Some people would still vote Boris if Ken could cure cancer. Ken is a controversial figure, someone people find excuses to dislike. Ken spent decades campaigning for gay rights, only to be denounced as a homophobe for meeting with a controversial cleric, while Boris appears to have gotten away with comparing gay marriage to that between “three men and a dog”.

Livingstone undeniably has a knack for causing offence and expresses anger with a directness unusual for a politician. But this is an election for a mayor not a pope; we want good policy, not a friendly personality. In a time of deep social crisis, Boris is a Thatcherite without any understanding of or interest in the problems of poorer Londoners.

The centerpiece of Ken’s transport policy is the 7% cut in fares followed by a fare freeze. In these tough financial times Boris’ decision to allow fares to rise above inflation would empty the pockets of poorer Londoners for the sake of long term investment that can easily wait until rosier days. Even Boris’ most famous transport move – his eponymous bikes – were the result of a policy inherited from Ken.

 Boris claims to have cut crime which is, strictly speaking, true, but only if you ignore the disturbing increase in violent youth crime in the past four years. Last summer London went to hell and Boris refused to cut short his holiday. Ken proposes tackling gang warfare with carefully targeted multi-agency plans, as well as implementing an acti

on plan for disenfranchised youths. Boris has nothing more than a neighborhood watch scheme. Boris scrapped Ken’s target to make 50% of new homes affordable during a crippling housing crisis and, at the same time, backed borough plans to demolish swathes of social housing through regeneration schemes. Boris’ policies are creating a divided London and exacerbating what is fast becoming an epidemic of homelessness. Ken plans to create a “London letting agency’ to give cheaper rates to the poorest, whom Boris would abandon to the whims of the market.

Putting a friendly, ‘eccentric’ face on London isn’t enough. The reality is that London is a grim place to live in for many of its residents, and we need a mayor with serious plans for affordable housing and good policing. We need someone who is willing to delay investment so that Londoners who have been hit hard by recession can have more cash in their pockets. We need Ken.

We need to talk about Ken. This week you can’t help but empathise with Labour activists, pounding the streets campaigning for a man they largely find odious. Amidst Tory austerity this election should really belong to them. A red rosette pinned to a pig would do the trick. Failing that, the party chose Red Ken – a champagne socialist whose name has become a byword for hypocrisy. In what is essentially a two-horse race between Livingstone and the incumbent, a vote for Boris is surely right.

The fact that he is not Ken is by no means the only good reason to ‘Back Boris’. During his term in office he has bartered astutely with the Coalition to secure a good deal for London. Understanding the importance of a mid-term Tory win in the capital, the Chancellor George Osborne was careful to preserve the big-spending projects in Johnson’s fiefdom. Were Ken to win, the Olympic-sized tide of Whitehall spending would subside and Londoners would be forced to confront the cuts that Mancunians and Geordies are currently grappling with. The calculation here is implicitly one of blackmail: vote Tory, or the preferential treatment afforded to London stops.

 Regardless, the truth remains that the capital is better off with Boris. His first term wasn’t transformative, but Londoners, ask yourselves, has the city improved under Boris’s watch? Council taxes? Cut. Crime? Cut. And the City Hall sleaze? Out. Add in a few goodies like Boris Bikes, the scrapping of the Western extension and, well, the man’s extraordinary bombast, and Boris’s second-term credentials seem fairly commendable. He is a competent, charismatic big-city mayor, confounding those who sneered at the prospect of a television personality running the world’s greatest city. Somehow the Eton and Balliol educated Boris – a former Union President nonetheless – embodies the diversity and dynamism of London better than any old, washed-out socialist could.

Charisma counts. This summer the world will come to London and, for a city that relies on international trade and whose vibrant culture is international, the face we choose to represent the name London matters. Boris can charm a crowd with his mix of rhetorical skill and mild eccentricity. Despite his bedraggled appearance, Mr Johnson has an indiscernible talent that makes him an asset to London in situations where Ken would be a liability. He’s independent , charismatic, and pays his taxes. Back Boris.

After the last election, there are now more first time MPs than there have been for decades. How has this affected the government?

The key point is that there is now a huge cohort of young MPs who have no chance of becoming ministers in this Parliament, not least because cabinet is now split between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. After the expenses scandal, a lot of the safe seats that the parties use to parachute favoured candidates into Parliament were flushed out, so the new MPs tend to feel like they got in on their own, rather than through the party machine – they aren’t easily cowed. The main consequence of this is that there’s a lot more intellectual foment going on; there are many new factions debating public sector reform and regulation, asking how to adapt to a post-boom Britain in which the old mix of social democracy and deregulation doesn’t work any more. It’s an unrulier, more intellectual Parliament.

How are the Conservatives and Lib Dems adapting to a coalition?

First, it’s worth saying that it’s really voters who are failing to adapt to a coalition. No one understands power-sharing; voters claim that they like it in abstract but, at the same time, say that they don’t want politicians to compromise their beliefs, despite the fact that you can’t have one without the other. Within the coalition, the main issue is the tendency among some Tories to blame the Lib Dems for the failure of right-wing policies on Europe and immigration, but really, they’re just using them as a proxy for reality. The government hasn’t withdrawn from the EU or banned immigration because they’re unrealistic and unworkable ideas, not because of the Lib Dems. At the same time, there is fear among hardcore Conservatives that Cameron is using the Lib Dems for cover as well. They worry that he uses compromise within the coalition as a pretext to get away with advancing the centrist, relatively liberal policies that he actually believes in. Clegg and Cameron’s inner circles are quite close in terms of policy, which is creating a lot of suspicion on the fringes.

Whatever happened to Cameron’s Big Society?

I think that the wisdom of crowds showed through here; everyone sensed that something just wasn’t quite right with the Big Society, that the idea of using charities and volunteers to take over public services just didn’t quite add up. What was missing was that the entire programme depended on privatisation to work, which Cameron wasn’t brave enough to admit. Now we’re seeing a backlash as the privatisation elements of reform to everything from the NHS to forests come to light, which Cameron spent more time trying to hide than to justify. Ultimately, no one believed that ‘society’ would take over government business, because it simply wasn’t true. The Liberal Democrats have probably lost their core vote. How are they planning to survive the next election? The Lib Dems did well as a rallying point for protest votes for a while, and although they have lost the student and eco-pacifist voting blocks, they want to believe that the coalition has given the party a chance to prove that they are more than just a protest party. Party insiders say that if the economy recovers it will prove that they are competent in government, but nicer than the Conservatives. They argue that softer, liberal Tory voters, who don’t hold particularly conservative values but don’t trust Labour’s economics, really belong with the Lib Dems, but are afraid of wasting their votes. The Lib Dems hope to draw in at the next election by proving in government that they can actually run a country. Whether they manage to do so will determine whether the party can make it through the next general election.

The Liberal Democrats have probably lost their core vote. How are they planning to survive the next election?

 The Lib Dems did well as a rallying point for protest votes for a while, and although they have lost the student and eco-pacifist voting blocks, they want to believe that the coalition has given the party a chance to prove that they are more than just a protest party. Party insiders say that if the economy recovers it will prove that they are competent in government, but nicer than the Conservatives. They argue that softer, liberal Tory voters, who don’t hold particularly conservative values but don’t trust Labour’s economics, really belong with the Lib Dems, but are afraid of wasting their votes. The Lib Dems hope to draw in at the next election by proving in government that they can actually run a country. Whether they manage to do so will determine whether the party can make it through the next general election.nment business, because it simply wasn’t true. The Liberal Democrats have probably lost their core vote. How are they planning to survive the next election? The Lib Dems did well as a rallying point for protest votes for a while, and although they have lost the student and eco-pacifist voting blocks, they want to believe that the coalition has given the party a chance to prove that they are more than just a protest party. Party insiders say that if the economy recovers it will prove that they are competent in government, but nicer than the Conservatives. They argue that softer, liberal Tory voters, who don’t hold particularly conservative values but don’t trust Labour’s economics, really belong with the Lib Dems, but are afraid of wasting their votes. The Lib Dems hope to draw in at the next election by proving in government that they can actually run a country. Whether they manage to do so will determine whether the party can make it through the next general election.

According to Joseph Bast, the University of Oxford should be ‘ashamed’ for associating itself with ‘a bungling thief and scientific fraud’. Bast is President of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute; the man accused is Dr Peter Gleick, a renowned expert on water resources and climate change. Gleick posed as a Heartland board member to solicit evidence for claims that the Institute was preparing to ‘muddy the waters’ on climate science.

Gleick’s frustration with the anti-climate lobby is understandable. Particularly in the US, climatologists face an uphill struggle to persuade an apathetic public. But, the way Gleick gathered his ‘evidence’ has cast doubts on its authenticity: he has even been accused of forging one of the documents he obtained. Gleick’s actions were at best naïve, at worst stupid and illegal. Worse still, he contaminated the debate he was trying to advance. His actions have given what Heartland calls ‘limate realists’ real ammunition, and they have seized upon it. In doing so, a purely scientific debate has been dragged out of science and into politics, a move especially damaging because it is gleefully trumpeted by climate sceptics. The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker triumphantly gloated ‘supporters of the Cause will stop at nothing.’ What do we expect the average reader to infer? That climate scientists are desperate, misbegotten swindlers. Gleick is grievously at fault for damaging the cause for, and debate over, climate science. He has destroyed the integrity of thousands of scientists at a stroke, and that is a heinous mistake to make.

However, there is an important second point. There is no evidence Gleick is a ‘scientific fraud’. Despite what Heartland might say, his scientific – and I stress the scientific – views are in good company. Just ask the Royal Society, the foremost organisation of British scientists. They know there’s no debate on the fundamentals of climate change. Gleick’s private decisions may have been stupid, but that does not mean his professional work – peer-reviewed and examined by the rest of the scientific community – is also in doubt.

Bast claimed that ‘Linus Pauling and Edwin Hubble must be spinning in their graves’, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps, instead, they’d recognise a man who has acted foolishly, but whose scientific work is part of the effort to understand the changes in our world like never before. Oxford is the university of Edmund Halley, one of the first scientists to study the world’s atmosphere. I’m sure that, like Hubble and Pauling, he’d know good science when he saw it.

So, let Gleick come to Oxford. Let him speak to students as the eminent scientist he remains. Perhaps at the same time he can give a brief lesson in the right and wrong ways of meeting your opponents.