So farewell to Ken's cappuccino fiefdom

I was strongly ambivalent about Ken - I had fully intended to vote for Brian Paddick - but Livingstone had at least taken his office seriously, with the Oyster card, Congestion charge and challenge to the absurd farrago of the PPP on the Tube. But few in London's suburbs seem to have taken a similar view.

They didn't mind that making crass remarks is Boris Johnson's default setting. Indeed it's for precisely this reason that the usually disaffected but latently Tory voters out in the 'burbs were so heavily - and effectively - targeted by his strategists. The truth is: these suburbanites secretly like such divisive talk.

Johnson's campaign team also knew what Boris may himself realise: out there in the sticks, these semi-detached Londoners cleave more to the shires than they do to Soho; they think of themselves as second-home owners even if their only cottage is a conservatory they bought by mail order.

The Tories were able to play upon the fears of these "dwellers in the doughnut": their fears of crime, their fears of the numinous "other" in the city centre, their residual dislike of London's cosmopolitanism, and their sense that the last Mayor's congestion charge was a ghastly imposition of the Nanny State.

But I say to all of you out there in Carshalton or Epping: walk a mile in my shoes. It's us, here in the inner city, who are the winners and losers when it comes to car taxes, whether they be parking or driving charges - not you. It's us who are the victims of all the socalled "nuisance crimes" that the new Mayor hopes dramatically to reduce - not you. And it's us who live in a multicultural society, far more than you do.

Johnson says he will be a Mayor for all Londoners but I ask him, how is he going to surmount this paradox: he was elected by the suburbs to enact policies instead aimed squarely at improving the lives of those in the centre. How, when he was elected on the basis of anxieties, will he deal with realities?

And while he may be a genius, as his friend Charles Moore claimed on the radio at the weekend, I doubt he has what I always understood to be its true hallmark: the infinite capacity for taking pains. He can prove me wrong.