy, I - courtesy, perhaps surprisingly, of the Evening Standard - can go one better: his excessively strongly worded denials about cocaine this morning have left him open to charges that he has simply started lying about it now:

Janet: You said in interviews that you’ve snorted coke.
Boris: Well, that was when I was 19. It all goes to show that, sometimes, it’s better not to say anything.

[…]

In 2005, he joked on the quiz show Have I Got News For You: “I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.”
But then, in an interview with GQ magazine in June 2007, when he was asked whether any of the Class A drug went up his nose despite the sneeze, Boris responded: “It must have done, oh yes, but it didn’t do much for me I can tell you.” He added: “I tried it at university and I remember it vividly. It achieved no pharmacological psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.”

[…] 

But let me repeat his denial of this morning: “To say that I had used cocaine is simply not true.”

It might, at this point, be worth pointing 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…

Indeed - there’s no doubt Boris has form as a liar. A timely reminder of his affair, too - I didn’t see any suggestion that any of Ken’s children came from, shall we say, simultaneous relationships!

And while the media have today grouped together the revelations about the two candidates, let’s not forget one key difference that can easily be overlooked amid claims and counter-claims about whether candidates’ personal lives matter in elections: by smoking dope and snorting cocaine, Boris Johnson was breaking the law.

Here’s hoping his drug-taking doesn’t play well with his the more traditionally conservative end of his supporter spectrum.

Since gaffophobia hit the mainstream media, there have been a couple of interesting announcements.

Apparently Boris will now take part in a couple of TV debates with the other candidates in the coming weeks.

On last night’s BBC London they announced a forthcoming pre-recorded debate with the main candidates, including Boris, being recorded on (if I remember correctly) 14 April. You may be able to join the audience for this if you e-mail to register your interest.

And a short time ago on this evening’s Question Time on BBC One, David Dimbleby announced that on 24 April, the show will come from London and will also feature the main candidates for Mayor taking questions from the audience. Should be a must-see programme, coming just one week before London goes to the polls. If you want to be among those putting questions to them, register your interest via the Question Time web site.

Congratulations to everyone who covered the determination of the Boris campaign to keep him out of the spotlight: it looks like the coverage has shamed him back into it!

A few Boris-stoppers [i.e. members of the Facebook group and other followers of the campaign] went along to the Time Out hustings this evening, and want to fill Stop Boris blog readers in on what happened.

A couple turned up early to hand out the stickers - nice one, quick work printing those out! - and were surprised to find about ten people in Back Boris t-shirts, handing out Boris leaflets and trying to excuse his no-show.

The leader of the Back Boris campaigners - the assumption is that he was the leader, as he was the only one who stayed around to heckle inside the actual event - kept trying to start up chants, which were laughable in a number of ways:

1. The most-repeated one compared Ken Livingstone to Robert Mugabe (”Goodbye Mugabe/Next is Ken/Let’s make London/Smile again”);
2. This one bloke was the only one bothering to chant anything, so it just sounded like a lone weirdo rather than a political chant;
3. Best of all, he was reading the chants from a computer-printed sheet of A4 paper! Did they have to be approved by Lynton Crosby too?!

The sticker-distributers report brisk business, offloading dozens of the things in the 20 minutes or so they were working the area, as well as putting up with some heckling from the Boris-backers, who seemed to think that their campaigning was better than the Boris-stoppers because it was “positive” - obviously most of their chants mentioning Boris providing an opportunity to get rid of Ken was not thought to be negative campaigning.

Apparently one of the Boris-stoppers even caught Mr. Livingstone himself on the way in, and he was only too happy to add a Stop Boris sticker to the lapel of his overcoat!

The hustings itself was entertaining and informative in fairly equal measures, but the aforementioned Back Boris campaign leader made a bit of a pest of himself, heckling and seeming most put out that - like everyone else in attendance - he was limited to a single question from the floor. He used this to attack Ken rather than promote Boris - that’ll be that positive campaigning he was proclaiming earlier, presumably!

It was clear to all who’ve been in touch that the atmosphere was pretty favourable towards the three candidates on stage - Ken, Brian and Siân - and pretty hostile towards Boris, which lends further support to the suggestions he avoids any event where he thinks he’ll get asked any difficult questions or come under any serious scrutiny.

The best opening line came from Siân Berry:

I’ve been asked to speak about my vision for London over the next 40 years. In some ways, this hustings is already a lot like it: it doesn’t have Boris Johnson in it!

Sadly there was no tub of lard in the place of Boris, but Ken did turn up with a children’s book called Calm Down, Boris!, which he placed on the table behind Boris’s name card. This transpired to be some sort of book/puppet hybrid, which Ken then played with while the chair mentioned Boris’s absence.

It’s not Stop Boris’s job to assess the other candidates’ performances, other than to say, unsurprisingly, that it was clear that any one of these people would certainly make a better Mayor with a clearer vision and better grasp of policy than Boris.

Afterwards, the Boris-stoppers with the stickers bumped into Siân Berry, and offered her one. Her response was apparently: “Can I have a whole sheet please? I love the web site!” She received a whole sheet.

We’ve been promised some photos and perhaps even audio clips of this evening’s events by those Boris-stoppers in attendance. We’ll post these when we have them. If you have any good ones, or anything else to report about tonight that we haven’t been told about, please get in touch!

The Guardian followed up on the Tory Troll’s scoop earlier: Give second vote to Johnson, BNP tells supporters.

It seems Team Boris did manage a rebuttal in the end, but Brian Paddick’s opening sentence was the best:

Clearly the BNP have recognised Boris’s talent for causing offence and creating division.

The Guardian article then strays on to the astonishingly offensive remarks of the BNP candidate for the London Assembly who was sacked this week when someone unearthed an old piece of writing he’d done on a blog, stating that rape was no worse a crime than “force-feeding a woman chocolate cake”, among other things.

The interesting thing about this is the BNP’s comments about this sacking, which sound remarkably similar to the defences Boris wheels out when someone raises his own offensive writings, be they on homosexuality, race or whatever. The BNP said:

It was felt that no matter how much Nick Eriksen’s blog comments, written back in 2005, had been distorted and taken out of the context of a blog which reflected our tough stance on all sorts of crime, they could still be perceived as trivialising the issue in a manner that many women in particular could have found extremely offensive.

Written some time ago, taken out of context, could have been found offensive… all the words of an insincere apology, and all just the kind of words to be found in most of Boris’s apologies (and there have been many). No wonder the BNP have warmed to him.

Sadly I’ve no time to compose a proper post, but I couldn’t leave it until late this evening to point out that the BNP have endorsed Boris as their candidate of choice for their voters’ second preferences.

I think the Tory Troll was first with this news - well spotted, that troll - and Dave Hill’s also covered it since.

I’m not aware of a response from Boris’s team yet, but I assume this wasn’t part of Lynton Crosby’s carefully orchestrated campaign. That’s the trouble with ‘dog-whistle’ tactics: you can’t control exactly which ‘dogs’ prick up their ears at them…

On 7 March, Ken Livingstone was on the panel of Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4. In the interests of impartiality, host Jonathan Dimbleby introduced him thus:

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London and the first of the three leading candidates that we’ve invited on to the programme between now and the election in May when the people of London will decide who should be their next mayor.

Sure enough, last night’s panel included Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate, and (as with the show on which Ken appeared) there was plenty of discussion of the London elections and issues pertaining to London.

But then came this surprising announcement from Mr. Dimbleby:

Regular listeners to the programme may remember that Ken Livingstone was on the programme on March the 7th, and of course Brian Paddick is on on this occasion, and inevitably we asked the other leading candidate, Boris Johnson, if he would like to join the programme, and he declined, saying that he didn’t wish to discuss national issues while he was concentrating on the London Mayoral election.

So he’s not just terrified of his incompetence at debating the issues with his rival Mayoral candidates: he can’t even face the thought of discussing any issues with anyone in a live environment where the panellists don’t know what they’ll be asked in advance.

Is it unprecedented for a London Mayoral candidate to turn down a high-profile media appearance in which they can put across their views and policies to a large audience? I certainly can’t remember it happening before.

This betrays a fundamental lack of confidence in both Boris’s policies and abilities, neither of which it seems even his own team think would stand up to proper public scrutiny.

A vote for Boris is a vote for policies and incompetence so indefensible he can’t even be bothered to defend them. Extraordinary.

Over the weekend, a bit of a heated debate broke out on the Guardian’s blogging site Comment is Free between Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, with Siân Berry and even George Galloway also joining in.

Notable by his absence, as the linked article mentions, was Boris, who a spokesman informed the Guardian was ”out there meeting real people” - not to be confused with the pretend people who use the internet of course.

This highlights an important part of Boris’s strategy: don’t engage in meaningful discussions of policies.

A month after David Cameron called for live TV debates during elections, Boris has been refusing to participate in any sort of televised debate with his opponents in the Mayoral contest. Cameron taunted Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Question Time last month, asking him “What on earth are you frightened of?”, and it now seems that question would be more pressingly addressed to his own Mayoral candidate, Boris Johnson.

But then, we know the answer: Boris is frightened of the other candidates wiping the floor with him in a discussion of the issues, because unlike him, they have a grasp of them and are competent, capable politicians who can engage in debates properly, rather than reeling off soundbites and expending much of their concentration on trying not to smirk.

Boris is in the lead in the polls, and as such a debate would be his to lose - and lose it he most certainly would. A televised debate would expose his cluelessness to a viewing audience of thousands (of “real people”, no less), who would quickly switch their allegiance to someone more worthy of a vote.

I suppose it’s hard to blame Boris for being terrified by the idea of a debate. After all, if I had a manifesto as thin on policy and heavy on meaningless waffle as his, I’d want to steer clear of anything that might bring any scrutiny to bear on it.

Boris has been grabbing the headlines today by pledging to plant 10,000 trees around London over his first four years as Mayor.

But in 2002, the current Mayor launched the Million Trees Campaign, which aims to plant - surprisingly - a million trees around London by 2012. By the end of the 2006/7 planting season, the fifth year of the campaign, a total of 425,000 new trees had been planted in London.

By comparison with this total of nearly 100,000 per year, Boris’s 10,000 trees in four years looks utterly pathetic.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the media lauding the plan as some kind of eco-revolution. Get serious, please - this is the man who wholeheartedly supports George W. Bush’s policy of boycotting the Kyoto agreement to combat climate change. (The USA under Bush is the only developed country in the world not to sign up to this, in case you thought this might not be a particularly extreme stance to take.)

Everyone knows Boris hasn’t a green bone in his body, and offering to plant a handful of trees over a long period of time goes no way whatsoever towards demonstrating otherwise.

P.S. To pay for the trees, Boris has pledged to scrap the Mayor’s newspaper, The Londoner, which is basically his equivalent of those newsletters/magazines that most local authorities send out from time to time to update their residents on what they’ve been up to - and, of course, to put their own spin on things. You know the sort of thing: the local media are up in arms about library closures, then you receive the Borough News which tells you how the council are consolidating some of their library resources into one much better library which will save you Council Tax, and so forth.

So The Londoner is biased, of course. But goodness me, to read some of the things Boris has been saying about it, you would think it was literally nothing but outright lies from the front cover to the back. In a city where the only city-wide paid-for newspaper and two out of the three freesheets are produced by the Daily Mail group, between whom and the Mayor there is little love lost, it’s not surprising he might want to point out a few falling crime figures or other things the Standard and its offshoots may ‘overlook’.

And of course, Mayor Boris wouldn’t need the Londoner anyway. Why invest time and money putting together a newspaper that looks like the Evening Standard but talks up your achievements instead of knocking them, when you can just let the Evening Standard do the work for you?

Sorry, that’s an awful pun, I know.

There’s an interesting idea in today’s Guardian: Martin Kettle suggests Vince Cable would be a better Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor than Brian Paddick.

He certainly captured the imagination of the political classes during his brief temporary tenure acting as Lib Dem leader. Would he capture the imagination of Londoners more than Boris seems to be? It’s certainly food for thought.

Really we’re into fantasy territory now, I would have thought, though - it’s got to be almost unprecedented for a party to change its Mayoral candidate halfway through the campaign.

(I say ‘almost’, because who could forget the first election for Mayor of London, when the Conservatives picked Jeffrey Archer, only to have to substitute in Steve Norris when Archer was charged with perjury? Hey, there’s an idea. Does anyone have any evidence of Boris committing any crimes that might lead him to have to stand down before nominations close in a few weeks’ time? We can only hope!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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