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.

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.

Dave Hill looks at Ken’s and Boris’s respective transport policies and draws the only sensible conclusion: Boris would be hopeless.

It’s the Independent’s turn to print a leader column about the Mayoral election today, but it frustratingly lacks a conclusion. Perhaps that’s the Independent way, is it? Do they always stay on the fence, to fit with their name, or is it just on this occasion? I must confess to not being that familiar with their output.

Anyway, I think the implication, reading between the lines, is the same as the Observer’s explicit recommendation from yesterday, Siân 1, Ken 2, but it’s not certain. This is what they have to say about Boris though:

it is not enough for one candidate to look past his sell-by-date. Another must inspire. The Conservative mayoral campaign has been tightly-run and professional; its tactics have been largely based on reining in its candidate’s more flamboyant instincts. But for all that, it is hard to see even the new, more serious, Mr Johnson as Mayor of a world city such as London. The Conservative candidate has never shown any real interest in the capital in the past. Nor does he have any experience of public administration. And the innate cautiousness of his campaign means that, in policy terms, he has outlined nothing much to excite Londoners.

Absolutely. I noticed in Saturday’s Guardian they spoke to a keen Boris voter in Bexley (one of the outer London boroughs targeted so closely by Lynton Crosby’s campaign), but when they asked him, in response to him saying that Boris "has some good policies", which particular policies he liked, he "tailed off", only coming alive again, with criticism, when Ken was mentioned. Certainly sounds like Crosby and co have done some successful brainwashing around there: that’s all their key messages installed in a real-life voter.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to matter that their key messages are utterly meaningless ones – Ken’s rubbish (the Evening Standard says so, so it must be true); it’s time for a change/fresh ideas; we have some good policies but don’t ask what they are because they don’t really exist in any useable level of detail; and did we mention that Ken is rubbish?

I bet you think there’ll be some clever twist in this post which will mean that the heading is completely the opposite of the truth – a bit like an Evening Standard advertising board.

Think again!

The Standard have given their team of reporters – the ones who haven’t come out on BBC News as self-proclaimed "Boris Johnson supporter[s]" (Andrew Gilligan on Question Time Extra last night, in case we weren’t sure) – the three leading candidates’ manifestos and asked them to pass judgement on their pledges.

In fact, they have largely interpreted their brief to be to pick as many holes as possible in the manifestos, but it’s interesting how easy a job they’ve had doing this with Boris’s.

The article opens well, pointing out that he is completely hopeless on the Tube:

1. there’s no chance of Aslef or the RMT signing up to a no-strike deal ("it will immediately lead to a strike" if he suggests one!);
2. his air-conditioning plans just amount to what is already being done or isn’t really possible; and
3. they question whether he’s really understood the Metronet contracts.

The piece goes on to criticise him on a further fourteen separate issues:

4. his bus costing;
5. his lack of detail on "reform" of the Congestion Charge;
6. the difficulties of his proposals to fine utility companies who dig up the roads;
7. his possible optimism about how far he could stretch money saved on advertising;
8. the "major headache" of enforcing his Tube alcohol ban (which "will not necessarily help" with cutting crime anyway);
9. his return to the days of stop and search;
10. his crime mapping potentially creating crime-ridden ghettos;
11. his pathetically low number of pledged tree-plantings;
12. his complete ignoring (ignorance?!) of climate change;
13. his hypocritical position on airport expansion which "would dramatically increase emissions from air travel and damage local wildlife";
14. the risk of his house-building policy letting "poor performing councils off the hook";
15. the fact that his supposedly ‘affordable’ housing scheme would require a household income of £60,000, which apparently puts it out of reach to 80% of London households!;
16. his complete misunderstanding of the empty homes situation – empty homes are at their lowest in 30 years and the majority may only have been empty for weeks: "the housing market can’t operate without a reasonable degree of turnover".

As well as all that, and particularly interestingly, they have this – we’ll call it no. 17 – to say about his promise to chair the Metropolitan Police Authority:

His pledge to run the MPA, and hold the Commissioner to account, is well intentioned but can he cope with being chairman of the body which oversees the biggest force in the country? Previous holders put aside three days a week.

Given that most people doubt Boris’s ability to run an alcohol-based event in a brewery, and certainly can’t imagine how he’ll cope with trying to run London, the idea that he could take all that on and cope with the burden of a chairmanship which would require as much as three days a week of his time is stretching credibility to breaking point.

Of course, given how little is left in his manifesto that the Standard haven’t exposed as fundamentally or seriously flawed in this article, one has to wonder why on earth they’re so keen to get him elected as Mayor. Nothing to do with a petty squabble with a certain incumbent, is it? As it happens, Ken’s manifesto comes off comparatively well under their scrutiny. (They even admit his crime reduction target is "realistic" and that "latest figures show crime fell by six per cent last year"!) No wonder they’re trying to distract voters from the actual issues in their more high-profile day-to-day election coverage!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tory Troll’s on good form today, with a great analysis of Boris’s contradictory positions on different types of unnatural deaths.

On the one hand, we hear over and over again about how concerned he is about the high levels of fear about crime, particularly in relation to the 27 young people murdered with knives and guns last year. He claims he’ll somehow be able to do something about this better than anyone else, which is a laughable suggestion given how completely out of touch he is with the poorer communities in which these tragic but rare incidents tend to happen.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, he proposes measures to tip the balance between the priorities given to cars and pedestrians back towards the cars, which can only increase the higher, but reducing, levels of pedestrian casualties and deaths.

There’s a pelican crossing near my workplace which is very much biased towards cars. It will only ever let pedestrians cross after a particular one of the two car directions has had its lengthy turn; and if you don’t press the Wait button by a certain surprisingly early point in the sequence, you have to wait for the whole process to go around again. So of course, what do I see as I await the green man? People of all ages getting bored of waiting and taking a chance on it - dashing across when the red man’s on display, despite the fact that there’s no way of knowing what’s coming round the corner or how fast it’s coming.

The simple fact is that the more you tip the balance in favour of traffic, the more pedestrian deaths there will be. Funny how Boris’s voters in their 4×4s aren’t portrayed as posing a greater threat - as they do, statistically - than young people, even the minority who carry knives or guns. Doesn’t quite fit the narrative, does it?

I hadn’t spotted this before: an independent analysis from TAS, "the UK’s leading specialist public transport consultancy", of "why Boris’s policy for buses in London is wrong".

I’d seen the Guardian quoting this independent organisation saying he had his figures wrong, but this article demolishes his entire policy, regardless of the figures.

Ask average Londoners to name one of Boris’s policies and most will remember the bendy-bus-scrapping policy as his totemic pledge. But on Newsnight it was clear he hadn’t thought the policy through properly at all, and now I see that TAS think the entire policy is simply "wrong".

What kind of indication is this of the reliability of his other policies, which one assumes will have had even less thought put into them than this, his first and most famous one?

Yesterday, Boris was campaigning on an issue which, if I recall correctly, actually amounts to a complete misunderstanding on his part: Boris vows to fight closure of Tube station ticket offices.

The Tory mayoral candidate warned that passengers would be put off using the Underground if stations were unmanned […]

Mr Johnson pledged to halt TfL’s proposals to close around 40 offices and said: "They do provide a great deal of reassurance to people late at night if something untoward happens, if they’re scared, or if there is an affray.

"It’s good to at least have a human being there to give a sense of security. That’s why I think we should fight to reverse this programme of closures."

The ever-reliable Evening Standard reports the story entirely from Boris’s side without approaching TfL for a statement about Boris’s claims, so they don’t shed any light on the real situation, but if my memory serves me correctly, the whole idea of these ticket office closures is to free the staff up from their enclosed ticket booths so that they can be a more visible presence within the station.

It’s certainly my understanding, which no-one’s ever challenged in relation to one of the Stop Boris posters, that TfL specifically have a policy of never leaving any of their stations across the entire Under- and Overground network unmanned during their hours of operation.

So for Boris to suggest that the closures of these ticket offices will result in the loss of the "human being there [giving] a sense of security" is ridiculous: if the closures proceed, the human being in question will be released from his or her enclosure and be able to be far more visible around the station, providing a much better "sense of security" – for the people scared into thinking they actually have something to fear by Boris and his Evening Standard cronies in the first place.

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.

The Guardian’s John Vidal

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.

The Guardian’s John Vidal

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.

C40 Cities web site

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.

Further reading and listening

• John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor, assesses the eco-credentials of London’s mayoral candidates
• Jonathon Porritt on the battle for London Mayor
• C40 Cities – Climate Leadership Group
• Greenpeace UK’s executive director on “Why blond isn’t green”
• Ken Livingstone on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast (general studio discussion covering some of the issues raised in this blog post fairly early on, then interview with Ken towards the end)
• Brian Paddick on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast (Brian’s in the studio throughout the podcast)
• Boris Johnson on the Guardian’s Environment Weekly podcast… “coming next week… if we can persuade him to break his silence to the national press… we phone him every morning…”

So thinks Mark Lynas of the New Statesman:

The Tory candidate is still waffling on about recycling and planting trees, suggesting he is stuck back in the light-green era of the 1980s, despite his much-trumpeted credentials as a cyclist. Though he says he will “make London the greenest city in the world”, this turns out to be more about parks than emissions. Johnson’s manifesto says that he will keep Ken Livingstone’s climate-change targets - but there is a lack of both consistency and enthusiasm running through his statements. While both Ken and Boris oppose a third runway at Heathrow - today’s litmus test for climate-change credentials - Boris supports the construction of an entirely new airport somewhere in the Thames Estuary, on the grounds that “London’s airport capacity has to expand”. That doesn’t sound very climate- or environment-friendly to me.

He concludes:

Let’s keep Boris in the TV studios by all means - he’s a gifted entertainer - but let’s keep him out of City Hall.

Team Boris have apparently promised us one new announcement every day since the start of this week until the election (give me a chance, guys – I have a full-time job to hold down as well as blogging, you know).

I’m not sure what today’s was supposed to be, but I don’t imagine the fact he’s done dope and coke was on Lynton Crosby’s schedule.

Yesterday’s announcement was explained concisely in the Daily Telegraph:

Boris Johnson will ban alcohol from the London Underground if he becomes the next mayor of London.

The Conservative candidate will say that the Tube must become a no-go area for drinkers, claiming that alcohol is a factor in four out of 10 incidents of violent crime. […]

Banning alcohol would require a simple amendment to the Tube’s conditions of carriage specifying that the consumption of alcohol was prohibited, he said.

That’s true. In much the same way, banning people from wearing, for instance, blue hats would require a simple amendment to, say, the legislation covering public decorum.

I think both ideas might be somewhat overlooking a crucial aspect of any proposed changes to laws and regulations: enforcement. After all, banning murder required only a “simple amendment” to the statute books, but it doesn’t quite seem to have resulted in no-one ever being murdered again.

This looks like yet another hollow and uncosted policy announcement with no real thought or planning behind it.

And unlike some, this piece of attempted populism isn’t even proving popular, judging by the number of comments I’ve seen people adding at the bottom of news stories to the effect of “my friends and I often share a drink on our way out in the evening on the Underground - why punish us by banning this?”

So make sure you point this policy out to anyone you know who’s thinking of voting for Boris, if you think they’re among those who enjoy a tipple on the Tube.

Channel 4’s excellent online FactCheck service has had a look at Boris’s costing of his pointless plan to replace bendy buses with conductor-dependent Routemaster-style buses, aka Boris’s bus black hole.

FactCheck rates each claim it examines on a scale from 0 to 5, where (rather counter-intuitively) 0 means it’s completely true, and 5 means there’s not a shred of truth in it anywhere at all. So how does Boris’s claim stack up?

The verdict

Even taking the unspecified costs of getting the new bus design on the road out of the calculations, the £8m figure is a vast under-estimate of the extra cost of staffing a new Routemaster.

Independent analysis puts the total cost of Johnson’s plans at £114m - in comparison to which, Johnson’s estimate looks like pretty small change.

FactCheck rating: 4.5

I’m just trying to work out where the 0.5 points’ worth of truth is located. Perhaps it’s the fact that he said it would cost £8m, and in fact it will cost £8m; it will just cost a further £106m as well!

Worth a read, anyway: they’ve certainly done their homework, unlike a certain Mayoral candidate, who clearly can’t be trusted to do his, even when it comes to his most highly publicised policy.

It really doesn’t bode well for Boris’s ability to control an £11bn budget as Mayor if he can’t even get the small sums right.