I don't know how to say this nicely, so I will make it blunt and to the point.
Kensington and Chelsea council is acting like a complete idiot over this mayoral car business. Wake up, you lot, and send the Bentley back.
I feel genuinely let down by the hypocrisy of it. This is a council which is looking seriously at following the example of Richmond and applying the polluter pays principle to its parking charges, yet it has just bought a car that is not just in the highest polluting band, but up near the worst end of the scale.
Perhaps it is simply a clash of the old and the new - of traditional values v modern common sense. If so, then a few simple words of advice: buying a gas-guzzling Bentley for the mayor of your local authority does not add to a sense of civic pride.
Driving a highly polluting vehicle is nothing to be proud of these days, and every time the mayor gets out of it to shake a few hands, she or he might as well have "stuff the planet, I'm more important than that" tattooed on their forehead. Nor does buying a car that can cruise along at 160mph convey a sense of civic duty. Is it a civic duty to break the speed limit? What is the point of a car that can do more than 40mph in Kensington and Chelsea, given that the speed of average inner London traffic is less than half of that?
As the local mayor, you may feel you look more important in a Bentley as it chugs out its fumes in some west London traffic jam, but does your civic duty really involve adding to air pollution that already breaks European and national limits?
Of course, Kensington and Chelsea is not the only council that suffers from this misconception that you can't be important unless you have a big car. Redbridge council not only splashed out on a mayoral gas-guzzler earlier this year, but compounded the mistake by getting one for the deputy mayor as well.
I know I will get all the "politics of envy" accusations, but the reality is that the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, gets far more respect for joining the rest of us on the tube and bus than if he had a limousine. The same goes for the cycling mayors of various European cities, who all have more power than our symbolic mayors.
So please, all you mayors, and even some of you government ministers, drop the polluting, pointless, gas-guzzling status symbols.
