Blairwatch has had a closer look at that Standard article I blogged earlier. Their conclusion? It’s a load of rubbish.

Apparently we’re one of three blogs that Tom from Blairwatch would recommend, by way of contrast with the Standard, for ‘good journalism’. It’s enough to make me feel a bit sad that I’ll be quitting journalism this weekend to return to the obscurity and spare time I enjoyed prior to the Conservative party foisting a terrifying Mayoral candidate on the city I love.

A Facebook-based Boris-stopper just relayed a conversation she had today on the campaign trail:

"I’m not voting for Ken!"

"Who are you voting for then? Boris?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

He went silent for a while (like a lot of Boris voters, he didn’t really know), and then he said:

"Because he’s got blond hair. And my girlfriend’s got blond hair as well. I like blond hair, you see."

Apparently we’ve been providing "all at the Standard with hours of family entertainment".

They’ve certainly been providing us with entertainment too, in various genres. Mainly Comedy, Fantasy and Horror, but certainly not Factual.

There’s been a lot of speculation during the campaign as to what big ‘revelation’ Andrew Gilligan would be saving up for the day before the vote, which then couldn’t be refuted in time to stop people fleeing from Ken in droves and into the arms of Gilligan’s on-off "pal" Boris.

The Tory Troll reports that Gilligan claims in today’s Evening Standard that the congestion charge has brought in 96% less money than Transport for London say it has.

That’s one hell of a big claim. I mean, couldn’t they have come up with something a bit more believable, 50% or something? Surely no-one will buy the idea that TfL would over-report their revenue by that much?

Ah, but of course, they’ll have shown their workings in great detail and it will be based on calculations and assertions by renowned experts in the field, so it will be believable on that basis, won’t it? Er, no.

They don’t disclose any detailed calculations, and the figures are based on an anonymous banker – he has that much faith in his figures that he fears for his job if he’s named – and a Tory councillor, active in the campaign to elect Boris, who is so out of touch with transport issues that he thinks Oyster bus fares are 67% higher than they really are.

So, was this supposed to be the big revelation that would make us delete our web site in shame at ever considering voting against Boris? I think we’ll keep the site up.

Addendum:

As Gilligan himself points out in the comments, he didn’t actually write this article. I must confess to having based my post primarily on The Tory Troll’s post, only clicking through to the main article to check a few figures, so I didn’t notice that it wasn’t actually written by the usual suspect.

That doesn’t make the Standard’s article any less rubbish, but it does leave open the possibility that Gilligan still has his ‘big one’ saved up for tomorrow’s paper, perhaps not thinking the Standard has yet abused its position enough in an attempt to affect the election’s outcome, and therefore that it’s imperative to cover their advertising boards with one last inverted pyramid of piffle as an onslaught on commuters heading home to vote. Time will tell, but he commented through his employer’s internet connection so he’s certainly working late tonight on something.

Gilligan also thanks us for hours of entertainment. If he and his Standard cohorts have been reading the blog for a while, and this is the first time he’s been moved to comment about an inaccuracy, I suppose we do at least have their tacit admission that everything else we’ve said is accurate Which is certainly more than can be said for those Standard advertising boards…

The Financial Times carries a lengthy article/interview/profile about/with/of Boris today.

(Thanks to a keen Boris-stopper for pointing out this and other good articles over the past few days, by the way!)

The writer of the article is noncommittal, but not exactly won over by Boris, raising lots of doubts about his abilities as Mayor.

But let his conclusion be a warning to us all to make sure we go out and vote against Boris tomorrow!

I asked Johnson whether May 2 would mark another new dawn for Britain. “That is an incontestable fact,” he replied. “A new dawn will have broken. All sorts of doors will open, windows will go up, lights will come on, curtains will be drawn.”

On May 2, Londoners may well draw their curtains to find that they have just elected Boris Johnson as mayor.

Martin O’Neill, writing for the New Statesman, reckons "our society is still disfigured by problems of social class".

It’s quite possibly true, although probably not the level of debate to win over swing voters to our cause at this late stage, so let’s concentrate on the facts instead.

You might prefer to click through to the article than to read such a huge quotation in small red type, but I couldn’t work out which bits to delete from any of paragraphs 2–7 so I’ve had to just put them all here!

The facts about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson are well-known, and should be more than sufficient to stop him being a plausible candidate for any kind of elected office in a mature democracy. He is a man who has lost a number of jobs for lying: he was sacked from The Times for making up a quotation from his godfather, the Oxford historian Colin Lucas, and lost his front-bench role, under Michael Howard, for lying about his four-year extra-marital affair with his fellow toff journalist, Petronella Wyatt. (For men like Johnson, with friends in high places, serial sackings are no bar to advancement.)

As well as being a famous liar, Johnson has skirted the borders of criminality when it has suited his interests or those of his foul, larcenous and over-privileged friends. In 1990 he agreed to give the home address of journalist Stuart Collier to Darius Guppy, a narcissistic Old Etonian convicted fraudster, who wanted to have Collier beaten up in revenge for some perceived slight. On being asked how badly Collier would be beaten up, Guppy informed Johnson that it would involve “a couple of black eyes, a cracked rib … or something like that”.

It is beyond satire that the man campaigning for the mayoralty of London by stoking up fear of violent crime should once himself have been involved in the attempted commission of an instance of GBH. Despite his new found enthusiasm for the Metropolitan police, did he alert the authorities to Guppy’s intentions? No doubt he takes the view that police attention should just be “for the little people”, and not for his odious chums from Eton.

But this is only the beginning of the charge-sheet against Johnson. Although he is campaigning to run London, he admits to completely administrative incompetence: he left a job as a trainee management consultant complaining that he could not “stay conscious” when confronted with financial information. We should not be surprised, in that case, if he is unable to master the fine details of running one of the world’s most complex cities.

Boris Johnson is not only shady, dishonest and incompetent. He is also a particularly offensive kind of clown, as is evidenced by his absurd litany of gaffes and insults. The people of Papua New Guinea are, according to Johnson, “cannibals,” while Portsmouth is “full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs”.

Worst of all is Johnson’s casual racism, although it is perhaps not wholly surprising from someone of his class and background. It takes a particular kind of bad judgement, as despicable as it is revealing, to think that there could be anything funny about describing the participants in the Congolese civil war as having “watermelon smiles” or talking of “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” (with conscious echoes of Enoch Powell?), yet both phrases appeared in a Daily Telegraph article by Johnson as recently as 2002. Such a man simply does not belong in modern, multicultural London.

I can’t argue with that. Indeed, I don’t think anyone can really. Has anyone heard a decent rebuttal of much of this stuff? I’ve mainly heard deflection onto the Evening Standard’s allegations against Ken, for instance, rather than reasons why the above catalogue of calamity doesn’t disqualify Boris from the job.

guardian.co.uk has coverage of the fallout from the Telegraph article we blogged about last night, in which Simon Heffer tore Boris to shreds.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne has also attacked Boris, so Boris-backers are quite annoyed with them both for daring to reveal the truth about their naked golden boy.

It’s also interesting to see a bit more gaffophobia creeping in on the last day of the campaign:

Johnson has been accused of attempting to avoid press scrutiny by BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine.

"Have any listeners seen a tall man with yellow hair in a blue suit?" the presenter asked his audience after the Conservative candidate failed to appear on his lunchtime show. "He’s called Boris Johnson. Because if we don’t hear from him in one minute we’re doing a mayoral debate without him."

He added: "It’s very odd that noone can find Boris a day before the mayoral election. Has he just walked past that cafe you’re sitting in? Call us if you spot him."

It’s pathetic that even at this late stage he still doesn’t feel sufficiently on top of his brief to bother turning up to things like this. Let’s hope enough people reach the realisation that he ‘has no clothes’ before they put their crosses in boxes tomorrow.

Let’s hope the Labour MP quoted in this item from this week’s guardian.co.uk ‘Backbencher’ e-mail is a fair summary of the situation with voters. It certainly should be.

"Boris isn’t wearing any clothes"

Joan Ryan [is] MP for Enfield North, […] one of the suburbs the Person Formerly Known as Boris is supposed to have tended on the advice of Lynton Crosby. "Sure - he’s visited four or five times but what usually happens is he arrives, by public transport, does a press conference and leaves." Out and about in her constituency she describes the London elections thus: "the Emperor’s New Clothes. All the way though we’ve been warning people ‘Boris isn’t wearing any clothes’ and only now are voters coming to us and saying, ‘oh my goddddd, he’s not wearing any clothes… and it’s disgussssting’". The P.F.K.A.B. Naked. Think on.

I’d really, really rather not ‘think on’ about that.

They’re all on BBC London (on BBC One) right now if you want one last look at them.

Update: Not a lengthy appearance, but one which confirmed the general impressions created elsewhere in the campaign.

The final part summed them up really: the presenter gave each of them 30 seconds to tell voters one concrete thing they could "guarantee" would change if they were elected Mayor. In reverse order, Ken gave detailed and specific pledges on youth provision to lead to cuts in youth misbehaviour/crime, Brian talked about a culture change moving against crime, in semi-specific terms, using most of his time, and Boris used only half his time, to promise precisely nothing specific at all.

A vote for Boris "time for a change" Johnson is, ironically enough, a vote for someone with absolutely no idea how to change anything.

This looks very interesting from a first skim.

Unfortunately it’s 1am and I do still have a day-job to try not to fall asleep during.

And he says so in the Telegraph too.

OK, he starts by saying Ken and Brian are rubbish as well, and ends up encouraging mass abstention, which is pretty poor advice since the politicians always ignore abstention (they call it "apathy" and pretend it doesn’t mean anything).

But goodness me, he really doesn’t think Mayor Boris is a good idea, and nor does he mince his words (not that he’s renowned for doing so).

There’s no point in me adding anything more to this post apart from quotes directly from the Heffer’s mouth:

[Boris’s buffoon act] conceals two things: a blinding lack of attention to detail, and (though this might seem to sit ill with the first point) a ruthless ambition.

Mr Johnson is the most ambitious person I have ever met. That ought to be a commendation for high office, since ambitious people normally understand they will go further only by doing their present job well. Mr Johnson’s scattergun approach to life will not allow this.

… What is there in Mr Johnson’s past to suggest that his mayoralty would be anything but [a comic spectacle]? Where is the evidence of his adroitness in administration, his sense of responsibility, his ethic of public service?

As [biographer of Boris, Andrew Gimson] makes clear, one of Mr Johnson’s failings is a belief that the public is there to serve him, not vice versa. He has given much pleasure to millions over the years, but will that cause the Underground to work better, the Metropolitan Police to catch more criminals, or business to thrive in London? Or would a Johnson mayoralty be yet one more chapter in an epic of charlatanry - perhaps, since it is so serious a job with potentially no hiding place, the last chapter?

… The guiding theme of his life is the charm of doing nothing properly. …

He is pushy, he is thoughtless, he is indiscreet about his private life. None of this matters much to anyone these days, which is why he has gone so far in spite of them, and tomorrow may go further still.

Lynton Crosby, the Australian public relations genius who has kept Mr Johnson out of trouble during his campaign, returns home after it.

Then what? Who will guide the unguided missile? Who will support the figurehead? Who will ensure he turns up on time, or at all? How will they be accountable?

All good stuff, all true, all valid reasons why tomorrow we really must all do our bit to stop Boris.

Unfortunately, as chronicled by The Tory Troll, who was there, the Sky News debate was very disappointing.

It was truly bizarre how they would take some perfectly good questions, and then go to a break and never really address them. They also took a question about crime from – unless a Boris-stopper’s eyes deceive him – the very member of Team Boris who was peddling lies about crime outside the Time Out hustings earlier this month!

It was also seriously frustrating how they kept cutting things off every time the candidates starting interacting and coming alive. I lost count of the number of times Boris would come out with some rubbish and the other candidates would then be cut off without being given a chance to show it up as the nonsense it was. As I said, it was very disappointing.

Fortunately, the LBC radio discussion afterwards, featuring Dave Hill, wasn’t.

Grab it as an MP3 (I’ve even chopped out the ads) and put it on your MP3 player to pass 50 minutes of your commute. I don’t want to oversell it but I did find it a good listen on the bus this afternoon.

I was particularly cheered by a caller (I think he was the only caller they had on actually!) saying that he’d been determined he wouldn’t be voting for Ken at the start, and was a Conservative, but can’t believe how rubbish Boris has been in all the debates so will now be voting to stop him. That’s my kind of caller. (He pops up just before 28 minutes into the file, if you’re keen to hear him.)

So, the debates are over, and indeed as I type this we are now into the last day before the election itself. This is it.

I’m a bit tied up at the moment but I had to pass on what I just saw The Tory Troll blogging about: Transit magazine have interviewed various bus experts and they’re unanimous in saying that Boris’s bus plan is at best “not thought through” and at worst a complete “non-starter”.

So not only is the plan not properly costed, it’s not even worth doing or indeed likely to be doable at all.

And that’s his flagship policy – just imagine how little thought has gone into the others!

Don’t vote for Boris – it’s just not worth the risk of voting for someone whose manifesto is an amateurish wishlist that can’t be delivered.

Boris has announced that Labour MP Kate Hoey would be on his Mayoral team if he became Mayor.

Apparently Gordon Brown doesn’t mind.

I wonder where that leaves everyone who’s said they have to vote against Ken (i.e. either literally or effectively for Boris) because they hate “New Labour” so much? Whichever way you vote you get a Labour party member in City Hall now, so you might as well go for the option that doesn’t put an incompetent clown in charge of the city, eh?

After providing several months of what I would wholeheartedly agree has been balanced, open-minded and fair in-depth coverage of this campaign, Guardian journalist and blogger Dave Hill has this morning declared he’ll be voting for Ken, and offered ten substantial reasons why.