Is Boris Johnson Serious?

When Boris Johnson secured the nomination for Conservative Mayoral Candidate a number of commentators wondered if the Tories would have cause to regret the result.

In the months since there have been whispers that some within Tory circles were unhappy with Johnson’s campaign.Recent weeks have seen mutterings become more vocal.

In November The Times reported campaign donors have expressed “dismay privately at the hush that has settled over his mayoral effort”, the Evening Standard has asked: “What’s stalling the Boris bandwagon?” – the readers of Conservative Home offer a number of answers to that – and this weekend Peter Oborne suggested Johnson was “failing to perform”.

Last week a number of readers contacted us to claim an anti-Johnson bias in our coverage. To be clear: we don’t have any bias for or against any of the candidates.

It’s long been our position that voters should have a choice of credible, viable candidates from all parties, Mayor of London is a serious job with real impact and voters deserve candidates who treat it as such.

The only issue negatively affecting the coverage of of Mr Johnson’s campaign is the lack of information flow from that campaign.

More than once MayorWatch has offered the Johnson camp an opportunity to respond to articles only to finally receive a response long after the item was published.

One might imagine that a serious candidate wouldn’t wait 24 hours to answer the claim that they lacked knowledge of GLA procedures.

Equally, having raised the prospect of the BNP’s potential electoral success and having ownership of the issue who would have imagined that Johnson’s campaign would take 3 days to respond when asked to comment on Labour’s intervention on the issue?

Polling day may seem a long way off but the window of opportunity for the Johnson campaign to start acting like they’re serious is rapidly closing.