Apparently some people might not think that the Stop Boris blog would have provided an accurate and impartial take on last night’s Newsnight debate, for some reason. Honestly, next you’ll be saying the Evening Standard can’t be trusted to provide balanced coverage of the election campaign.

The account posted here last night is not exactly contradicted elsewhere on the internet though, and not just by anti-Boris types.

It’s particularly interesting to have a read through some of the comments on Iain Dale’s miserable coverage. (Presumably part of the reason for his grumpiness is that his party’s candidate for Mayor had just been exposed as a useless idiot!)

Some of the highlights from the comments are:

Sadly and very surprisingly though, Boris was crap - I mean just really REALLY bad. He had verbal dioreha, was blabbing on and saying nothing cohessive, speaking way too fast, unable/unwilling to answer the question on the cost of new routemasters (bad briefing), which was reminiscent of Paxman’s eviscertation of Micheal Howard!

If he had used his wit it owuld have been better.

I thought he was going to walk it!

Shabolic performance by Boris and I agree with Iain’s analysis of old “What’s his name?” (the Liberal Democrat candidate. Ken was relaxed but none of them was able tog et a word in edge ways. Someone tell Boris to stop interrupting!!!!!

If, like me, you have grave misgivings about leaving London in the hands of an arrogant Trotskyite berk then you would do the sensible thing and vote for the candidate most likely to oust the git. That would be Bojo. The trouble is - he’s shit. On tonight’s evidence this city would be in the hands of a bumbling, rambling, clueless(if likeable) nitwit.
Stop waffling on about bloody bendy buses, please! What’s he on about now, Routemasters? WTF???
Very depressing. Poor old London. It deserves much, much better.

Johnson reminded me of a graduate in his first ever job interview and he hadn’t done a stroke of preparation. Lamentable

The Tories dug their own grave by appointing BoJo. I almost wish they had s erious candidate, as I dislike Leavingsoon as much as anyone.

Boris Johnson came over as a lightweight joke. Why on earth did the Tories choose him? He bumbled his way through the whole event.

Boris was by far and away the worst. And Paxman actually showed how unmanageable the clown actually is. […]

Boris would be a disaster for London. Slippery, wet, dangerously vague, bullshitter.

Boris was just an embarassment. As a Tory, I don’t know who to vote for now. Why didn’t he prepare?

Andrew Sparrow on the Guardian’s Politics Blog has further coverage, and links to further coverage still. Dave Hill, as seen on BBC London this evening, has a brief response to Newsnight too, while Dave Cole goes into more depth.

Alternatively, rather than relying on everyone else’s coverage, you could just watch it for yourself. Here are two useful links, depending on how much time you have to spare:

• Two minutes: Paxman despairs at Boris’s bendy bus blathering
• 32 minutes: the whole thing (in RealPlayer format)

Enjoy – and let us know what you think. Will the polls continue to slip (slightly) away from Boris if he keeps up these performances?

P.S. Liberal Conspiracy have a similar, shorter but better lip-sync’ed video of the Boris bus blathering on their home page at the moment. Apologies to them for the fact that the StopBoris.org spam filter meant I didn’t see their e-mail telling me this until three hours after they sent it!

If…

This was the first of a number of televised three-way debates in the coming weeks, including a BBC London one next week and culminating with a Question Time special the week after that.

Boris’s opening speech was read out fairly competently, but he did keep having to suppress that smirk of his.

It was all downhill from there for him though, once the debate proper began.

Slippage

He did his best to hold in place the mask that Lynton Crosby has worked hard to cultivate on Boris over the past few months – the mask of a proper, competent politician – but there was no way this idiot could keep it in place over the course of a full half-hour.

So we saw it slipping to reveal parts of the old, bumbling Boris, who had no grasp of the figures, and indeed barely any grasp of how to construct a sentence: for instance, he told us that if issued with an ID card, he would

grind it up and eat it on my children’s cornflakes

which seems a bit mean to his children, who will presumably be left to go hungry. (Not to mention hazardous to his health – although he’s more renowned for snorting ground-up hazardous substances than eating them, of course.)

Boris also informed us that the people watching Newsnight are its “readers”.

Experience

One of the early wins for the other candidates was when Brian called his bluff on his much-trumpeted line about being the only one of the three with any experience of running a private organisation: Brian got his retaliation in first by turning it round on Boris, saying that the only management experience he had was managing a tiny organisation of about 20 people! Boris stammered his way to a mumbled correction of this but could only take it up to “at least 50 people”, which didn’t exactly make Brian’s point any weaker, when the job of Mayor involves managing 105,000 people!

Bus black hole

It was, as expected, his grasp of figures where Boris really came unstuck, though, particularly in relation to the legendary bus black hole.

Jeremy Paxman became increasingly frustrated by Boris’s apparent attempt to filibuster away the question of the cost of his hare-brained bendy-bus replacement scheme, by simply talking on, and on, and on, and on, and on, without really saying anything informative at all.

(In fact, Paxman gave him one minute and 47 seconds to come up with a figure, which is quite some time on live TV. In total, Paxman asked Boris 15 times to clarify his policy in this area, and in fact the last 12 of those times are straightforward pleading for the cost of the buses. It was like that classic Michael Howard interview – “Did you threaten to overrule him?” – all over again!)

Essentially, we were back to the good old days of the Andrew Marr Show interview, when Boris simply couldn’t answer what he was being asked and Marr literally found himself on the edge of his seat with exasperation at trying to get him to finish a sentence (preferably by actually answering what he had been asked).

Likewise, Paxman moved ever closer to the podium on which the three candidates were standing, begging Boris to give him a figure, but none was forthcoming. For a moment I thought Paxman might mount the stage and give him a slap, but sadly it didn’t quite come to that!

In the end, with extraordinary cheek – not to mention a revealing implicit admission about his arch-rival’s superior grasp of figures – Boris turned to Ken and asked him how much Ken’s bus plan would be costing, on the basis that he thought his own would cost a similar amount!

Spoilt

Even after all that, Boris still wouldn’t shut up, suddenly interrupting Brian (who had moved on to talking about trams) to ask to be allowed to say one more thing about his beloved uncosted buses. Paxman slapped him down thus:

No! No you can’t! You’ve said quite enough without enlightening us with a figure! You have a think about it: give us a figure and you can talk again.

Boris still continued to try to make his point as his microphone was faded out, providing evidence of the spoilt temperament that Janet Street-Porter hints at in her Marie Claire interview with him.

In that interview she suggests that people never say ‘no’ to him, and he is very uncomfortable and unsure how to respond. Tonight we saw the result of someone who’s spent his life surrounded by yes-men, underlings and hero-worshippers: a tendency to interrupt and talk over others repeatedly, and to assume that he was the most important person in the room.

This was clearly noticeable at the very end of the debate, when the debate’s allotted time on the programme had expired. Paxman held up his hand to signal to them to stop whichever bit of bickering was ongoing at the time.

Boris: Can I just say…?

Jeremy: No, I’m afraid, I’m very sorry, you can’t.

Boris: Why not?

Jeremy: [Somewhat taken aback by the question] Because we’re out of time!

“Why not?”? What kind of question is that? It was obvious to everyone else that their time was up, but apparently if Boris thinks what he has to say is important, it won’t do for anyone to try to stop him saying it.

A vote for Boris is a vote for a spoilt, incompetent and bumbling man with no relevant experience or grasp of the figures. For London’s sake, please vote for someone else.

Oh good, we are at the Neasdenburg Rally all week. Here’s today’s instalment:

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.

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.

Boris wants to negotiate a no-strike deal with the RMT union.

This is the union that rarely agrees to even fairly reasonable demands, instead going on strike at the slightest sign of problems.

The idea that Boris - of all people - can persuade them to give up their right to strike ever again is one of the most ridiculous things in his whole manifesto.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of trying to stop them striking, promising to achieve this in his manifesto makes one wonder how seriously we should take any of his other pledges - it’s just so unlikely to happen!

Tony Travers, who’s doing booming business in media appearances trading on his undisputed expertise on London government, told the Guardian

that the RMT would prefer a Johnson victory because the union believed that despite his posturing the Tory candidate would be easier to beat than Livingstone, who had been “hard and canny” in negotiations.

“If they [the Tories] really are going to bring in a union-busting transport leader he or she is going to have to be very tough because the RMT are lethally strong,” added Travers.

So who’s he going to call in? And if Boris antagonises the RMT from day one, can we look forward to even more RMT walk-outs over the next four years if he’s Mayor?

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.

Not sure how I missed this - it’s only taken six months for me to stumble across it!

Boris Johnson illegally using his mobile phone while driving.

(Of course, he has also been seen on his phone while cycling, but that’s just risky and stupid, not illegal.)

I wonder if he advocates a zero tolerance approach to all criminal behaviour on the roads, or only that of his boss?

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!

Just seen a great report on Channel 4 News (I assume the video will be added to that rather thin page at some point). The Daily Mirror filmed David Cameron cycling through red traffic lights and performing various other misdemeanours.

Quite amusing (not to mention annoying for those of us who obey the rules when we cycle but are given a bad name by the minority who don’t!), but Boris got himself a bit tangled up when Channel 4’s reporter caught up with him at Borough Market.

He said there should be zero tolerance for cyclists breaking the road traffic regulations, slipping into one of his plethora of pre-prepared bland lines (which seem to be his main tactic against the risk of coming out with a blunder - well, that and the fact that he’s been ordered to stay off the drink for a couple of months).

For once (good old Channel 4 News), the reporter actually followed up on what he’d just said, asking what his zero tolerance approach meant he thought about his party leader’s misbehaviour. For the first time in a while (thanks to a combination of the aforementioned tactics and hitherto woeful journalistic scrutiny), Boris was visibly flustered, and paused for a moment, before coming out with the hopeless riposte: “Show me the evidence!”

The report immediately cut to the Mirror’s footage again.

I do hope Channel 4 News does a lot more coverage of the Mayoral election in the coming weeks.

Tonight’s London news programmes’ election coverage was centred on Gordon Brown’s unsurprising endorsement of Ken Livingstone, what with him being in the same party and all. (They have ‘history’, of course, but some of the coverage would make you think Brown would seriously have refused to endorse him, which hardly seems likely.)

Both ITV and the BBC made reference to Metronet (which will bring me to Boris shortly, don’t worry). One of the most ill-informed questions I’ve seen on the news in recent memory was put to Brown by Alistair Stewart, whom I think I’ve mentioned my dislike for before, but really, this was just amateur. He said, “Do you really think Londoners can trust Ken Livingstone with a £5bn budget [don’t know where he got that figure from - I’ve always heard of it being £9-11bn] after the Metronet fiasco?”

Seriously. A supposedly respected veteran news broadcaster asking Gordon Brown whether Ken Livingstone could be trusted with big budgets after Metronet!

(For anyone as unenlightened as Stewart appeared to be, Brown forced the Metronet Tube deal on Livingstone against his loudly publicised wishes - and against a legal challenge Ken brought against the government in the courts to try to prevent them pushing it through.)

Anyway, this site is called Stop Boris, not Stop ITV’s London Tonight Being So Atrocious, so you’ll be pleased to hear that when I switched over to BBC London I was soon presented with The Blond himself, putting across a point about Metronet so convoluted that it must have taken quite some time for his campaign team to dream it up.

Apparently the current Mayor is indeed to blame for wasting money in relation to Metronet. Boris declares that Ken wasted the money he spent taking the government to court in the early days of his tenure to try to prevent the whole Metronet debacle from ever happening!

Now, StopBoris.org is already under enough suspicion of being a front for the Ken campaign (a commenter on PoliticalBetting reckons we’re Ken’s £100k-salaried ‘cronies’ - not a figure I’m ever likely to see on my payslip!) without me doing too much defending of Ken, but honestly! Boris has come out with some rubbish in this campaign, and this can certainly join the heap of nonsense. Had Ken been successful in the courts, he’d've saved many times over the money he’d spent on legal fees. And perhaps if he hadn’t opposed it, Gordon Brown wouldn’t have coughed up the £2bn to bail out Metronet from central government funds quite so readily, risking Londoners having to bear the whole bill themselves instead.

More evidence that Boris will say anything, no matter how illogical or downright nonsensical, if he thinks it will add to his chances of winning.

Needless to say, by the way, his point wasn’t challenged by anyone on BBC London. This is becoming a regular and worrying feature of the election coverage in all media. (Except StopBoris.org, obviously.)

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…)

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