City Hall published a " cultural audit" this week, yet another Ken Livingstone production proving that London under youknowwho is the envy of the world. It was enough to bring us out in a cold sweat.

Paris may have a humiliating 20.2 million visitors to its top five museums, compared with London's soaraway 20.4 million but I bet that if the mayor of the French city were unwise enough to produce a similar collection of boasts, it would at least be literate.

London, Mr Livingstone's document informed me, is a "full-service world city", experiencing a "comet-like resurgence as the latest world financial supernova". Comets are not resurgent, Ken. They blaze briefly across the sky before disappearing again. And does the Mayor actually know what a supernova is? It's a star that suffers a catastrophic explosion, briefly brighter than the sun but creating radiation that lasts thousands of years. On second thoughts ...

Since language and its expression on paper are fundaments of culture, it was depressing that an audit of the subject couldn't get the words right. But it fell down on the numbers, too.

The clue, I suppose, lies in the identity of the report's author: the London Development Agency, financial safari park for Lee Jasper and chums. The words "LDA" and "audit" do not sit happily in the same sentence. They carry sad overtones of police investigations, angry London Assembly hearings and ever-shifting Mayoral denials.

Sure enough, someone has been fiddling the figures again. The cultural audit's London numbers (of libraries, cinemas, bars and so on) are all for the entire GLA area, the inner city and suburbs, with 7.5 million people.

But the audit's Paris numbers are only for the city of Paris itself, about equivalent to our Travelcard zones 1 and 2, with two million people. To make Paris look a less cultured place than London, the LDA simply left out twothirds of the conurbation.

There were other suspicious statistics. Is 66 per cent of London really water and green space, compared with only five per cent of New York? What about the East River or that stretch of water that takes the Staten Island ferry 45 minutes to cross? But here's the fundamental point. To look at culture - or almost anything else - as a matter of numbers and a position in a global league table is moronic.

For some reason, the Mayor seems quite obsessed with the notion that London is the "Number One" city in the world. He never stops talking about it. But even if it were true (and it's almost certainly not), who cares? Isn't wanting to be top dog a bit of an imperial throwback?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it plays brilliantly with the focus groups. But I simply don't believe the average London voter spends his or her time comparing their city with New York.

What they compare their city to is London, or rather the London of a year, or five, or 30 years ago with the London of now. And the reason that Ken is missing a trick is that in most things, culture included, he concentrates on quantity. Most of us, by contrast, want him to concentrate on quality.

It's not just that people disbelieve the Mayor's constantly quoted magic numbers - crime down by this per cent, bus mileage up by that per cent, X thousand "starter units" delivered in the Thames Gateway. It's that they show a man taking the wrong approach.

There may indeed be a greater quantity of buses on the road, but the quality of bus travel for passengers has declined dramatically. And some of the most important things are difficult to express at all in numbers. Is an old pub where they know your name better than an All Bar One? Probably yes, depending on personal taste, but they count as the same number of bars in Ken's cultural audit.

Is it better to build 20 decent and generous affordable homes, which will last and whose tenants will be happy, than 25 mean and nasty ones, which will crumble and make them miserable? Again, probably yes, but the numbers approach says not.

In purely cultural terms, the most significant event of the week was not the LDA's silly report, but the open letter by Tracey Emin, Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread and others. They attacked Ken for "destroying" London through "corporate plunder of the most cynical kind", including a plan to bulldoze much of their own area, Shoreditch, for tower-block development. This battle is coming to a head: a key Shoreditchplanning application reaches the local council tonight.

Nothing is more obviously symbolic of Ken's obsession with quantity over quality, and his priapic fixation with size, than his towers (and yes, I know, everyone likes the Gherkin. So do I - but for every Gherkin there are three dozen lemons.)

Little, not even the cultural audit, is more symbolic of Ken's lack of understanding of London's real cultural needs than the Shoreditch towers scheme. Shoreditch, the home of what was a major artistic movement, unique to London and with real value to it, must be spoiled for the sake of something far less distinctive and important.

As more people work from home, the day of the big office tower may soon be over. And Ken's production-line architecture is already as out of date as his production-line politics. He wants to produce cheaper office space than the Chinese, just as his spiritual ancestors in various Sixties economic development corporations tried to produce cheaper textiles than the Chinese - and with equal futility...London's future is in quality, not mass-production.

One of the reasons we need artists is to act as the canaries in the coal-mine; to alert us to shifts in the atmosphere. People like Emin and Whiteread are almost the epitome of the modern cool London which Ken thought he owned. Their turning on him now might, just might, be another sign that Comet Livingstone is falling to earth.

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