Those of you looking at our YouTube channel may have spotted a video called “Ken Livingstone for London” appearing in our Favo[u]rites, and thought “Hah! This campaign does support Ken after all!”. So I thought I’d better explain why I’ve added it.

The video, apparently made by an ‘anon Ken admirer’, contrasts Ken’s handling of that extraordinary 48 hours in July 2005 which I’m sure most Londoners can still vividly remember, with the idea of Boris trying to cope with similar events.

The Tory Troll has written about this video too, so have a read of what he had to say, but the reason it’s appeared in the Stop Boris favourites is that the point the video is making is valid regardless of the competition for Boris. Yes, Ken handled it really well, but I’m sure there are other politicians who would have done too. The key point here is that Boris is obviously, definitely, clearly not one of them.

So, with that in mind, here’s the video:

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.

A new series of Channel 4’s satirical show started this evening, and had some good Mayoral Election material in it, particularly a bit emphasising the sheer frothiness of Boris’s campaign strategy, which I’m contemplating attempting to get onto YouTube in some way.

In the mean time, here’s a reminder of one of the highlights of their previous series, after Boris had become the Conservative candidate for Mayor, which someone else has already posted on YouTube, so I don’t have to (fortunately, since I don’t have a recording of it any more anyway):

We keep hearing how the candidates in this election (and others in the UK) could or should learn a lot from the US presidential election.

Well, it looks like someone on YouTube has decided to try to help them out with that:

Via the Tory Troll.