London Mayor Odds: It's make your mind up time, folks

UK Politics / Chicken Dinner / 01 May 2008 / 1 Comments

Boris makes some last minute mischief while Ken places faith in pencils

Is your voting hand nice and relaxed? Have you freed up a little brain space in order to responsibly perform your democratic duty? Don't smirk - Ken Livingstone has discovered a new psychological phenomenon that is going to sweep him back into a still damp City Hall: hovering pencil syndrome.

"I just think that although people may be toying with the idea of voting for Boris, when it comes to it they will find they just can't do it. This is too serious for that. They will think 'It's my money, it's my job that is at risk if it goes wrong', " said the mayor. Sadly for him with 24 hours to go, the betting markets don't see it that way, and Ken finds himself all the way out at 3.0 on Betfair, with Boris at 1.5.

After such a low-key campaign, these prices suggest that voters are feeling anti-Ken, rather than pro-Boris, as while Ken has eight years of mayoral record for people to meditate on, Boris's positions remain soft and vague. Indeed, the dominant themes from the Boris campaign at this stage have little to do with the issues.

One is that Conservative central office geeks will be glued to their instruments to see how far the needle twitches to their side during voting. The Tories can barely conceal their glee that an enormous, tailor-made focus group should have fallen into their laps in the shape of the mayoral race, but Londoners are looking for someone to run the place. The other is the notion of "serious" Boris, as though the concept of "I am no longer an imbecile" were a sturdy voting platform from which to spread confidence into every corner of the electorate. As for policies, Boris seems to be saving them for after the election.

Alarmingly for Boris converts, though, even Boris himself admits he is still the same person as before. "There is absolutely no distinction, theological or otherwise, between the Old Boris and the New Boris," he said. "They are of the same nature, the same substance." According to the Independent, "He then said it again in Latin, as if to prove it."

His big eve-of-voting coup has been to coax Labour MP for Vauxhall Kate Hoey to agree to act as one of his advisers, and even described her in a press release as "the first member of his administration" although he was later moved to retract that claim. Labour grandees were less generous in their description, calling her actions "deplorable", "regrettable" and "despicable".

At last some language the voters can understand.

Comments (1)

1. Gareth Jenkins | 03 May 2008

   Is anyone taking bets on how quickly Boris will screw up/someone within the GLA will put in a vote of no confidence?