Why so quiet during the election campaign, Boris?

It's two years since Boris Johnson won the mayoralty and signalled, said the Conservatives, that they were back as an electoral force.
There's no reason to think there's been any significant falling off in that personal popularity which conveyed him to City Hall.
In this campaign you might have expected the Conservatives to trumpet his record and launch a bold manifesto for the capital, a vision of loveliness for the future.
But a week to go, and no such manifesto nor launch. Instead a list of promises, conveyed to the capital by email.
Why such reticence?
One theory could be that those pledges the Conservatives might like to make fall into three broad categories.
Either they are things that they cannot afford, or at least guarantee at this stage because they cannot be expected to 'write their budget at this time'.
Or they are things where they can't safely paint a miserable picture of decline because the mayor claims he is already dealing with those things successfully, using money from a Labour government.
Or they are things which involve presentational difficulties because of inconvenient positions adopted by that self-same convivial and free-speaking Conservative mayor.
Into the first camp falls Crossrail, of course, and the upgrade of the Tube. Arguably here too should be their proposal for a temporary moratorium on current plans to close a number of Accident and Emergency and maternity units in London. That is far from being a guarantee that no such closures will happen under them.
Into the second category come crime and housing. Boris Johnson claims he is presiding over a fall in crime - including the number of murders and in particular deaths of young people from knife attacks. It does not sit easily with the party's depiction of a broken society.
The mayor also claims that he is delivering a record number of new affordable homes which - if true - will in no small part be down to the extra hundreds of millions of pounds that the mayor has been put in command of specificially for housing since 2008.

And in the final group:
Opposition to Heathrow expansion, blurred by the mayor's enthusiasm for aviation and exploration of the idea of a new seagull-decimating airport in the Thames Estuary.
Annual cap on immigration, contrasting with Boris Johnson's pursuit of an amnesty for people living here illegally which is also supported by the Lib Dems.
The plan for elected police commissioners, heralding Boris Johnson as the 'model' just as he was deciding, due to workload, to remove himself as the head of London's existing police authority.
So perhaps it's logical that the Conservatives are foregoing the chance to make a song and dance about their vision for the capital.
Perhaps it explains too why the proven electoral winner that is Boris Johnson has not combined with the talented Shadow Minister for London Justine Greening to launch anything resembling a withering attack on Labour's record in the capital.
There may be more to lose than to gain.

I'm BBC London's political editor and presenter of the London section of the Politics Show. Here I'll be identifying the key talking points during the election campaign and trying to offer a reality check to the many promises that you'll hear up to polling day. Your thoughts welcome.
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