Flashing the cash the Livingstone way

The Londoner is a 20-page newspaper pushed through three million letterboxes every month. It has attracted a reputation for being Ken Livingstone's personal propaganda sheet and is heavy on content about the Mayor's achievements. It once carried a large Venezuelan flag in recognition of the Mayor's friendship with that country's controversial president, Hugo Chavez.

The Londoner is said to be a freesheet: for Londoners it is anything but. It costs around £3 million a year to produce and distribute, of which more than £600,000 comes directly from the council tax precept paid by every household. The rest of its budget is said to come from advertisements, but since most of the ads are placed by Transport for London, the police and the fire service, Londoners pick up the bill for those, too, through the organisations' own budgets.

The Londoner is also sent to every Member of Parliament and every Member of the European Parliament, including those in Scotland and Wales, reinforcing the argument that the paper is merely a vehicle to raise Ken's political profile. There seemed to be a tacit admission of this when it was decided to suspend publication of the paper during the election campaign.

Over the moon

There was consternation in some quarters at City Hall last year when it was revealed that Ken was investing £12 million in a European scheme to launch a new satellite. Why are we blasting Londoners' money into space, some asked? The reason, it was thought, was that the satellite could be used at some point in the future to spy on motorists in a second-generation congestion charging scheme.

A lot of hot air

The Mayor cranked up his green agenda as the election neared and unveiled the new Low Emission Zone under which lorries and vans more than six years old have to pay £200 a day to enter Greater London. It was trumpeted as a move to improve air quality. But TfL was forced to admit existing European regulations would deliver most of the benefits claimed by Ken and the scheme would ultimately improve air quality by only one per cent. For this, Londoners have had to fork out £49 million to set up the zone and £10 million a year to operate it over the next eight years.

The £30 million tram to nowhere

The Mayor championed a scheme to introduce a tram service into central London from the west. Around £30 million was spent pushing it. Since 2002, £14.6 million has been spent on consultancy fees, £1 million on surveys and around £120,000 on advertising the public consultation in 2004. The rest went on staff costs and "overheads". The project has now been shelved.

Moronic expense

In 2001, Ken said only a "ghastly dehumanised moron" would scrap the Routemaster bus. Indeed, TfL went on to buy nearly 50 second-hand models to boost London's fleet, saying they were highly cost-effective. Then the Routemaster was scrapped in favour of a new fleet including the much-loathed bendy buses. The cost: £390 million. The buses also cost London an extra £50 million a year in extra fuel because, compared with the old Routemaster, the new buses are gas guzzlers.

Costly free insulation

Even by City Hall standards, this was a zany way to spend Londoners' money. Ken did a deal with British Gas to provide discount insulation packs for 30,000 homes. The scheme cost more than £1 million, mainly spent on advertising. This, say critics, was a thinly disguised effort to promote the Mayor's green credentials. The publicity cost more than the insulation; only 3,000 people took up the offer, at a cost of around £300,000.

Ken's foibles

Ex-Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq was paid £4,750 to sit next to Ken at a cycling promotion last year, incurring the dismay of her BBC bosses who thought she had compromised the corporation's impartiality. They know a political pitch when they see one.

More than £700,000 was spent on a junket to India for Ken and a retinue of advisers and press officers. Ken's foreign "embassies", in Brussels, Shanghai, Mumbai and Caracas, will cost close to £1 million in the current financial year. When Ken was criticised for inviting Muslim leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi to City Hall he commissioned a dossier defending the homophobic sheikh. It cost more than £4,000. Defending Ken over his Nazi jibe at an Evening Standard journalist cost rather more: £120,000 for the Mayor's appeal against suspension and £80,000 costs.

Ken's devil-may-care spending doesn't always run to six figures: a taxi from Blackpool to his Cricklewood home cost taxpayers a mere £260.