Election day is coming

Time to look through the booklet telling us all about the Mayoralty and the London Assembly, the two page spread each mayoral candidate gets to boost themselves, and the lists of candidates for Assembly seats (no promo spots for them, which seems a biti mean, for candidates and voters alike).

 Diamondgeezer's given a concise thumbnail sketch of the mayoral candidates, so all I'll remark on is the number of candidates vying for the "Stop the world, I want to get off" tendency. Apart from the increasingly fissiparous pressure groups within the Conservatives and the ex-UKIP/ex-Brexit/Nigel Farage fanclub ReformUK that the Tories are so afraid of, there are the "I've run a business, so how hard is it to run a city" candidates, the "Social Democratic Party" that looks nothing like the original SDP I joined in - can it have been? - 1981, and the latest incarnation of what we tactfully call the far right. We'll draw a veil over - no, let's not - the actor Laurence Fox, whose name appears in the booklet without any further details, because his team messed up their nomination forms. 

 What pretty well all of those have in common is opposition to the zone where people are charged to drive cars that emit too much muck, despite the repeated legal judgements against the UK for missing international commitments on reducing air pollution - and more urgently, the death of a child from severe asthma brought on by the traffic pollution where she lived. Oh, and despite a £120 million scrappage fund to help people swap older polluting vehicles for newer, cleaner ones. 

 For the Assembly (basically a relatively small scrutiny committee), there's also the Heritage Party - yet another split-off from Reform. Elsewhere on the spectrum are the Communist Party ,(yes, there still is one), the Christian People's Alliance, and the perhaps over-hopeful RejoinEU. The Conservative candidate for Brent and Harrow might need to review the chances of his name being on everyone's lips in future, or at least of wear and tear on typesetters' nerves - Stefan Bucovineanul-Voliseniuc.