"Not the candidate the party leader actually wanted"

Full marks for persistence to Steve Norris who has yet again put himself forward to be Tory Candidate for Mayor of London.

This latest effort is more than slightly undermined by his own comment less than two months ago (after David Cameron's botched attempt to get a joint candidacy with the Lib Dems in the shape of Greg Dyke):

"The unfortunate reality for whoever the Tories choose is that Ken will also know they are not the candidate the party leader actually wanted."

Note "for whoever the Tories choose", which obviously includes him - as he must have known when he wrote it.

Norris has already set out his vision for London over the last two elections and it would have been a disaster - abolition of the congestion charge; cuts to the bus subsidy; less investment in public transport; no extra resources for the Metropolitan Police Authority.

His opposition to the congestion charge shows his unwillingness to take tough decisions - and it means that if he was elected there would be no move to emissions charging for the zone, meaning no action against the gas guzzlers and 4x4s clogging up central London (showing the sharp difference between Cameron's "green" rhetoric and the reality of the Tory party in London - we've had similar locally in Hackney with obsessive defence of car use from opposition to controlled parking to trying to stop a 20mph zone around a school).