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So, having prevaricated until the 11th hour over whom I would cast my first preference for, I caved in, in the booth, and gave Ken my vote.
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.
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I am surprised Will Self has got it so wrong this time. Boris won handsomely on the popular vote because people simply want to see the whole of corrupt, decadent and incompetent New Labour out of office as quickly as possible.
- Mikko Takala, Drumnadrochit, Scotland
Hmmm, semi detached Londoners buying their their conservatories by mail order! That is the trouble, the lefties are such snobs they don't care about the poor kids being murdered. I live in the centre, and it is as congested as before Ken's extra taxes. Taxation For London is what we say.
- Kate G, London UK
Will Self you need to get out more the problem you think is only in central London spreads out far and wide. From the south of London to the north and east and west too parking is no easer or cheaper. The fares we pay to travel on buses that are full do not run as often as the buses in central London. The cattle trucks we board to come to work in the morning. Social nuisance crimes are rife with bands of kids wandering the streets at night cans of larger in hand and will to push anyone out of they way I feel ten times safer walking through Soho than through my own streets.
- Dave, Croydon
