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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For those just discovering the Stop Boris campaign now, you might not be aware of a couple our Facebook presence, and might want to join in over there:

• Stop Boris group
• Stop Boris application

Earlier this evening the group passed 1500 members, which was quite exciting. Unfortunately when it passed 1200 members Facebook decided it was too big for us to be able to send messages to all members (a ridiculous limitation which I can’t understand the logic of), so that’s a shame, but the group is still a good place to show your support for the campaign and speak to like-minded Londoners.

I’m afraid the group is only open to members of the London network, because that seemed a logical option to pick when setting it up in a fit of Boris-fear last July, and I had no idea that that option would be unchangeable!

The application has about 750 users so far and lets you put a condensed version of your choice of campaign poster onto your profile page, feeding a to-the-point version of its message into your Mini-feed and so hopefully into some of your friends’ News Feeds too. As the election approaches it could be worth changing your chosen poster every few days to increase awareness of the many reasons not to vote for Boris.

I’ve just had the pleasant surprise of receiving an e-mail from a creative Boris-stopper who has taken the trouble to produce some Stop Boris pin badges:

I trust he won’t mind me quoting from it:

In a fit of creativity, I’ve made some Stop Boris pin badges that I’m distributing via eBay.

I say ‘distributing’ as I hestitate to say ’selling’ – after all the materials, postage costs, PayPal and eBay fees I’m not even breaking even (!) – this is not for profit! – but I wanted to make something to take the Stop Boris campaign further – and, well, offline!

I’m happy to send badges out for free to anyone who can’t afford to pay or doesn’t use PayPal – they should just email me (I’d just ask them for a stamped SAE).

So if you’d like to grab a badge or two, head over to his eBay Buy It Now listing!

End time: 30-Apr-08 21:26:48 BST (9 days 22 hours)

Election end time: 1 day, 33 minutes and 12 seconds after that. We really don’t have long to stop Boris now, you know…

Who’s the slightly scary chap on the right?

Find out in the video accompanying the new Stop Boris campaign song…

The latest YouGov poll for the Evening Standard shows that Boris’s lead has been cut in half since their previous weekly poll. He now leads Ken Livingstone by 6%, where last week he led by 13%.

Additionally, more people now think Boris isn’t serious enough to be Mayor than think he is - a position which has reversed since last week.

While it may be boastful to think StopBoris.org has played a role in making people start to move away from the blond buffoon, you never know, we might have done. So keep up the good work, Boris-stoppers - we can do this if we keep on spreading the message in these last two-and-a-bit weeks of campaigning!

Yes: the Tory Troll has sent me a link to details of a precedent, where students campaigning against Boris with their own posters managed to defeat him in the battle to be Rector of Edinburgh University.

So, Boris-stoppers, don’t feel disheartened in the face of Team Boris and their bags of money spewing out t-shirts, leaflets, posters etc: we can beat them, and hopefully will!

No, I don’t really. But that is the title of this amusing video, first spotted by Conservative blogger Iain Dale:

While I can see this actually going down well with a certain type of Boris-supporter (primarily the ‘I don’t usually vote, but I know that Boris bloke off the telly and he seems a laugh’ type), I think it’s safe to assume the titular sentiments are ironic.

According to Sam Coates of Times Online, the Boris campaign team hate it, so that’s a good enough reason for me to post it on this blog, anyway

The Times mentions suspicions about the video, in a news item:

The Livingstone campaign denies any connection to the video, made by a group which calls itself TRSG. The high production standards have raised suspicions that the video has been financed professionally.

Unfortunately, as we’ve experienced ourselves at StopBoris.org, if you oppose Boris and have half-decent standards in what you produce, people are very quick to decide that you must have been funded by the Livingstone campaign.

These days you need very little in the way of budget or equipment to meet reasonable production standards. Thanks to a donated domain and webspace from a sympathetic (but otherwise unrelated) party, StopBoris.org has been put together on a budget of £0.00, for instance.

Making a video does require some expenditure beyond making a web site, but not a great deal. It still mostly comes down to whether you can be bothered to invest a bit of time in something, and what sort of standards you’re prepared to settle for when you do.

(After all, last year a musician-cum-journalist showed how little you could make and promote a pop record for using modern technology, and his project included a very professional-looking music video which was at one point YouTube’s most watched in the world. And one of his biggest costs was a licence to film in Westminster – not something I suspect the Boris-fancier will have bothered applying for.)

We didn’t have to code StopBoris.org to meet Web Accessibility Initiative standards or use valid XHTML, but we did because we believe in those things as a minimum standard for any web site.

Ultimately, we didn’t even have to set up a web site, or a blog: we didn’t have to do anything, because we’re not being employed (or leant on, or encouraged) by anyone to do anything.

So on balance I reckon ‘I think I fancy Boris’ has indeed been made by a lone maverick, or a handful of mavericks, putting a few days’ work into something in the hope of affecting the Blond Buffoon’s chances.

One reason I believe this is that it was posted onto YouTube by someone who’s been a member for several months and posted two previous, completely unrelated, equally off-the-wall videos, made to a similarly decent standard, suggesting that this is just what he gets up to as a hobby from time to time.

I’m sure that won’t stop people digging to find out whether there is any evidence linking him to Ken Livingstone’s campaign but, assuming there isn’t any, I hope the apparent lack of a link might convince people that sometimes, there really are some of us who are just campaigning against Boris of our own volition, in our own time, without any link to any other candidate’s campaign, and without any financial reward.

Because not having to see the city we love suffering four long years of a Boris Johnson Mayoralty would be a perfectly adequate reward in itself.

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.

In the past few days, from time to time – including in an e-mail today, thanks – people have been asking us if we can produce some Stop Boris leaflets to distribute.

We are now looking at the feasibility of providing something a bit more textual than the posters, for people to download, print/photocopy (we could make it black and white to assist!) and distribute, but one thing that has made us not prioritise this too much is the fact that really, fifteen different leaflets are effectively already available: the campaign posters.

These posters don’t contain too much text, so are likely to be read in full (unlike an overly wordy leaflet), but do cut straight to the point of a number of key issues, explaining the reasons why Boris needs to be stopped.

I think perhaps the ‘missing link’ has been that the posters are A4 PDFs, whereas leaflets would usually be A5. While it’s technically possible to print two to a side of A4, thus making them A5, it isn’t always easy to set up your printer or software to sort this out. (If your printer takes A5 paper, though, you can choose to fit the poster to the page size and that should work fine.)

So we’re going to sort out some copies of the posters that are laid out two to a sheet of A4 in the PDF, so you can just print it out and cut it in half. Hopefully that’ll do for now, but we will continue to look at the possibility of more textual leaflets covering more of the issues too.

Will anyone actually want to print and/or distribute any leaflets though?

And if so, would you rather we prepared them in black and white, colour, or a choice of each?

A couple of good e-mails have come in from readers this evening - thanks!

First up, someone chasing us up on the homophobia-highlighting poster I said we’d have to sort out some time ago. I think that might just have to be put onto this weekend’s to-do list.

The same person wants to see the web site and blog getting more promotion on other blogs and web sites. So do we, so if you run anything you can put a link to us on, please do!

In the second e-mail, journalist David Wearing points out an article about Boris he wrote last July, when his potential candidacy was first announced, and the general consensus was that he was nothing to worry about; David’s article clearly shows he was a rare dissenting voice.

(Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, July last year is actually also when the Stop Boris campaign kicked off too, over on Facebook - great minds think alike! Oh, and in collecting the Facebook link I discovered that the group there has passed the 1,000-member mark today - it’s really shot up in the past couple of days, from about 860 mid-week.)

Anyway, David’s article is an excellent analysis of so many of the underlying reasons why Boris shouldn’t be Mayor of London. It would be impossible to edit it down into a few select quotes so instead I shall link to the whole article, The Liberties of Boris Johnson, but spoil it slightly by cutting straight to his concluding remarks:

In 2008, London may find itself, as a city comprising hundreds of ethnic groups and nationalities, run by a Mayor who displays, at best, an unthinking attitude to race relations. It may find itself, as a city which will both effect and suffer from the effects of climate change to a serious extent, run by a Mayor who fails to grasp environmental issues at even the most basic level. It may find itself, as a city of over 7 million people, run by a Mayor whose stunted view of politics contains little room for the legitimate rights and needs of others. At that point, Johnson the Libertarian, Johnson the character, may, for some at least, lose a good deal of his entertainment value.

Got anything to point out to us? Campaign ideas? Events you think we should try to be at? Get in touch!

We were a bit slow off the mark with this one, so apologies, but at last we can now offer you some little Stop Boris promotional graphics to put into the design of your blog, journal or web site if you want to promote and link to StopBoris.org to help spread the Anti-Boris word.

To choose an image size/shape and grab its HTML code to insert in your site, just go to the Campaign blog and web site buttons section of StopBoris.org!

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!

…or don’t; he’d probably only remove it if you did.

Yes, we are pleased to announce the arrival on StopBoris.org of a sheet of Stop Boris stickers for you to print out and take along to any election-related events you may be attending in the coming days and weeks, or indeed to put to any other (legal) purpose to promote the campaign to Stop Boris.

You’ll need some labels to print them onto, of course, but these are available in all good stationery shops - not to mention work stationery cupboards - for a perfectly affordable price.

There are 21 stickers on a sheet, designed to fit sheets matching the Avery template called L7160, or P21 if you want to save money by getting Ryman own-brand! I don’t see why they wouldn’t fit most sheets that are laid out in seven rows of three but don’t hold StopBoris.org responsible if they don’t! The stickers themselves measure 64×38mm, by the way.

Best of luck spreading them around, Boris-stoppers - we’ll be looking out for them, and hoping to find Dave Hill blogging about them turning up at hustings!

Personally, I’m not into drugs - never even tried them. But I also subscribe to the view which seems to sustain London as one of the most diverse and tolerant cities in the world: everyone can do what they like, as long as their actions don’t impact undesirably on others - that sort of thing.

So personally, I don’t really care that Boris has snorted coke and smoked dope, but if you know of anyone thinking of voting for him who might care, perhaps you’d like to mention it to them!

That said, it seems pretty pathetic for him to try to cast today’s young people as somehow more depraved than he ever was by suggesting that they are all using much stronger variants of the same drugs he once enjoyed himself.

Either say: “I did drugs, I shouldn’t have done, I’m sorry, and I therefore think we should stamp down on their use”, or say: “I did drugs, I don’t regret that youthful experimentation, and I therefore think we should go a bit easier on others doing similar experimenting.” Don’t try to have your coke and snort it (to coin a phrase) by suggesting things were different in the good old days.

If anything, the only significant difference was that in his day - if we believe the type of headlines he’s usually happy to use to propagate fear of crime - there was far less drug use than there is now, making his experimentation all the more delinquent than that of today’s young people, surely?