My post suggesting that, despite all the reasons for not doing so, there might perhaps be something to be said for voting for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, as some kind of vaccination against a future Conservative Government, attracted quite a lot of criticism in Lib Dem circles. Jo Christie-Smith, for example, made a good critique of this position on her blog (apologies to Jo that for some reason I don’t understand Wordpress won’t let me link to her blog, but if you put her name into Google, it comes up pretty quick!).

In fact I wasn’t firmly saying that I thought anti-Conservatives should necessarily vote for Johnson, just highlighting the dilemma – and for the record, my own second preference on Thursday went to Livingstone.

I remain firmly of the view that a Boris Johnson London mayoralty is bad news for London – my concern limited only by the fact that the Mayor of London’s powers are in fact pretty limited. Talk of the job being that of ‘running London’, while perhaps understandable, are very wide of the mark. Even of those aspects of running London which lie in the public sector’s hands, few lie with the Mayor – he has no influence at all on health, for example, almost none on schools, not much on the green agenda (despite Ken’s generally admirable efforts to expand its power in this area), very little on waste (despite Ken’s more unsuccessful efforts here too), and very little even such London bete noires as parking. Public transport, policing, some aspects of housing, and major planning issues are the only really important areas the Mayor has real control of. And even in these areas he has to find agreement with a multitude of government departments, local councils and various other bodies (even if you live here you may well never have heard of the Government Office for London or GOL, but it is not too far from the truth to say that this government quasi-department exists largely in order to prevent the Mayor and 33 Boroughs from doing things that central government doesn’t really want them to do).

On the question of whether a Boris Mayoralty is good for the greater Conservative cause or not, it is fairly clear that the Conservative hierarchy, if not quite sharing my views precisely on the merits or otherwise of Boris Johnson, did have some concern about how he might perform as Mayor, and indeed how he was already showing as the Conservative candidate. The role of Australian Conservative spinmeister Lynton Crosby in sorting out the Conservative Mayoral campaign, and specifically sitting on Johnson, has been fairly widely discussed.

Boris’s first few pronouncements since his election confirm that he has behind him a strong team who are determined to control what he says pretty closely. His acceptance speech bore the hallmarks of this pretty strongly (even if rather hilariously the final draft had evidently been done by someone who believed that the declaration would be on Thursday and not on Friday night). I read that his chosen message today (Sunday) is that ‘Boris pledges to unite London’. I find it very difficult to imagine that, left to his own devices, this is the kind of reaching out statemanslike message that Boris himself would have come up with.

There has been some coverage too of the team behind him, with talk of the man himself taking simply a “chairman’s role” as Mayor, rather than the main hands-on management role, and indications of various people, such as Nicholas Boles, being the “real Mayor of London”. (Boles is in fact a pretty strong candidate to do this role, not least because he is possibly the only senior Conservative who for several years was clear that he did actually want to be Mayor of London. His main handicap was that no-one had heard of him, so actually doing the job while Boris clowns around, could actually suit him pretty well – though it will be interesting to see how he combines it with being PPC for a fairly solid Conservative seat in Lincolnshire).

So will these figures in the dark negate the argument that Boris will make such a fool of himself as to deter people from voting for Cameron at the 2010 General Election?

To an extent, yes, I think they will. On the showing since Thursday, and in the last few weeks of the campaign, I imagine they will do the professional job of keeping the show on the road that Johnson himself is incapable of.

But there is a point beyond which the men in the backroom cannot protect the Mayor of London from himself. On his public performances he will be up there on his own on stage. He has generally done a good job recently of reading the script they’ve given him – but there comes a point when this dynamic and effervescent individual will rebel against being treated like a child by his staff, and insist on saying what he wants to say.

He should remember too that the approach of relying on a group of people around him to do the real job is too not without its drawbacks. It was, let us not forget, this very aspect of the Ken Livingstone, very much more his own Mayor than it looks as if Johnson will be, that more than anything else sank him. Boris relying on networks of people to deliver his agenda is surely at least as hazardous as Ken doing so.

I expect the Johnson Mayoralty to start on the present magisterial note – but the next General Election is probably two years away, and I simply do not believe that Boris Johnson will be able to last that long without in the end embarrassing his own party.