Ken vs. Boris: It's So On

d'ya remember when they tried to stuff the ballots so laura roslin would win instead of baltar?

Ohmigod Boris is going to stick us all in Cylon concentration camps and sign our death warrants.

Would like to sign Ken lead the resistance, lose an eye and then turn out to be a baddie, though.

it'll be quiet for the first 12 months...

But if Roslin had won, everyone would be dead!

there are only 12 Tory models

mrs fiendish seems able to laugh about this/adopt a dr c-esque pragmatism.

i'm just getting crosser and fucking crosser. i feel tonight's meal out with my parents might be explosive.

i mean. i don't live in london, plan ever to live in london, or even particularly like it. but still. GRR.

No, the 2001 myth was that the Clinton staffers removed all the Ws from keyboards before vacating, as disinfoed in thelondonpaper. Never happened.

Better dead than Cylon.

I am seriously tempted to tell any Tory people I meet over the weekend that Boris is canceling the congestion charge ASAP and they should just drive in to work on Monday FOR FREE!

You know there's no C-Charge (nor a lot of work) on bank holidays, right?

Oh yeah. Tuesday, then.

a text exchange that will hopefully go no further:

me, to my cousin: "i sincerely hope none of the votes for that tory buffoon is yours, or your baws are getting booted next time i see you"

my cousin: "all i'm going to say is that i didn't vote for the guy trying to charge me 25 quid a day to drive to work"

me: "i so want to believe you voted for brian paddick :("

(yes, we text in full like that, with punctuation and everything. we're well-brought-up young men.)

your cousin have a big car then?

he sells finance for very, very expensive motors and gets a new company car every six months.

last time i saw him, it was -- i shit you not -- one of those fucking awful porsche cayenne things. "they're taking them off the company-car list," he said, "so i just wanted to see what they're like."

answer: absolutely fucking abominable. what a shitmobile, in every way. even the driving position's pish, which surprised me.

you know how you can sometimes just turn a blind eye to the most appalling habits and behaviours of your friends and family? well, this is a case in point.

ah, another text!

him: "at least i didn't vote for the 'let's stop subsidising scotland' party. it actually exists!"

me: "a small mercy, i suppose"

So, are Tory supporters admitting (OK, pretty weak) dirty tricks live on the official Conservative Home homepage?:

My numb fingers delivered my last crumpled and damp 'Back Bozza' flyer through the letterbox below the green 'NO JUNK MAIL WHATSOEVER!' Sign (clearly a Tory voter). Inside the occupants were squeezed together on a warm sofa, beers in hand, cheering on Chelsea's European campaign.

Outside, Boris' loyal fans in Wandsworth were on the last leg of our own London final.

Despite the appalling weather, it had not been a bad evening's leafleting - 300 delivered, only two 'canvassed' properties with Vote Ken stickers in the window, one deranged dog, three scrapped knuckles from a medieval draft excluder and four Labour leaflets retrieved and 'recycled'.

Are you legally allowed to put leaflets through a letterbox where the householder requests no junk mail? And wouldn't taking the opposition's leaflets be considered as theft should the householder see it as such?

I'm grasping at straws, aren't I?

Yes

i sort of feel like if ken can't push the right levers - fraudulently or otherwise - to beat a cartoon character who was born in a top hat and tails, my faith in him as a "player" has been misplaced

He just needed to capture the "LOL OMFG!!!! KEN DONE A GUFF!!!! ROFL!!!!!!! THE MAN IS A LEGERND I TELL YOU LOL!!!!! I CARNT WAIT 2 SEE HIM RUNNING THE INTIRE CITTY!!! KEN 4 KING!!! LOL!!! LOL!!! LOLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!" voters.

i know someone who voted for paddick? wtf??????????????????

Paddick apparently intends to stand as an MP now, possibly capitalising on his captivating and career-making performance over mayoral elections.

John McDonnell on C4 news just said: 'I'm still hopeful that Ken will hang on, thanks to 2nd preference votes. ... but he'll hang on because he's Ken, not because he's Labour'.

I'm not saying this means he has a chance. I'm just recording what was said.

"After the worse results in 40 years it is intellectually unsustainable for ministers to simply tell the electorate that the government is listening. Prevarication will only lead to a Tory government - what people want is decisive action to change the policies immediately.

If Ken does hang on, it will be as a result of his perceived independence from New Labour and should not be interpreted by Gordon Brown as any vote of confidence in New Labour in London."

BBC R4 suggested that the result wouldn't be known till half midnight suggesting that it is close.

Guardian suggesting it isn't close.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/may/02/london08.london

let me believe a little while longer, although those turnout figures make me fear the worst.

With more than half the votes counted, figures released by the election organisers, London Elects, showed that that the MP for Henley was ahead of Ken Livingstone in eight of the 14 constituencies in the capital. Livingstone was ahead in the remaining six constituencies.

Bur if Johnson's won eight constituencies by 51% to 49%, and Ken's won six by 55% to 45%, doesn't that mean Ken has more votes? How the fuck does this work?

face it guys

http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/10/dawson-crying.jpg

Guardian calls BJ victory 'remarkable'. Why, given that most people have been predicting it for months, most of the media has backed BJ, his campaign has had more money, and Ken is suffering from general anti-Labour feeling?

'BJ was initially dismissed as clown but is proving them wrong' - BS. The first line of the Labour side was to warn that BJ was dangerous and right-wing. Look at the archives from the relevant period and they'll show this. If anything they have desperately turned to the clown attack in the last week.

labour lost 331 seats and 9 councils, ouch

evening standard has called it for boris - lol

i'm on call this wkend for the bbc homepage and i've been told to expect a call around 1am (though it could be "as early as 8pm" - thanks for the specific info guyz)

Hand, that's like someone coming to fix the washing machine: between 8am and 1pm, or between 1pm and 6m. possibly. if they turn up.

I had two thoughts.

1. Ken has not been seen as, or prominently called, 'soft on crime'. Despite his lefty past etc, no-one has said he has a bad relation with the police (I know this point has been discussed upthread), or that he lets muggers go free because he is a woolly social worker type. somehow, whatever the persona / perception has been, it hasn't been that - unusual, given his roots in / possible continuing attachment to radical principles?

2. Tony Blair (who was with Gordon Brown last night at a Middle East summit! really!) should go and live in Baghdad. Why not? He likes the way things are going over there. It would be interesting to see how long he stayed alive. - Actually, to put it that last way is crude and nasty. I don't want him to die, and don't want him to be a martyr, etc. But it's kind of true that if he thinks Iraq is so much better now, he should try it for a while.

it's exactly like that, pf. And i'm similarly shackled indoors. At least I know the call will come - or I think I do.

pf your Blair proposal reminds me of a similar proposal a friend of mine had for American politicians. Whichever consitituency he or she represented - under these theoretical rules my friend had dreamed up - the policitian would need to live on the poorest block. By law. Given American politicians' contant invocation of Judeo-Christian principles, I don't see how they could really argue with this rule.

Sorry to break up the Baathist Fan Club meet, but both Sky and the Telegraph are calling a Johnson win.

I have pretty much given up hope. However, I didn't realise we'd adopted a system where whoever 'seems' to have won has won. The idea is to work with the facts, not with exit polls or media speculation. You know, count the votes, that sort of crazy madness.

BBC say 80% of the first preference vote is counted and Boris leading in 8 ken in six constituencies.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2352/2459260367_ab3761cfa8.jpg

ES says second preferences will not come into it. I would love for ES, sky and the telegraph to be wrong

every time i move to a city they put in some fucking right wing asshole as mayor

I guess if you've counted 70% of the votes, or whatever, then you can predict the result with extremely high levels of certainty UNLESS you're not actually counting them in a random way - i.e. they just haven't got to Brent or Brixton or Hackney yet.

I assume all this "Boris ahead in 8/9/10 of 14 GLA districts" nonsense - not that it really tells us anything - is because one of the three ballot papers is region-specific, hence that's how they're being tallied at the three counting centres. I don't know whether it's a visual check (stack of paper on blue table) or whether people are leaking tabulated data (which surely isn't allowed).

We don't know which districts Boris is ahead in (though we can guess), whether they're the most populous/have the greatest turnout or by what margin he supposedly leads/trails.

I would love it, LOVE IT, if Boris edged it by 30,000 votes and then saw the Green-Lab pact sweep away his lead on the 2nd-prefs.

ES says second preferences will not come into it.

This has to be BS. Boris by 15-20pts?

some serious over-estimating of the "lol legernd" vote on this thread. if it was that simple labour wouldn't already be toast in the next general election.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/The_Smashing_Pumpkins_1979_Mixes.jpg

ES says second preferences will not come into it.
This has to be BS. Boris by 15-20pts?

Either someone at the Evening Standard is innumerate or there's been a completely unpredicted landslide.

the es has been wrong about so many things, it would be nice if this were one of them

*cries*

i think dg's right about the congestion charge, people's relationship to their cars is very personal and very emotional, second only to their relationship to their money

Brian Paddick's second preference vote was for Lindsay German.

Isn't he a Dickens.

and for those reasons if livingstone is booted out, the congestion charge will go down as one of the bravest policies ever pushed through by a mayor anywhere

to do something like the congestion charge, or to increase the time the green man stays lit at crosswalks, or to insist on 50% affordable housing as a target for new residential development etc etc, requires enormous fortitude that can only come from belief in one's principles. because it takes exhausting negotiating sessions over months and months to pass these things. (this is not to even speak of the whole network of local community organisations who work with the city on hundreds of different initiatives, depending on the mayor's priorities). i don't see boris being able to sustain the interest beyond cocktail #2.

xpost it's "lindsey"

After a nailbiting count, Mr Johnson was so far ahead on first-preference votes he could not be caught by Mr Livingstone, even after second preferences were taken into account

Ah, OK. They're not saying it won't go to the 2nd round just that it'll be a formality. Which is still dubious, as there'll be 350-400k Paddick/Berry votes to go through.