The Scoop

Boris Johnson is losing on policy but winning on mud slinging

Adam Bienkov | Monday 19 March, 2012 08:46

Boris Johnson has already lost the election on policy. He’s now trying to win it on bashing Ken Livingstone.

Talk to Boris’s supporters privately and they will tell you that his campaign has been lacklustre, his policy pledges half-arsed, and his record in office meagre.

Ken’s policy of cutting fares is popular they admit, and Boris’s policy of giving you £3 back in council tax is not so popular.

Ken is talking about fares, rent, and childcare, and Boris is talking about airports, bus design and street trees.

But none of that matters they say, because Labour have picked Ken Livingstone and there’s simply no way that he can win.

The “tax avoidance” story is in reality a “policy avoidance” story. Focus the election on anything apart from Boris’s policies versus Ken’s.

In pursuit of this strategy, no story is too small and no line of attack is too petty in which to throw at Ken.

Look Ken has made an outrageous comment about X. Look he’s photoshopped a picture of a bus. Look he’s made a typo on an election leaflet in Sutton.

Will any of this work? Quite possibly.

Voters don’t care about most of the attack lines on Ken, but the strategy is less about damaging Ken than it is about distracting him from his campaign.

In a close personality-based election, these distractions can make all the difference, and Boris’s supporters are still hoping that he can pull off the walkover they have so long predicted.

This still looks unlikely.

The polling shows that Ken’s campaign is most in touch with what Londoners care about and Boris is still nowhere near as popular with voters, as he is with his friends in the media.

The only way Boris can win is if he manages to bog Ken and his supporters down in a muddy pit of accusations, counter-accusations and party infighting.

With the state of the Labour party at the moment this strategy may well prove to be successful.

But if they can manage instead to drag the debate back onto policies, then they still have every chance of winning on May 3rd.

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