From copper to candidate

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As I walk into the Lib Dems’ HQ on Cowley Street, SW1, there is a group of people having a meeting in reception. It includes a wheelchair-bound woman and an Asian man.

The male receptionist, meanwhile, is too charming to be heterosexual. Indeed, he would set anyone’s gaydar pinging at 50 paces.

It is a scene certain to warm the cockles of any liberal-minded soul and appropriately it is the Lib Dems who have ­become the first of the major parties to elect an openly gay candidate to stand for high ­office in this country.

The party’s candidate to be Mayor of London is, of course, the former top cop Brian ­Paddick. As the man who was once in charge of policing Brixton’s appropriately named front line, what he doesn’t know about fighting crime isn’t worth knowing, and he has radical ideas about transport too.

Plenty of scope for a long chat about policy matters then. But it’s his misfortune that our interview takes place on the day the papers are full of the news that his party leader Nick Clegg has admitted to sleeping with “no more than 30” women in an interview with Piers Morgan in GQ.

In the circumstances it would be unprofessional of me not to ask about his own record in the sack.

So, Brian, how many people have you slept with?

“Mind your own business,” he says brusquely, but – realising that it might be cooler to come back with something witty – he adds: “A lot less women than Nick Clegg.”

These days Paddick lives with his long-term partner in a £325,000 apartment in Vauxhall and their circle of friends includes David ­Furnish and his partner Sir Elton John.

Indeed, Furnish and Elton are partly responsible for Paddick’s decision to stand for Mayor.

“I’ve known David Furnish for a long time,” he says, “and, when there was a report in a newspaper last summer that I might be standing for Mayor, I got a text from David saying: ‘Please run for Mayor, we’ll support you’.”

The couple went on to host a celebrity-studded fund-raising dinner at the end of ­January, which was attended by the likes of David Walliams and Tamara Mellon. So, as a former copper, what would he do about London’s crime problems?

“I would put myself ­forward to be chairman of the Metropolitan Police ­Authority and set priorities,” he says. “My plan is to concentrate on those crimes that are most important to local people, as I did in Lambeth.

“That way you can win the trust and confidence of local people and, once they realise the police are on their side, they will help the police.

“Clearly, gun and knife crime is a priority in an ­increasing number of areas in the capital.

“It used to be seen as being confined to run-down estates but then there was a murder at a bus stop in Upper Street in the middle of the ­afternoon just before Christmas and people suddenly ­started to realise that this issue affected a lot of Londoners.

“Hundreds of law-abiding people know who these ­people are but don’t trust the police enough to tell them.

“If they believed the police were on their side we would see a downward spiral in this type of crime.

“It’s a bit like the person whisked off to hospital with a heart attack.

“The first thing to do is to keep them alive, you can deal with the diet and exercise after. On the question of gangs, first you have to get the guns and knives off the street."

The answer, he says, is to carry out targeted stop and search operations. Not the sort of ­indiscriminate shakedowns at the core of Operation Swamp that led to the Brixton riots of 1981 but searches based on good intelligence.

“When someone phones up you need to get an accurate description,” he says.

“What colour were their trainers? What colour were their trousers? Robbers will often swap jackets after a theft but not trainers for ­hygiene reasons and not trousers because it’s simply too embarrassing.

“Did they have tattoos? Nose rings? Eyebrow piercings? That way you get a description saying the suspect was wearing red trainers, white trousers, a piercing in their right eyebrow and two rings through their left ear, instead of one saying he was an 18-year-old black youth with a hooded top, which applies to 39 per cent of youths in the area. I put this all down in a 12-page report four years ago and it just got thrown in the bin.

“These days you’re four times more likely to be stopped and searched if you’re black – and it’s getting worse – and two times more likely to be stopped and searched if you’re Asian – and it’s getting worse.”

He may have spent 30 years as a police officer but Paddick has views on every aspect of the Mayor’s responsibilities, whether it’s the congestion charge or the provision of free Wi-Fi for all (see the Key Policies box).

One of his most radical proposals is to ­reform the Tube, ­under which the lines would be run by a ­private operator reporting to TfL on the same basis as bus routes, the DLR and the North London line, are run.

Under Paddick’s plan, TfL would set the fares and service standards and take all ticket receipts, and the contractor would be paid a fee to deliver the service.

“Running the Tube on a concession model basis would deliver better service and value for money,” he says. “I’m not bound by political ideology, I’m committed to service. I don’t care who delivers it. Ken still believes in the workers owning the means of production.”

Not that the present Mayor is the only opponent in his sights. He has no great love for Boris Johnson either.

“When it comes to Ken and Boris, one’s a tragedy and one’s a comedy, so you’re ­between a rock and a hard place,” he says.

“I couldn’t vote for either. A lot of people are desperate to get rid of Ken without ­seriously considering the consequences of electing Boris as Mayor.

“Anybody can read scripts, as he has proved on Have I Got News For You, but when it comes to delivering public services and managing large teams of people, he readily admits that he has no experience in that area.”