Tom Peck’s Sketch: The three amigos’ state school experiment won’t result in another Tory Mayor of London

Zac Goldsmith quickly learned that the trouble with wheeling out the big guns is that it can make your own small gun look even smaller

Zac Goldsmith campaigning with the Prime Minister at a Richmond school (Getty)

They’d already tried the racist leaflets and that hadn't worked. Pitting Sikh and Hindu against Muslim in a mad mailshot war had only brought the odds on Sadiq Khan winning the London mayoralty down from 6/1 on to 10/1 on. Yes, Zac, Boris and Dave knew now they were going to have to get really dirty. And that meant - brace yourself - crossing the threshold of a state school.

Don’t worry. It was only Richmond, and there weren’t any pupils there. In fact there didn’t appear to be anyone there within a three mile radius.

It was your textbook political meta-event, ie one that exists only to be filmed and reported upon. The willing audience a few phone-calls away, called in as a backdrop for the TV cameras.

A turban front-middle, a west African headdress lower right, and somewhere toward the back an Arab man in jet black shades. Only a cynic would suggest the ethnic smorgasboard assembled behind the three white, middle-aged old Etonians hadn’t happened by accident. In any event, multicultural looks are nice, but the only truly indisposable quality is upper body strength. Those ‘Back Zac’ signs aren’t going to hold themselves aloft for fifteen minutes at a time. Ambitious intern, looking to get ahead in politics? Forget the tea, get going on the tricep curls.

Out the three amigos came, on to the platform, in the unsettlingly unoaked-panelled hall. The crowd whooped with joy. An outgoing Prime Minister, a serial opportunist who’s missed his moment and a soon-to-be failed mayoral candidate. These are the misfortunes opposition parties have been known to capitalise on when not preoccupied with Zionism in the Third Reich.

“He’s not in it for the power! He’s not in it for the glory,” Dave boomed, only slightly misquoting Meatloaf. What is he in it for? Certainly not to keep his dignity, that much is clear.

“He’s the right man with the right plan,” he went on, Boris occasionally barking support in unintelligible syllables, a custom more commonly practised by the warm up acts for evangelical preachers.

“You just need to know one fact about the Labour candidate!“ Dave went on. He’s going to lose? No. “He nominated Jeremy Corbyn and he doesn't regret it.” Indeed he did and, again, he’s 10 to 1 on at the bookies, so what does that tell you?

In front of his tough, hand picked crowd, the PM bravely battled on. “As I said when we did a rally 98 days ago, if you want to be lab rats in Labour’s experiment on London, then you go for the other guy.” That’s right. He did. The only difference is Zac was favourite back then. Erm, we've got a problem here Dr Dave. The rats aren’t responding to the drugs. Oh well. It's too late now. Better up the dose.

Zac Goldsmith listens to his mayoral rival during a recent debate (Getty)

Boris was up next, with his usual attack on the “Chateaneuf-du-Pape swilling Hugo Chavez venerating bendy bus fetishists” straight from Tuesday’s and last year’s Daily Telegraph. Earlier in the morning, Sadiq Khan had had a pop at Boris’s ‘bus design that doesn’t work.’

When they politicise bus design, who do you think wins? I’ll give you a clue: it’s not the taxpayer.

It should probably be recorded that Zac himself had a brief word next. The trouble with wheeling out the big guns, he quickly learned, is that it can make your own small gun look even smaller.

“I want to thank you,” he began. “The people who’ve spent the best part of a year flogging the streets.” Eh? Flogging them to who? The Russians? The Arabs? An admirable bit of honesty at last.

“This election will go right down to the wire,” he warned, and in the sense that no one will suspend it before the polling booths are due to close, it certainly will.

“What happens on Thursday won’t just decide the next four years, it will decide the next forty years,” he claimed, for reasons that make at least partial sense. Zac Goldsmith is a mere 41. If he makes to 81, there’s a chance people might have begun to respect him again.