Poll suggests the mayor of London would increase support for his party if he were Tory leader

He may have been caught looking distinctly uncomfortable hanging from a zip-wire after getting stuck on Wednesday, but Boris Johnson’s star is firmly in the ascendancy, with a new poll suggesting Labour’s current lead over the Conservatives would be slashed if he were party leader.

A YouGov survey for the Sun reveals that 34% of people would vote for a Cameron-led Tory party, while 40% would vote for Labour under Ed Miliband’s leadership. If the current mayor of London were party leader, on the other hand, support for the Tories would rise to 37%, while Labour’s would fall to 38%. The poll shows the Labour party (43%) enjoying a lead of 11 percentage points over the Conservatives (32%), with the Liberal Democrats on 10%.

The YouGov poll findings were published just days after a separate poll by ConservativeHome showed Johnson is the early favourite among grassroots Tories to succeed Cameron as leader.

The poll of 1,419 Conservative activists showed 32% back Johnson, who is eight points ahead of his nearest rival, former leader William Hague (24%), with the education secretary, Michael Gove, on 19%. David Davis was on 10%, with George Osborne, the chancellor, languishing in eighth place on just 2%.

The polling comes as Johnson enjoys a high media profile during the Olympic Games as principal cheerleader for London 2012. A brief speech by the mayor to rally a mass crowd in Hyde Park, who had come to see the last leg of the torch relay on the eve of the Olympic opening ceremony last Thursday, was interrupted by chants of “Boris, Boris”.

Further photo opportunities presented themselves when he triggered his own version of the Mexican wave while attending a beach volleyball event in Horse Guards Parade. Even dangling awkwardly over Victoria Park in east London after getting temporarily stuck midway on his zip-wire ride did nothing to damage the brand, prompting Cameron to quip that only Johnson could get away with what would have proved a PR disaster for almost anyone else.

Cameron said: “If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zip-wire it would be a disaster. For Boris, it’s an absolute triumph.”

But not all the headlines have been good for Johnson. He was accused of “appalling judgment” after it emerged he had invited Rupert Murdoch as his personal guest to watch Rebecca Adlington defend her 800 m swimming gold at the 2012 Olympics on Friday.

Political opponents said it was inappropriate for Johnson, who as mayor has oversight of Scotland Yard, to invite the News International proprietor while a Metropolitan police investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal involving the company is still under way.

The row was stoked on Thursday when Murdoch was moved to tweet: “London in best shape ever. All overboard about the Olympics, brilliantly organised by Zeb [sic] Coe and Boris Johnson.”

Former Labour minister Lord Prescott wasted little time tweeting back: “@rupertmurdoch Why are you accepting Olympic hospitality from a mayor in charge of the police who are investigating your newspapers?”

Poll suggests the mayor of London would increase support for his party if he were Tory leader

He may have been caught looking distinctly uncomfortable hanging from a zip-wire after getting stuck on Wednesday, but Boris Johnson’s star is firmly in the ascendancy, with a new poll suggesting Labour’s current lead over the Conservatives would be slashed if he were party leader.

A YouGov survey for the Sun reveals that 34% of people would vote for a Cameron-led Tory party, while 40% would vote for Labour under Ed Miliband’s leadership. If the current mayor of London were party leader, on the other hand, support for the Tories would rise to 37%, while Labour’s would fall to 38%. The poll shows the Labour party (43%) enjoying a lead of 11 percentage points over the Conservatives (32%), with the Liberal Democrats on 10%.

The YouGov poll findings were published just days after a separate poll by ConservativeHome showed Johnson is the early favourite among grassroots Tories to succeed Cameron as leader.

The poll of 1,419 Conservative activists showed 32% back Johnson, who is eight points ahead of his nearest rival, former leader William Hague (24%), with the education secretary, Michael Gove, on 19%. David Davis was on 10%, with George Osborne, the chancellor, languishing in eighth place on just 2%.

The polling comes as Johnson enjoys a high media profile during the Olympic Games as principal cheerleader for London 2012. A brief speech by the mayor to rally a mass crowd in Hyde Park, who had come to see the last leg of the torch relay on the eve of the Olympic opening ceremony last Thursday, was interrupted by chants of “Boris, Boris”.

Further photo opportunities presented themselves when he triggered his own version of the Mexican wave while attending a beach volleyball event in Horse Guards Parade. Even dangling awkwardly over Victoria Park in east London after getting temporarily stuck midway on his zip-wire ride did nothing to damage the brand, prompting Cameron to quip that only Johnson could get away with what would have proved a PR disaster for almost anyone else.

Cameron said: “If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zip-wire it would be a disaster. For Boris, it’s an absolute triumph.”

But not all the headlines have been good for Johnson. He was accused of “appalling judgment” after it emerged he had invited Rupert Murdoch as his personal guest to watch Rebecca Adlington defend her 800 m swimming gold at the 2012 Olympics on Friday.

Political opponents said it was inappropriate for Johnson, who as mayor has oversight of Scotland Yard, to invite the News International proprietor while a Metropolitan police investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal involving the company is still under way.

The row was stoked on Thursday when Murdoch was moved to tweet: “London in best shape ever. All overboard about the Olympics, brilliantly organised by Zeb [sic] Coe and Boris Johnson.”

Former Labour minister Lord Prescott wasted little time tweeting back: “@rupertmurdoch Why are you accepting Olympic hospitality from a mayor in charge of the police who are investigating your newspapers?”

Britain’s prolific Olympian talks almost as well as he cycles, making us love him all the more

Bradley Wiggins is unique in British sporting history in that, every time he opens his mouth, you like him more. He is so good at cycling that it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t want to talk. But sometimes I think that he’s so good at talking, it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t win all the cycling. Already, his sideburns have taken on a talismanic status of their own, so that people stick them on as a charm for other sporting events, a rabbit’s foot made of beard. He’s so great, in short, that the last thing he would want is for you to forget about Chris Froome. Yet there it is.

Froome arrived at the finish in his suit, looking like a flying seal; he was, for a time, in first place; the commentator had been yelling for ages about how he was scorching and sizzling and burning, a constellation of metaphors that all seemed to come from a barbecue. Yet there it was, his bronze totally snuck up on the breath-baited crowd. It was like waiting for New Year’s Eve – no, it was like waiting for your GCSE results, only to find – no, sod it, there is no working analogy. It was what it was: the nation waited for its pride, its hairy pearl, to make medal history for a British athlete, and then found there was even more to celebrate. Nobody stole anybody’s thunder. Joy is a limitless resource, a use it or lose it muscle. The more you cheer, the happier you feel.

Sorry, before we get to all (both) the medals, raining down like (two, heavy) sploshes of medal, there was the zippy matter of this race.

Look, I’m sure they’ve given it a lot of thought, but I have a few quibbles with the way time trials are run. I get that there is a fairness issue when they all start at the same time, and it involves a lot of wind-based strategising, but frankly, when they all start separately, there’s no sense of scale. It’s like taking a picture of a baby bat without a pound coin next to it. You can’t tell how small it is, and you can’t tell how fast they’re going. The only comparative judgment you can make is that none of their thighs are as big as Chris Hoy’s (they don’t need the big thighs. You only need them if you’re planning to cycle sideways up a vertical slope. If they’d had to devise Spiderman without his webbing function, they would have given him Hoy’s thighs, though good luck getting your crime-fighting onesie over those, Spider).

Sorry, off the thighs, eyes on the road: many skinny thighs and skinnier arms, and the shiny, duck egg blue of Kazakhstan, that makes Vinokourov look like one of the air hostesses out of Fifth Element.

It’s also a little bit insensitive, if you ask me, making the least successful ones start first, so that they have that giddy illusion of arriving first, only to remember that it’s because they left first. They’re probably used to it.

From the crowd’s perspective, none of this mattered. It didn’t matter that the spectator experience was watching 30 odd brightly coloured shapes whizz past, then spending the next 47 minutes wondering what was happening in Esher. If this in itself were enough to stimulate the human mind, we would never have had to invent language, we could have just lain about, gazing at birds.

But there is too much thrill in the air to worry about the view or the narrative – and nobody had to wonder who was winning because, obviously, Bradley Wiggins was. “The great thing about cycling”, Wiggins said afterwards (brace yourself, he is about to become more likeable still) “is that anyone can watch it. We all know about the Olympic ticketing – inside here, it can all become a bit of a prawn sandwich fest. Ultimately, all the real fans are outside the gates.”

Chris Froome is a more taciturn creature, with a complexion a little bit like Wayne Rooney. The race over, he sat in his bronze throne looking like his hamstrings hurt (they did hurt). Bradley Wiggins sat in his gold throne looking sardonic (in truth, all the thrones were gold), and the German rider Tony Martin sat on the other side with his silver. They looked like they were just about to enter a three-way civil partnership organised by Posh and Becks’s wedding planner. This throne business is between Hampton Court and its conscience.

Just when people had started to talk about whether or not London had the lesser-spotted home disadvantage, the purpose of raw enthusiasm suddenly showed itself. The British cyclists, while not gushers themselves, appear to quite like it. “It was really something special, just enormous, the support,” Froome said. “It’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever experience again”. Wiggins said the same, “coming back round the roundabout in Kingston, I’m never going to experience anything like that in my entire career. It’s topped off.” I guess they’re used to this in France, but I find it droll to imagine anything momentous or life-affirming happening on a roundabout.

In a bid to articulate the gladness, people were instantly talking about making Bradley Wiggins a Sir, or Sports Personality of the Year – both of which accolades sounded significantly less of a big deal than everything he’s already won, like gifting someone the keys to Swanage because they’d won a Nobel Prize. It is well-known that he’s not interested in that kind of thing – “I don’t think I’d ever use it, I’d probably just keep it in a drawer,” he said of a prospective knighthood, when someone from the Telegraph brought it up. But if baubles and gongs seem necessary but insufficient, what else could a crowd do, to express an adulation a bit more complicated than jingoistic jubilance – we know you are not just superman, the crowd inside and out of the prawn-sandwich-zone said, with their eyes. We know you are also a Good Bloke, and how rare it is for supermen even to start off as Good Blokes, let alone stay that way. Well, there’s not much you can do, you can’t throw your pants at him, he wouldn’t like it. So it was settled that we would all yell. When he walked along, when he got his medal, when we alighted the podium, when he gave a dignitary a friendly pat, when he stood up, when he sat down, we yelled in slightly off-putting jubilation. He drinks vodka and tonic, by the way, in his downtime – if you are thinking of toasting the man in a way that he’d appreciate.

For some Olympians, the media attention is just too much – even if they’ve grown up with it. The Daily Telegraph reports that Zara Phillips has been too busy dealing with the media to speak to her grandmother, the Queen, since her silver medal win in the eventing on Tuesday. Asked if she had received any message from the monarch, she told BBC Breakfast: “No not yet, I haven’t had time with all this media.” We love you too, Zara.

British cyclist uses the winners’ platform to speak out for equality for sportswomen, an issue we should have tackled long ago

Life is full of surprises and, for non-sporting me at least, one of this week’s has been the sound of Lizzie Armitstead using the platform provided by her Olympic silver medal in Sunday’s thrilling women’s road race to complain about “overwhelming sexism” that persists in sport. Gosh, I didn’t think it was still allowed.

Rapidly emerging evidence of sponsorship and facilities confirm that British women may well outshine the men despite meagre support, not because of it. Just look at the money poured into men’s cycling – Team Sky won the Tour de France this month – and compare that with the training facilities, cash and media coverage afforded to their female colleagues, Armitstead suggested after her dramatic tussle with the Dutch cyclist Marianne Vos.

It not just a problem in Britain. Times columnist Rachel Sylvester has a terrific piece (subscribers only) on how Japanese women footballers and the Australian women’s basketball team had to travel to London in economy seats while the lads were in the business section.

As in other fields of human endeavour, business, politics and academia, the situation is patchy, quirky even. All those south Asian women prime ministers, yet none in the uber-feminist US. And we should acknowledge that the Saudis have finally allowed two women to compete in London and that Tahmina Kohistani will run for Afghanistan in the 100 metres, albeit in a headscarf and long sleeves.

All the same, I didn’t have more than a vague inkling, did you? Perhaps we should have done. There was a row over the absence of a woman on the shortlist for BBC Sports Personality of the Year. England’s women cricketers often do very well, but usually at the tail-end of the TV news. Ditto women’s football. It’s all a bit of a larf, isn’t it? Well, no, it isn’t, not even the women’s beach volleyball, which I hope to catch in Whitehall later this week.

Armitstead admitted that she’d been tempted to raise the issue when being introduced to Pat McQuaid, the bloke who presides over the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), but “didn’t want to come across as negative and moaning” – a fear that has not always inhibited good sisters with a lot less grounds for complaint than women cyclists seem to have.

As soon as you start to look, of course, it’s all there. Tanni Grey-Thompson, the Paraolympic champion, confined to a wheelchair by spina bifida, wrote an official report last year – here’s a summary – which revealed that 0.5% of sponsorship in this country went to elite women’s sports in an 18-month period of 2010-11. Men’s sport gets 61%, team sports the rest.

Ministers wrung their hands, as ministers do, and the report claimed some signs of progress. It’s a problem of media interest as well as sponsorship, though they reinforce each other. It’s a wider problem in the sense that report after report confirms that 80% of British women and girls don’t get enough exercise through sport. It’s bad for them and bad for Danny Boyle’s saintly NHS.

Why is this still happening? Women won a lot of strategic battles in the 20th century, as Boyle’s pageant also acknowledged, more than I sometimes feel they realise. They live longer too but, like the rest of humankind in any negotiation, take their pluses for granted and concentrate their attention on the bits they still haven’t achieved. A 2% share of mainstream media coverage for women’s sport is one of them.

Physical strength must be part of the explanation, except in sports that don’t rely on it. Men are generally bigger and stronger, their superior sporting achievements reflect that, so when a 16-year-old Chinese girl outperforms a 27-year-old American in the Olympic pool – I name no names – a controversy rapidly emerges suggesting she “must” have been using banned substances. True or false? We’ll find out in due course, but it illustrates the problem.

Once you start to look, the internet is littered with tentative debates on it. Here’s one, here’s another. Here’s a bit of encouragement for more media coverage from the Australian government, headed by Welsh-born Julia Gillard, I seem to recall. And here’s an upcoming conference on the issue.

One theory floated is that being sporty makes women feel less feminine. It doesn’t square with what we hear about goings-on in successive Olympic villages, but if people feel it then it must be an inhibition to other potential sports women. Today’s Guardian carries a brilliant series of photos of Olympic women weightlifters. It’s a study in concentrated effort, but they’re wonderful faces.

Ah, faces. Last year the organisers of Wimbledon admitted that “good looks are a factor” in deciding who gets to play on which court. The Mail’s sports writer Laura Williamson examines the factor here and her newspaper’s website spells it out with the brutally illustrated clarity that has helped make it the world’s No 1 news website. Yes, it’s the women’s looks we’re talking about here, not Andy Murray’s winning smile.

So, these are the most gender-equal games, we are assured, but there’s still a way to go. Baroness Grey-Thompson, whom you may have seen reporting for the BBC from outside the road race finish on The Mall this week, says she suffers anti-disability abuse online. And the Mail’s Williamson recalls that BBC2 actually showed last year’s quarter final match between England and France in the women’s World Cup, the event which Japanese women won by unexpectedly beating the US. They still travelled economy to London last week. Oh and incidentally, England’s women lost their game with France on the penalty shoot-out. So some things are equal already.

Move comes after controversy over ticketing process for London 2012 Games and anger at unfilled seats at venues

The International Olympic Committee is to review the way it handles ticketing after calls for it to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a centralised system that could be used for every Games.

Amid complaints about the ticketing process and concern over empty seats, the chairman of the British Olympic Association, Lord Moynihan, has called for the IOC to take control of selling tickets.

“This is such a major and complex issue. Moving forward, I hope this is an issue the IOC will take a lead on. It is a major ask to get any organising committee to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a ticketing operation that is highly complex from a clean sheet of paper,” he said.

“This is an opportunity for the IOC to put in place a ticketing system that can stay in place for each Games. It is so important to get this right. I hope this is recognised by the IOC as something they should take on, then build on that platform from Games to Games.”

The IOC has said it will conduct an audit of its ticketing system amid allegations that national Olympic committees have been breaking its rules by reselling their allocation.

Moynihan called for a ticketing system that followed the model set by the centralised Olympic news and statistics service that is improved and adapted for every Games.

The London 2012 organising committee said on Tuesday that it had clawed back a further 3,800 tickets overnight across 30 sessions and 15 sports to sell to the public online, most of which had been snapped up immediately.

There are about 80,000 non-football tickets on sale through the Locog website, or set to go on to the market, as last-minute contingency tickets are released.

Locog is negotiating daily with international federations to reclaim some of those seats for the public amid widespread anger about the pockets of empty seats that have been reserved for the “Olympic family”.

After complaints that the reclaimed seats were being drip-fed randomly on to the website, forcing prospective buyers to check regularly for updates, Locog said it was looking to standardise the process so tickets were released at the same time.

It is also introducing a “print-at-home” option for tickets to the gymnastics at North Greenwich Arena and the volleyball at Earls Court, so buyers will not have to collect their tickets in person.

But it has refused to reconsider its stance on only selling the reclaimed tickets online, despite pleas from overseas visitors to be allowed to buy from box offices at venues.

Locog said figures showed venues had been filled to about 90% of capacity since the Games began. Overall attendance on Saturday was 856,000, including an estimated 500,000 watching the men’s cycling road race, which comprised 86% of capacity.

On Sunday, the total was 900,000, including 300,000 on the streets of London and Surrey watching Lizzie Armitstead take silver in the women’s road race, equalling 92% of capacity. On Monday, when there were no free public events or football matches being played, the total was 370,000 – 88% of capacity.

Moynihan said it was “time to stop the blame game” over the unfilled seats in sold out venues. “We remain strongly of the position that we want every seat filled, from the point of view of the team and the wider British public,” he added.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt confirms all medal winners face ‘the most rigorous anti-doping procedures in place for any Olympics’

Plymouth college’s 5am starts and gruelling work schedule steer Ruta Meilutyte, 15, to victory in 100m breaststroke

As the Lithuanian swimmer Ruta Meilutyte touched the wall of the Aquatic Centre in the Olympic Park on Monday night a huge cheer went up a couple of hundred miles away in Plymouth College‘s main conference room.

Fellow members of the school’s elite swimming programme had been given a few precious hours away from the pool to see how 15-year-old Meilutyte would fare in her first Olympic final.

“It was just wonderful,” said Stephi Baker, a spokeswoman for the private school that is quickly gaining a reputation as a key centre for elite athletes across a range of sports. “We are extremely proud of her winning a gold and it is so exciting to see one of our pupils at the Olympics.”

Earlier Tom Daley, the British diver and another Plymouth College pupil, had come a disappointing fourth in the synchronised 10m platform diving, and later this week two other swimmers from the school – 15-year-old Jamila Lunkuse from Uganda and 17-year-old Jade Howard from Zambia – will take part in the London Games.

Baker said there was a growing sense of excitement among pupils and teachers about the teenagers’ prospects. “Everyone is looking forward to the other events that our swimmers and Tom are involved in and I think it is safe to say we will be watching.”

A decade ago the idea of the college producing a string of Olympic champions seemed fanciful. It was a successful private school dating to 1877 but, unlike some other private schools, it did not have a particular reputation for producing elite athletes.

According to Baker, that all changed in 2000 when a decision was taken to build a 25m pool at the school. The local swimming club was invited to use the facility as its base, and within a couple of years the school had set up an elite swimming programme.

Fast forward 12 years and the school has more than 60 elite athletes from 27 countries and runs academies in modern pentathlon and fencing, rugby and basketball as well as successful programmes in sailing and squash.

The standard fee for boarding is £24,000 but for those who are good enough there are scholarships. “We offer these pupils the whole package,” said Baker. “It is about having the top sports coaches in each discipline and it is also about having the academic education that you get here. On top of that it is about looking after the wellbeing side of things for our pupils and the mentoring that brings together both schoolwork and sport.”

But it is the 35 members of the school’s elite swimming programme, who are housed in a separate dormitory, that are doing most to secure the school’s burgeoning reputation for sporting excellence.

For this group, who range in age from 12 to 18 and come from 15 countries, the day starts just after 5am. Half an hour later they are ploughing their way up the school’s pool for the first of hundreds of lengths each day. There is just time for breakfast before they need to be at their desk at 8.50am for the start of the school day. That finishes at 3.30pm when it is either back to the pool or off to the gym, depending on the day and their individual programmes. After another couple of hours’ work there is an evening meal at 6pm and before the youngsters can collapse into bed they must complete their homework.

“It is certainly a busy day,” said Baker. “But we make sure they are properly looked after, and putting them together in a separate block means they are able to support each other. They get properly tailored nutrition and there is a physio room down there. We are also very careful to look after the mental side too so there is a mentoring programme and we have lots of people coming in to talk to them about how to deal with things like stress.”

The sporting standards that many of the young athletes reach mean that schoolwork is regularly interrupted with international competitions, so the academic programme is tailored to individual pupils’ needs, with e-learning and long-distance tutoring available to ensure they do not fall behind.

As the elite swimming programme began to gain an international reputation the school set up academies in other sports and has 60 elite athletes – and a formidable reputation among rival schools. “It is fair to say that when it comes to county cups and things we tend to clean up … we are pretty strong across the board,” said Baker.

But this week, as Daley tries again for a diving medal and Lunkuse and Howard take to the pool, the school’s attention will, for once, not be on training, eating and sleeping.

“I think it is fair to say the whole place will be glued to the television for the next few days. There is just such a sense of excitement and pride that comes from thinking it is my friends and fellow pupils who are at the Olympics and competing for gold medals.”

Plymouth College timetable for young swimmers

05:00 Wake up

05:30 In the pool

08:30 Breakfast

08:50 School starts

15:30 School ends

15:30-18:00 Training either in the pool or at the gym

18:00 Evening meal

19:00-21:00 Homework in the dormitory

21:30-22:00 Bedtime

Seats continue to remain unallocated at London 2012 venues on days three and four of the Games

Olympic officials to meet every evening to agree which unused tickets can be sold to public in effort to defuse empty seats row

London 2012 Olympic organisers have announced that batches of tickets for the next day’s events will go on sale every evening in an effort to defuse the row over empty seats.

Locog said it had clawed back a further 3,800 tickets, across 30 sessions and 15 sports, from international federations to put on sale overnight. Almost all of them had gone by the morning.

The move follows widespread criticism from ticketless fans after TV pictures showed the world’s top swimmers and gymnasts competing in front of partially full arenas. Members of the armed forces have been drafted in to fill seats in several events.

Under the plans Locog, the International Olympic Committee and the sporting federations will meet each evening to agree which blocks of tickets can go back on sale that night. Tickets could appear on the London 2012 ticketing website after midnight for sessions starting the next morning.

Locog said that by selling the tickets only online it would allow people across the country to have a chance to purchase seats. But with such tight timeframes the system appears to favour people who live close to the venues.

Many people have complained that they cannot complete the transaction on the website even when tickets appear to be available.

On Monday Locog said it had sold 600 tickets for gymnastics sessions, 700 for beach volleyball and more than 100 for swimming.

In a further move, the number of children who are in the Olympic Park ready to take up empty seats in venues will be increased from 150 to as many as 400.

Did you manage to get any tickets in the resell? How long did it take you and what events did you get tickets for? Tell us about your experience of attempting to get resell tickets on the Locog website in the comments section.