Green eyes on the big prize

Prev

• 
• 
• 

Next

View gallery

Sian Berry's finest hour  came in February when Mayor Ken Livingstone signed the scheme order that brought in the £25 "gas ­guzzler" charge at City Hall.

As director of the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s, Berry was more responsible than anyone for the measure getting this far. The legislation – which is ­being legally challenged by Porsche – remains one of the key points of difference between Livingstone and his two main mayoral rivals.

Not that she has a souvenir of the occasion.

"It was a very proud moment watching Ken sign and he offered me the pen he signed it with," she recalls. "But someone said, ‘no, that's mine and I want it back ­because it was a present'."

Now the former principal speaker of the Green Party is campaigning against Livingstone as the party's candidate for Mayor.

Of course, she has as much chance of taking City Hall as Fulham have of staying in the Premiership, but as No 4 on the Greens' list of ­Assembly candidates, she could win a seat in London's parliament.

But the 33-year-old might not be everyone's idea of the stereotypical Green politician. She brushes her hair before being photographed and sports stylish knee-high boots.

Berry is, however, the Cinderella of the contest. While Livingstone is paid £137,000-a-year as mayor, the Conservatives' Boris Johnson was on more than £400,000 until he resigned his newspaper column, and LibDem Brian Paddick has a lucrative book deal and a visiting fellowship at a business school to fall back on, Berry earns little more than the London Living Wage of £7.20 an hour.

She lives with her boyfriend – a fellow Green Party apparatchik - in a rented flat above a shop in Kentish Town and survives on a stipend from the party after giving up her job as a website manager to fight the campaign.

She still remembers well the day she came up with the idea of bogus parking tickets to harass the owners of Chelsea tractors.

"I was waiting for a bus and watching the 4x4s ­going by," she says. "I found a parking ticket and thought it would be easy to spoof. The original one looks identical to Camden Council's tickets. Our wording (left) is very slightly cheeky. It doesn't say, ‘You're the devil's work!' I ­always carry some just in case I see a Hummer."

The next step was to persuade the Mayor he should ­penalise 4x4 owners with a premium-rate congestion charge.

"Ken Livingstone and TfL originally turned it down on the basis that it was unworkable, but we took their ­arguments apart," says Berry.

Brought up in Cheltenham, Berry now reckons she's a fully-fledged Londoner. "I've been here 11 years and I've hardly left the place to be honest," she says. "I really feel this is my patch now. I'm very involved in community politics in Camden, from Stop the War to more public toilets."

Whatever happens on 1 May, she will toil on regardless and take solace in the motto of her old school: "Honour not honours".