‘Only boring people get bored’ is what we were all told as children. What we were not warned about was that boring things can also make you boring. Boringness is infectious. Or so I have come to believe.

Thanks to my own low tolerance for boring things, I didn’t race to find out about the Ulez scheme. These soul-destroying acronyms often arrive at the peripheries of my vision, where I hope they will remain. Yet they make their remorseless push forward. So this week, with boring inevitability, I had to call the Ulez hotline to see if I was going to have to pay this extra car surcharge, to save the planet, from the end of this month.

To do this I had to go to a website where I searched for a number I could call to speak to a human. The automated voice welcomed me and informed me that because of the ‘currently high call volumes you may find it more convenient to visit our website’. Of course, here ‘You may find it more convenient’ translates as ‘We would find it more convenient’. It turns out that on high holy days and feast days you can get through to a human being. They too will invite you to go to the website.

The resulting tedium was in part my fault. Ulez required me to give details of my car. This is not easy. At a push I can remember the colour. But the other details escape me, because I find cars boring. Yet we persevered. The girl on the phone was able to log on to the Ulez website and so together we scoured it to try to work out my eligibility or otherwise for an exemption.

Along the way there was a moment of boring pleasure when we discovered that I may have the right to a reduction on payment of the existing London vehicle tax – the Congestion Charge. How much was this potential reduction, I asked. After some searching of the website on her end the young lady pronounced ‘100 per cent’. When it comes to discounts, 100 per cent is my favourite per cent. But the pleasure couldn’t last. On further inspection of the website the girl found bad news. The deduction on Congestion Charge payments had fallen. It was now only 90 per cent. ‘When did that happen?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Just one of those mysteries. I got off the line sharpish, since my deduction seemed to be falling an average of 10 per cent every 90 seconds.

Anyhow – I relay this story not simply to spread the boredom around. Rather, I do so to make a single, hopefully salient, point. This is precisely what I feared a quarter of a century ago. Some 25 years back Londoners were asked to vote on whether or not we wanted a mayor. I voted ‘No’ with memorable relish. My worry was not just that Ken Livingstone would become mayor, but that anyone would become mayor. It is my firm conviction that there should be fewer politicians, not more. The simple reason is that I like accountability. I like to know who I can reward and who I can punish at the ballot box: in short – who I can hold responsible.

My insight all those years back was that if we had a mayor in London they would at best simply provide one more layer of government. Which means one more layer of accountability dodging. Things get blurred. Bucks get passed.

Certainly this has proved to be the case with the London mayoralty. Some people in construction have occasionally argued to me that there are benefits to having a mayor of London. And I suppose at its best it is good to have a sort of ambassador for the capital. But otherwise the post has been an exercise in accountability avoidance.

For example, if there is a problem with young men stabbing each other to death, the Mayor can avoid taking any responsibility. Though in charge of policing, he can also claim not to be in charge of policing. Like everyone else. Including the police.

Stopping people stabbing each other is the sort of thing that ought to be high up on any politician’s list of priorities. Expanding the Ulez scheme, by contrast, would strike me as a minimal priority. I have been to China and know what a pollution-ridden city looks like. London is not such a city.

Nevertheless, since getting a mayor in London we have got the Congestion Charge – which, rather than reducing traffic, simply added another tax on to drivers. And while it is something you could justify if the trains were world class, the train system in London is generally on strike. So the motorist isn’t left with many other options but to pay up.

And now there is Ulez. Which will also work as just another tax.

Of course, due to the backlash against the Mayor for his extension of the scheme, he has come up with a fresh, brilliant idea. This is the one that led to my calling his thrilling Ulez extension hotline. It is that if you fall into certain brackets of car, income or possibly height, you could be eligible for a grant from the scheme. Sadiq Khan obviously thinks this a brilliant way out. Personally it makes me groan. Where does this money come from that will now be given to some motorists in the suburbs of London? Why, from the taxpayer of course. So here is yet another scheme in which a tax is levied on the population with a system within the system then set up to hand some of this money back to some people, thus creating another beautiful layer of bureaucracy.

All this is good news for young people looking for employment, if their aim in life is to sit on the phone all day with people like me, trying to navigate a website. But it does not seem to me any basis on which to save the planet or anything else.