I’ve just noticed someone has added the below photo to the Stop Boris group on Facebook, with the caption "Don’t be fooled by the buffoonery - he is still a Tory".

Nice work!

Someone responded to our appeal, so we’re now hosting the borderline-pornographic "Boris Johnson, D***head" video which YouTube deleted on StopBoris.org, at the bottom of the campaign songs and videos page.

A few days ago I received a couple of MP3s from the man behind the Boris Johnson Reputation song.

The first was that song, so you can download it here (4.17MB) if you want to listen to it on your MP3 player or whatever.

The second was a previously unreleased song, based on The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love. He said we could use it if we wanted to, so, well, it would have been rude not to, wouldn’t it? So this is what kept me up late last night:

You can also get the song as an MP3 here (3.30MB).

Both songs and their videos have been added to the bottom of our campaign song page, too.

Starring two or three horses and an elephant in the room.

(Use this link to jump straight to our advice without reading the full post.)

This post has been brewing for a while now, as we’ve monitored the opinion polls throughout the campaign, and by coincidence this morning I received an e-mail from a Stop Boris campaign supporter urging us to make a post along these lines. So here it is.

The Stop Boris campaign was started and has been run with one objective: to do whatever it takes to keep Boris Johnson out of City Hall. I won’t list again the reasons why this is so important – there are 125 other blog posts, a web site and a group and application on Facebook that do that.

One thing we have been clear about from the outset is that this campaign is not seeking to endorse any particular alternative candidate to Boris: we’ve provided links to all but the BNP’s manifestos and other information, and been as meticulous as possible in retaining our non-partisan status throughout the campaign.

It also seems prudent at this juncture to remind readers that Dave Hill of the Guardian has independently confirmed that we are not a ‘Team Ken front’, without breaking the anonymity that we’ve (often frustratingly) had to maintain for personal reasons throughout this campaign. No-one is paying us to run Stop Boris – indeed no-one is even asking us to run it – and in fact only our close friends and family members even know who we are! We’re running this campaign in a personal capacity out of a genuine fear of the damage Boris would do if given control of London and its £11bn budget for four long years.

But now, at this point in the campaign, with barely a week until election day, we have to face facts. We have to acknowledge the elephant in the room: an elephant which the opinion polls suggest is not about to reach for its jumbo coat and leave the room.

While the opinion polls throughout the election have varied significantly, the overall picture is that Boris is at worst in the lead by quite some way, or at best pretty much exactly level with Ken Livingstone. Brian Paddick is bringing up the rear with only a fraction of the votes of either of these front-runners. In other words, this election is (some might say bafflingly!) proving to be a two-horse race.

In any normal, first-past-the-post (FPTP), one-vote-per-person election, the course of action for stopping Boris in these circumstances would be obvious and straightforward, if not to everyone’s liking: vote for Ken. But the election for Mayor of London gives each voter two votes.

LiveJournal user publicansdecoy has a dispassionate analysis of what this means for those of us wishing to stop Boris.

From his analysis (and further clarification among the comments) we see that using either your first or second preference vote for Ken is equally helpful in an attempt to stop Boris. It also does no harm to the chances of your genuine first choice if you put Ken as your second choice.

In the comments on that post, someone by the name of matgb (who sounds to be something of an expert psephologist based on publicansdecoy’s reference to him in his main post) goes one step further, offering advice on the ultimate Stop Boris pair of votes:

Use your first vote for the person you most want to win. Use your second for either Ken or Boris, unless your first vote is for one of them, in which case your second should be for Brian (there’s still an outside chance he could take a second place position, in which case he probably wins).

[…] if you really want to stop either Ken or Boris, then Brian 1st choice is the best way to go psephologically.

So if your only consideration is stopping Boris, Brian first, Ken second is the way to vote. It’s also your best hope of stopping Boris but keeping Ken out as well, although I wouldn’t want to overstate the likelihood of that happening, given how far ahead Boris and Ken are of Brian. But if enough people vote Brian 1, Ken 2, it’s certainly within the realms of technical possibility that it comes to a Boris v Brian run-off, with Brian taking the prize. Perhaps there are three horses in this race after all.

Before concluding this post, I would like to pre-emptively defend us against some potential attacks.

The Stop Boris campaign is not telling anyone how to vote. We are not endorsing a candidate, or indeed two candidates. We are simply advising our readers, from a psephological point of view, about how to vote in order to stand the best chance possible of stopping Boris.

That said, assuming the opinion polls aren’t unprecedentedly, enormously, wildly inaccurate, there’s no getting away from that aforementioned elephant in the Stop Boris living room: because this election is so very likely to come down to a run-off between Boris and Ken on second preferences, putting neither of your crosses against Ken does seem unlikely to have any more impact than a spoilt ballot paper would. But it’s still preferable to spoil (or effectively spoil) your ballot paper than to vote for Boris!

So in summary, here’s our advice, (to which this is a permanent link, which you are very welcome indeed to publicise):

If you want to use your ballot paper specifically to stop Boris, and…

1. …you think Ken’s the best choice for Mayor:

• Put Ken as your first choice.
• Put Brian as your second choice. It’s unlikely your second choice will be counted, so it almost certainly doesn’t matter who you put; but if it does get counted, it being for Brian would be of most use in stopping Boris, as he’s the only other candidate with a (very slim) chance of reaching the second preference run-off.

2. …you think someone other than Ken is the best choice for Mayor:

• Put your favourite candidate as your first choice. This will help them retain their deposit, but only in the event of a major upset will it actually result in them winning.
• Put Ken as your second choice.

3. …you’d rather avoid Ken being Mayor too, if at all possible, or
4. …you don’t really care who’s Mayor, as long as it’s not Boris:

• Put Brian as your first choice. He’s the only candidate with any slight chance of beating both Ken and Boris, if he gets enough first-preference votes to make the final round.
• Put Ken as your second choice. If you’re a ‘number 3′, hold your nose or look the other way as you cast your vote but, like it or not, Ken’s the only person with a good chance of stopping Boris. It’s a shame that a non-FPTP vote should require choosing ‘the lesser of two evils’ in many people’s eyes, but that’s the reality of the situation we find ourselves in.

So, with all that in mind, let the final week of campaigning commence.

Best of luck, Boris-stoppers!

I’ve just discovered that our campaign song/video has found its way into a competition.

If anyone wants to vote for it, or indeed for one of the others (we’re not precious), please do!

P.S. This appears to be a Labour bloggers’ competition so for clarity – particularly given something I’ll be posting later this evening about how best to use votes to stop Boris – I should just mention that we didn’t put forward our video for this competition ourselves and are not a ‘Labour blog’.

The Tory Troll has a good analysis of why the Sun has today decided to throw its weight behind Boris in the Mayoral election.

I suppose ‘the Scum’ and Boris do have a lot in common. They’re certainly both very popular in Liverpool.

The Sun is not known for backing losers: indeed, they tend to wait until as near to polling day as possible to come out for anyone, so they have the maximum possible opinion poll information on which to base their ’support’, ready to claim it was them ‘wot won it’ a few days later.

Unfortunately the result of their track record at backing winners is that I’ve heard a few people expressing defeatist sentiments today in the wake of their endorsement of the blond buffoon. People are saying "this is it, it’s all over, we’re going to have to accept that Boris will be Mayor," which is a very disappointing stance to be taking with over a week to go until the election.

And in this election, the polling evidence is extremely mixed. There is a tendency towards Boris being in the lead, but there have been several polls where he isn’t, and in many of the ones where he is it’s by less than the margin of error, making his lead in those statistically meaningless.

So don’t let the Sun trick you into thinking this is all over. It’s very far from over. We still have nine more days until the polls close and there is not a moment to waste in spreading the message to everyone we know in London.

Remember the key points here:

• Boris is not serious enough to do the important job of Mayor of London and manage an £11bn budget. This is the most important point to drive home as it’s this fear that is getting progressively stronger in the opinion polls as time goes by and people see how bumbling he is on TV etc.
• Boris can’t be trusted to get decisions right: he denied climate change was a problem for years, opposed gay marriage, supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, campaigned actively for George W Bush to get elected in the USA in 2000 and 2004… you know the list by now. On many of these things he has come around to the mainstream way of thinking, but not for years after getting them wrong and basing his political actions on having them wrong. As Mayor he has to get his decisions right first time or he’ll waste millions on erroneous policies.
• Boris has been renowned for his incompetence in every job he’s ever done. He was sacked from his first job for making up a quote to print in the Times. He was sacked from the Tory front bench twice! And one of his staff when he ran the Spectator recently wrote that even suggesting he used to choose where to take the staff to lunch overstated his level of involvement in managing the organisation.
• Lots of Boris’s policies are completely undeliverable: his manifesto is a fantasy document, not something that can be taken seriously. Promising an airport he can’t build in an area he doesn’t control, or a no-strike deal with a union who’ve insisted in response that they’ll never sign one, or a Routemaster bus that hasn’t even been designed and might well not be, is wishful thinking, not a political manifesto.

I say those are the key points, but really they’re just the ones that came to mind just then. There are so many: this is the 122nd post on this blog so there are quite a few others knocking about here. So really, tell whoever you’re speaking to whatever reasons there are to oppose Boris which you think will appeal to that particular person.

Just don’t give up on the campaign now. We can do this.

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!

If you click through to just one link from this blog, make it this one.

if you or your friends and family haven’t registered yet, you need to do so now. You cannot register after this Wednesday, so you need to stop putting it off and do so today.

Register to Vote at London Elects

-Registration ends on Wednesday-

It’s vital to get turnout up because, as The Tory Troll explains in the linked post, Team Boris are relying on keeping turnout as low as possible. So please do register if you haven’t already, and do share this advice with anyone you know too.

I was going to arrange to send a similar message to the members of the Stop Boris group on Facebook, but sadly the group has reached the arbitrary membership level at which Facebook no longer lets its administrators send messages to its members. Quite why there is a need for such a level, I don’t know: if you join a group, you are surely interested in receiving information about it. Apparently Facebook thinks otherwise.

I suppose we couldn’t consider ourselves truly Web 2.0 without being able to dump some videos onto YouTube, so now we have a page (or is it a ‘channel’?) over there for that purpose.

(For some reason, someone decided 18 months ago to set up a user account called ’stopboris’, upload nothing, watch only 52 videos and then never log in again for at least the past year, so unfortunately we’re stuck being called ’stopboris2008′. It’ll do.)

The Stop Boris channel includes some good clips from elsewhere on YouTube in the Favo[u]rites section, plus any videos we upload ourselves.

First up on that front are two clips from tonight’s Bremner, Bird and Fortune from Channel 4.

The first highlights the lack of deep substance in Boris’s campaign: Boris Boris Boris.

The second features the regular middle-class dinner party characters discussing the Mayoral election.

I don’t like the homophobic stuff around Brian Paddick in that latter video. I’m sure they’d defend it as ironic or as representing the homophobia inherent in the middle classes or whatever, but it seems that the only laughs you could get in that part of the sketch would come from laughing with, rather than at, the homophobia. On the plus side for Brian, if the best satire they can manage against him is that, I suppose he can’t be doing anything particularly bad in his campaign!

The Boris material is better, anyway, but hopefully there is better still to come in the remaining two programmes before the election on 1 May.

And on a related note, Have I Got News For You? returns in the nick of time at 9pm this Friday on BBC One, giving them two weeks to try to put the monster they’ve created back in his box. Given Paul Merton’s comments in the Guardian last year that he didn’t think Boris would be any good at being Mayor (culminating in "Boris can’t look after his bike properly – how’s he going to look after London?"), here’s hoping the topic comes up.

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!

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.