I think I want to run for Mayor of London

So, I said, "what do you think?" Muriel, a bridge player of international class and easily the cleverest woman I know, lit a cigarette, exhaled thoughtfully and said: "Well, if you do decide to run for mayor, I'll vote for you."

It's a start and, by the way, that's mayor of London. At the back of my mind a niggling voice is whispering "traitor", but I shall ignore it because, to coin several phrases, the goalposts have moved, it's no longer a level playing-field and at the end of the day I must be true to myself.

Three years ago I was Red Ken's most ardent supporter. I went to his election campaign meetings in dreary halls off Euston Road and clapped enthusiastically when he told us how he was going to transform London. I wish I could remember the details of his exciting, new health, education and housing policies – my memory, alas, is no longer the oiled and purring machine it was – but I well remember the solemn pledge he made to me about transport.

Hold it right there, I hear you say, are you seriously telling us that Ken Livingstone personally promised something to you? Indeed, I am. It happened like this. The meeting began, the mayor presumptively addressed us, everyone clapped, the chairman asked "any questions?", 20 hands – including mine – shot up and, minutes before 9pm when the Pentonville Players were due to start rehearsing the Pirates of Penzance, the chairman pointed at me. "Mr Livingstone," I said, "is it true you're going to scrap all the jump-on, jump-off double-decker buses with conductors?" "Ah, you mean those wonderful, old-fashioned Routemasters?" replied Ken, his voice warm with the same nostalgia that Lord Lucan's probably has when someone mentions nannies. Ken said he loved Routemasters and not just because they were an intrinsic part of London's heritage, but because they were so efficient. Far from scrapping them, he was in the process of ordering new ones.

How we clapped. As we made way for the Pentonville pirates, people came up to me and said "Well done" and "Good for you" as if, merely by posing the question, I was in some way responsible for the Routemasters' survival. Last week, I read that all of London's double-decker buses – with or without conductors – will soon be replaced by continental-style bendy buses, parvenus consisting of two single-decker coaches coupled together with a flexible hinge. So, tell me, who's the traitor now?

My ambition to occupy the new state-of-the-art mayoral parlour hard by Tower Bridge came to me in a flash last Tuesday as I sat in the back of a gridlocked taxi. If he had known it was going to be like this, said the driver who'd only been a cabbie for three weeks, he wouldn't have bothered spending four years learning The Knowledge. His name was Bunney, he said, and the first question the Carriage Office examiner had asked was the quickest route between Rabbit Row and Lettuce Street.

Was he working tomorrow, I asked, referring to the second Tube strike. Definitely not, he said, the previous Wednesday had been a nightmare. And, with that, the solution to the insoluble problem of getting around London came to me, given that a Tube strike is the perfect time to do it. Forget congestion charges for a day and ban every private vehicle in London, thereby forcing all drivers – yes even Prince Edward and Two-Jags Prescott – to use public transport. Apart from the 999 services, only bikes, buses and black cabs would be allowed on the roads, the last being made to slash their extortionate fares by half. Theoretically, buses would breeze from Kew to Kentish Town – no jams, no road rage, just millions of smiling people getting to work on time.

Then, if they don't, we'll know it is nothing to do with traffic. We'll know it's the basic service that's flawed. There simply aren't enough buses – and there definitely aren't enough qualified drivers. In the last month I've been on buses that have crashed into the backs of other buses, mounted pavements, failed to stop at ordinary and request stops, taken the wrong turning and run out of petrol. Having waited one hour and 20 minutes for a No 49 in Kensington, I asked the driver punching tickets "Why the delay?" He didn't reply. He was on his mobile discussing a penalty in the previous night's Millwall match.

It was the half-price cabs and my pledge to have a cat like Dick Whittington's that convinced Muriel. As I said, it's a start.