Last week at Mayor’s cabinet, Ken Livingstone made an extraordinary statement. He said that he believed that government ministers Stephen Byers, Nick Raynsford and John Spellar supported the PPP plans to partially-privatise the Tube because they were being misbriefed by their civil servants. Poor little innocents!

Oh please! These three grown men, Ministers of State of the United Kingdom, are supposed to be running the country- and Ken sat there making excuses for them. They have at their disposal all the resources available to the machinery of Government to find the truth.

They have no excuse for not knowing how badly flawed their privatisation plans are. The government hasn’t just failed to persuade transport experts, the public and Bob Kiley that the plans make sense. The government has even failed to persuade the Labour MPs on the Transport Select Committee. The reality is that PPP is not safe, not cheap and not wanted.

Even the Ernst and Young report, commissioned to examine value for money by the Government itself, says that the calculation they make is ‘part art, part science’. And that report only concludes that privatisation offers value for money by assuming the public sector would get nearly everything wrong and the private sector would get nearly everything right. Yes, that’s the same private sector that has brought up Marconi, Equitable Life and Railtrack.

It is highly implausible that the private sector would really perform better than the public sector in this case, especially as the public sector has on its side Bob Kiley, a man with a proven track record of turning round other failing public transport systems.

So it is no wonder the government is so reluctant to hand over information about the details of the contracts. After promising on TV to give the Mayor the details of the profits private companies would be allowed to make from the Tube, Stephen Byers did duly deliver the documents – but with the key numbers missing and replaced with asterisks!

These and other contract details are being kept secret because changes were still being made to the contracts as the private companies get colder and colder feet about accepting any risk transfer at all. It is such an unbelievably bad deal, that I keep hoping against hope that the cavalry will somehow appear and save us at the 11th hour. Sadly, there is no cavalry!

And all that stands between London and the PPP now is Ken. And that is why Ken needs to get tougher. Kowtowing to Labour and making excuses for government ministers is not going to get us anywhere. There isn’t much hope left – but the Mayor of London must go as far as it is possible to go to stop privatisation.

Labour, meanwhile, hope and pray that London is fed up with this row, and is growing impatient and simply wants to get on with it. But given that by Kiley and Ken’s account, the contracts now deliver virtually nothing to London in terms of benefits in the first decade – what’s to delay? Ken went soft on the Government over PPP during the General Election and refused to use it against Labour then.

He has another opportunity coming soon. Will he help make Labour pay the political price this time through the ballot box in the London council elections on May 2? When push has come to shove, Mayor Livingstone so far hasn’t been willing to truly stand up for London against Labour. The umbilical chord always proves to be too strong for that final cut.