Looks like Steve Bell’s If… cartoon strip in the Guardian is turning its attention to the Mayoral election this week.
Here’s his first offering:
I have no idea if he’ll be focussing on a different candidate each day or if we’re at the Neasdenburg Rally all week!
According to a quick item on the BBC News 24 newspaper preview just now, tomorrow’s (well, today’s now) Telegraph has a lengthy profile of Boris which doesn’t sound like it’s the glowing praise-athon you might expect from his former employer.
It’s not online yet, but what I could glean from the television was that part of its headline was “Running for Mayor… and running from the Press?”, which is a nice gaffophobia reference, illustrated by a photo of a journalist (the author of the piece?) trying to grab him as he walks away.
Apparently the piece also focusses on some of his gaffes and some of the racist articles published in the Spectator when he was editor of it – which he issued another apology for this week, having previously only apologised for the things he’d written himself, rather than the out-and-out racism from the pen of Taki, which he waved through to the newsstand countless times during his editorship.
I don’t suppose even a StopBoris.org-worthy hatchet job would change some Telegraph readers’ minds about the columnist they lapped up for two decades until last year – and however surprisingly negative this article might be, it’s probably not that harsh – but you never know, it might just make some of their readers think twice about backing him.
We look forward to seeing the article when it appears online.
Update: It appeared while I was writing that! I’m a bit confused because although I think this must be the article they were referring to, I can’t see any references to the Spectator racism in it. Indeed, it’s one of the milder articles I’ve read - exactly as one would expect from his former employer.
It’s not without its revelations, though. Did you wonder what the underlying motivation for Boris to become Mayor was? What incident had propelled him to do all he could to get into City Hall? Was it his passion for the city’s diverse population? Perhaps his desire to dream up exciting policy plans to improve the city? Or some overarching vision for the greatest capital on Earth? Er, no. It all dates back to one brief encounter on his bike:
I was almost killed by a bendy bus and can remember pulling over, shaking, to the kerb and thinking, ‘Who did this? It must have been Livingstone, it must have been that man.’ And I remember thinking I would do anything I could to secure his removal from office.
Knowing that that was the real motivator explains rather a lot about his ridiculous campaign, actually.
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.
Unlike Boris, Pippa Crerar actually uses bendy buses - and rather likes them.
They seem all right to me too. I’m a bit baffled as to how they became such a totemic punchbag - the Heather Mills of the public transport world, at least during this election. But then I’m still more than a bit baffled as to how Boris ended up being the front-runner for Mayor of London. It’s a baffling world.
In the unlikely event you’re one of the tiny minority of Londoners to whom the type of bus operated on a small number of central routes actually matters enough to you that you agree that most of a Mayoral election campaign should be focussed on it, read on.
Channel 4’s FactCheck have had a look at one of Boris’s manifesto claims: “[Bendy buses] have twice as many collisions with pedestrians and cyclists than other buses.”
Ignoring the grammatically incorrect ’than’ (what did all those school fees buy?), you can certainly read some figures to suggest that this is true, which is why FactCheck give this claim a generous 50% accuracy score.
However, those figures compare bendy bus-operated routes against every other bus route in the entirety of London! This overlooks the obvious fact that bendy buses operate in central areas only, serving some of the most pedestrian-full streets in the city. Anyone who’s walked (or, I assume, driven) around central London will be familiar with how little attention many pedestrians pay to the red man signal and how prone they are to run out into the road to get to whatever exciting thing awaits them on the other side. Sheer volumes of pedestrians make these roads much riskier to operate any vehicle on.
When you compare bendy bus figures with a selection of non-bendy routes operating along similar roads in similar conditions, lo and behold, the figures become more or less identical (and certainly the difference is statistically insignificant, given the low overall numbers of accidents involving any types of buses).
And I’m delighted to see that those mischievous FactCheck researchers aren’t content to leave it at that, but instead deliver one final twist:
How do bendy buses score in contrast to accidents involving the old Routemaster?
Changes in routes mean that data isn’t directly comparable, but according to other figures TfL gave FactCheck, between January 1994 and September 2007 there were 0.05 fatalities per million km operated by bendy buses and 0.08 fatalities per million km operated by Routemasters.
For every dodgy use of statistics to support Boris’s bizarre obsession with abolishing bendy-buses, there’s an equally dodgy way to use statistics to prove his policies woefully misguided - hurrah!
On last night’s BBC London news I witnessed what must surely be a conscious tactic being adopted by Boris Johnson’s campaign: soundbites which are not just putting a spin on the issue at hand, but actually make no logical sense in response to the subject at hand.
This post is rather long so I’m going to make use of the ‘More’ feature on this blog. (You’ll have to excuse my lack of brevity - I’m new to this blogging business…)