/ Chicken Dinner / 17 April 2008 /

Boris is still favourite, but the Mayor's got the moves

After weeks of circling each other suspiciously, the mayoral scrap between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson really burst into life this morning - Martin "three-time Sports Journalist of the Year" Samuel joined in. Enraged by the mayor's enthusiastic efforts to personally overpopulate the planet, the great Samuel vents in this morning's Times:

"A guy buys the wrong sort of vehicle, runs it for a few hours each week, most of the time it sits in his garage doing nothing, using nothing, consuming absolutely nothing, and he's a monster. Ken introduces five people into the world, people being the single biggest factor in the consumption of resources, people that need water, energy, food and shelter, that overcrowd the cities and invade the countryside, that cause CO2 emissions and generally stuff the place up and will continue doing so for roughly the next 75 years, and not a murmur."

An excellent rant, your award-winningness, but Ken's fortune is not going to stand or fall on the size of his family. His more tenacious enemy, Andrew Gilligan of the Standard, has an even more shocking confession: "Ken could still wriggle back through the cat-flap."

His argument is that the election will not be won by appeals to the ethnic vote or "preposterous deals" such as the Green Party agreeing to instruct their voters to give their second votes to Ken. Instead "the election will be decided heavily on television. Until recently, Londoners' TV screens were filled with stories about Lee Jasper. Now they are filled with debates and other things at which Ken, as we have seen, is better than Boris. There are still three weeks to go. Could a combination of above and below-the-radar lying, superior TV performance skills, and fading memories of sleaze pull it back for Livingstone?"

While praising Boris Johnson's improved performance in a Newsnight debate on Tuesday, Gilligan also laments his ability to bring the hammer down on Ken's mistakes. "He is a vastly improved candidate, but if I have a criticism it is this: he isn't yet closing the deal."

At the biggest hustings event of the campaign so far last night in Westminster, Boris faced a hostile audience who at times drowned him out with their boos. By the end, according to reports, he had won many of them over, in spite of appearing initially terrified. That's all very nice, but shouldn't the leading candidate to be next mayor of London be beyond the terror stage by now, when confronted with the people he hopes to lead?

Boris is currently available at [1.63] on Betfair, Ken at [2.64]

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