An early start to Mayor’s Question Time as Ken has to leave for Moscow at 10.50am.

He starts in good form – but as the thrust of the first question begins to bite suffers his normal deterioration in humour. The question itself is about an area in Spittalfields where the proposed route of CrossRail would mean building a ventilation and emergency shaft in the middle of a densely populated area with narrow streets.

Everyone is concerned about the well-being of this community.

Ken finally loses his cool with me. So no change there after his summer break!

We go onto a question about finances. There is a looming half billion hole in the Mayor’s budget. I’m highly suspicious that his intention will be to fill as much of it as necessary by digging into Londoners’ pockets by increaseing fares and his share of Council Tax bills (called “the precept”) in due course.

With Ken having just been re-elected, this is his “safe” period when he feels he can do as he pleases – with one election out of the way and the next a long time away. He informs us that he will make an announcement on his proposed fare increases next Tuesday at his press conference.

We had been informed earlier this morning that he has cancelled his visit to the LibDem conference due to – as his office put it – an ’emergency crisis budget meeting’.

I challenged him on his dishonesty pre-election when he promised time and time again when the fares were raised last January that he would peg the price of tickets to inflation.

This will clearly be broken next week and – given our fares are the highest in the world and the cost of living in London is making it a nightmare for key workers and the like – this is going to make things worse. Let alone making a nonsense of the benefits of the congestion charge in reducing traffic – when the fare hike could send people back into their cars.

I accused him of telling porky-pies and received a rebuke for using such langugate. Mind you, “porky pie” was mild compared to what I would have liked to call him!

We moved onto the ’emergency budget crisis meeting’. Ken laughed (as he does) and said it was simply a meeting with Transport for London to determine how the government’s grant would be spent – i.e. which transport projects he would have to drop given that raiding all of our little piggy banks through fares still won’t be enough to plug the hole and fund his wish list.

I rest my case – emergency crisis budget meeting was the right terminology.