Boris johnson

In today’s election special podcast, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss David Cameron’s election rally with Boris Johnson in Hendon and whether the Mayor of London has been underused during the campaign. We also look at how David Cameron has proven, yet again, to be the essay crisis Prime Minister — showing his passion just in time for polling day. Plus, we discuss how Ed Miliband has surpassed all expectations during the campaign.

On the Andrew Marr show this morning, Ed Miliband fended off questions about any post-election deal with the Scottish National Party. He had two lines of defence. First, he said he wasn’t going to pre-empt the election result and that he was fighting to win the election everywhere including Scotland. Second, he was adamant that ‘I’m not doing deals with the Scottish National Party’. But there was no explanation of how he would pilot legislation through the Commons without their support. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on audioBoom When it came to the economy, Miliband refused to admit that the last Labour government spent too much, saying the financial crisis had caused the deficit not the other way round.

One of the main risks of wheeling Boris out this week was that he was never just going to be asked about this election in interviews. The Mayor and candidate for Uxbridge ended up saying 'in the dim and distant future, it would be a wonderful thing to be thought to be in a position to be considered for such an honour’ when asked about becoming Tory leader. He knows as well as anyone else that the way this campaign is going, that this ‘wonderful thing’ might get underway within a month, or indeed in the more distant future. His allies in Parliament have been very careful to refrain from courting support during the campaign. Their mantra has long been ‘low key and loyal’.

The Tories’s not-so-secret weapon has finally been deployed. Boris Johnson hit the campaign trail with David Cameron today, solving a jigsaw puzzle, painting with some children (above) and exuding a bonhomie missing from the campaign so far. But the dangers of letting Boris loose were also seen in an interview on Sky News. When asked, multiple times, by Kay Burley if he would like to succeed Cameron as Tory leader, Boris edged a scintilla closer to saying ‘yes’. At first, the Mayor of London deflected: ‘By 2020, I hope I will still be alive and still in Parliament but kaleidoscope of politics will have changed and rotated.

I have been wondering why nobody so far in this election seems to have made any mention of what most people recognise to be the biggest security problem facing this country. But then I discovered that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, last week appeared at the Al Falah Islamic Education Centre in West London. He used the opportunity to express, er, ‘concern about the level of Islamophobia in the capital’ and to insist that 'an alternative word needs to be found to describe extremists who claim to act in the name of Islam'. According to the Evening Standard: ‘Mr Johnson, whose great-grandfather was a Muslim, added that a "problem in the language" needed to be resolved, with the issue discussed with the Muslim Council of Britain.

Are the Tories throwing dead cats into the election debate? This question only makes sense if you recall Boris Johnson's 2013 description of a strategy deployed by an 'Australian friend' of his: 'To understand what has happened in Europe in the last week, we must borrow from the rich and fruity vocabulary of Australian political analysis. Let us suppose you are losing an argument. The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as “throwing a dead cat on the table, mate”.

After Boris Johnson got his dates muddled while discussing his biography of Winston Churchill on LBC yesterday, it has come to Mr S's attention that a selective memory could run in the family. Speaking at an Oldie literary lunch earlier this month, Boris's father Stanley Johnson revealed to Steerpike that there is an embarrassing mistake in his second autobiography Stanley, I Resume regarding his wife Jenny: 'If you get to page 21 of this book you will see it says "and Jenny and I were married October the 27th 1982 and we lived happily ever after". Now, that's 33 years ago but Jenny pointed out when she came to read it that I got the year wrong, and it turned out it was 1981.

Boris was waxing lyrical about Winston Churchill during his weekly LBC phone-in earlier when it all went a little wrong. Discussing the ‘many different phases Churchill’ went through ‘in his life’, Boris recalled that ‘in 1908 I think you’ll remember, he was in favour of cutting defence spending when he was going around with Lloyd George campaigning on social affairs.’ So far, so good. However, he then said this: ‘So indeed, in 1922 when he was, sorry, 1920, in the twenties when he was Chancellor, he was accused later on by his enemies of having been a great cutter of defence expenditure and there was a certain amount of truth in that.’ Churchill actually became Chancellor in 1924.

With just days to go until the general election campaign, David Cameron has declared that this is last time he's leading his party into battle. It's not clear why he felt the need to make this announcement, a tactic normally used by unpopular and besieged leaders to buy time. He says he will stand for a 'full second term' but won't serve a third. His party has lots of talent, he said - a comment that all party leaders make from time to time. But what's unusual is that Cameron actually picked out three potential successors: Theresa May, George Osborne or Boris Johnson (in that order). Which will set all kinds of hares running.

As the election approaches, politicians will find their diaries packed with various events. It's an equally busy time for those born with the gift of looking like a politician. ‘I’m lucky that I look like Boris,’ says Drew, a Mayor of London 'lookalike' who is on the books at the Susan Scott agency. ‘I often get stopped and while it’s not always pleasant, it’s nowhere near what a David Cameron lookalike I know gets.’ Alas, Boris won’t have Drew’s vote. ‘I may make money out of Boris, but I have never voted for him and that’s not going to change.’ With election party season on the horizon, Mr S has gathered a selection of his favourite lookalikes to invite to your own soirées.

This week Sol Campbell was named as a bookies' favourite to be the next Tory candidate for Kensington after Sir Malcolm Rifkind stepped down following a cash for access scandal. While Rifkind's resignation has sparked a debate over whether MPs should be allowed to have second jobs, the former Arsenal footballer thinks there is a simple solution. When Mr S caught up with Campbell at the 6th anniversary Amos Bursary dinner at the House of Lords to raise funds to help African and Caribbean British young men realise their ambitions, Campbell said MP salaries should be increased to over £67,000. 'They should raise the salary, then you would have more diverse candidates,' he told Mr S.

Have you seen Boris Johnson? The Mayor of London has been surprisingly absent from the Conservatives’ floundering campaign so far. He was not chosen to be member of the core team fronting the campaign — Sajid Javid, Nicky Morgan, Theresa May, William Hague and George Osborne in case you’d forgotten. His most prominent appearance was standing alongside the Chancellor at an event focused on London. Today’s Times splashes with the story that some Tories are beginning to worry, and wonder, why the Mayor isn't being used more often. The numbers alone suggest Boris should be on TV screens every night to promote the Conservatives’ cause.