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.

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!

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.

At long last, we’ve published a poster highlighting Boris’s homophobia.

The ‘Gay Shame’ poster includes a quote from Boris stating that gay marriage is comparable to a union between “three men and a dog”, and a reminder of his strong support for the anti-gay Section 28: he said its repealing would “allow left-wing local authorities to waste taxpayers’ money on idiotic and irrelevant homosexual instruction”.

A miniature version of the poster has also been added to the Stop Boris application on Facebook, so you can add this to your profile to help spread the message about Boris’s appalling record of pandering to homophobia via your Profile page and Mini-Feed.

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!

I’ve heard much about the article in today’s Evening Standard which states that Boris is “holding secret talks with potential executives to run City Hall” if he becomes Mayor, but unfortunately the Standard’s web site appears to me to be down at the moment (long may it continue) so I can’t read it for myself.

What I can do is link to a MayorWatch article with a headline of the “Pope: ‘I am Catholic’” variety: Labour: ‘Boris isn’t up to the job’. Hardly a surprise that Labour might think that, but it sounds like this story certainly does lend itself to this interpretation.

The report claims senior Tories are concerned that a badly run capital would have an adverse impact on David Cameron’s chances of winning the next General Election.

Speaking this afternoon Tessa Jowell MP, Minister for London, said […] “David Cameron is asking Londoners to elect someone he is determined won’t be allowed to exercise power.”

Rumour has long had it that Cameron never expected that Boris would actually end up winning the Mayoralty, and now he’s the clear front-runner it’s understandable that he might be nervous about the impact on the Conservative party’s reputation. The General Election is widely expected not to be held until May 2010 now, which would give voters more than enough time to see what an atrocious buffoon the party has put forward for Mayor of London, potentially damaging the party’s credibility.

So Cameron - who, it should be acknowledged, Boris’s team have denied “is directly involved” in the discussions (presumably in the same way as Gordon Brown was never “directly involved” in those regular attempts to destabilise Tony Blair’s premiership) - has now had to enter damage limitation mode rather hastily and endeavour to find people with the skills Boris so obviously lacks, like, er, pretty much all the skills needed to run London.

Heh, I’ve just realised - does this story remind you of any particular Stop Boris poster? We hadn’t realised any of them would come quite so literally true, quite so quickly.