As the Standard reported yesterday, a document written by Ken Livingstone’s chief of staff and campaign manager Simon Fletcher confirms that Team Ken is determined to pin a Tory true blue rosette on Boris Johnson and persuade Londoners to hurl ordure accordingly.

Fletcher has pounced on David Cameron’s reported remark to his backbench MPs that securing victory for Boris in London next May is “essential” to the Conservative Party’s fortunes. He argues that exploiting this emphasis can help the Labour campaign in its task of undermining Boris’s carefully contrived distance from his party’s activities nationally and sharpening the differences between its candidate and the man it has long been pointedly calling “Tory Boris Johnson.”

I too have now seen the Fletcher document, which was written for Labour’s London campaign staff and has been copied to Ed Miliband’s office. A cynic might read it as a bit of gee-up for the troops, who can’t have been heartened by the eight-point lead Boris had over Ken in the most recent opinion poll. Even so, it makes a persuasive case that Ken’s Fare Deal campaign has found a weakness in Boris’s position not only on fares in particular – a weakness that same opinion poll identified – but more generally too. Fletcher writes:

We know from our own research that while Boris Johnson has been successful in differentiating himself from the Conservative party in the past, his brand is depleted when voters see him as a recognisable Tory. That in turn establishes a clear diving (sic!) line between Johnson as a representative of an increasingly out-of-touch Tory government and Ken whose relative strengths are as someone who is “on your side on the issues that are really affecting you right now”.

He continues:

The more that Boris Johnson is seen as a Conservative, the more this will enhance how our campaign defines the terms of the election – on Ken’s Fare Deal versus Boris Johnson’s rising fares, on police cuts and rising crime, on speaking for the majority not just a privileged few. In tough times like these, Londoners can’t afford a mayor who is so out of touch that he is raising transport fares, cutting police numbers and thinks it’s ok to have a second job paying £250 000 a year – an amount he calls “chicken feed”. Those perceptions will be strengthened enormously if it is understood that Johnson’s election matters so much to the Tories nationally that the Conservative Prime Minister calls it his number one priority.

And he adds:

Our next big campaign is when the fares rise in January. Cameron’s comments that Boris Johnson’s re-election is his top priority should be used in this context…Our [campaign] script must be amended immediately to say: “David Cameron says his priority is getting fellow Conservative Boris Johnson elected – that means your fares rising under a Tory government and a Tory Mayor for years to come.”

Fletcher also argues that the recent Feltham and Heston parliamentary by-election revealed the political wind to be blowing in Ken’s favour, despite the Tory Lord Ashcroft claiming that a poll he conducted showed otherwise – a claim Labour London Assembly candidate Tom Copley challenged here.

It is, of course, in Fletcher’s interest to assert that Fare Deal is cutting through in a big way, but his analysis of Boris’s politics is impossible to quarrel with. The mayor is, as I wrote here, a total, complete and utter Tory. (In some respects this endears him to me more than Conservatives in general do: in his case his ultra-Toryism reflects a philosophical consistency that enables him to be a social liberal as well as an economic one.)

Fletcher is also correct, of course, that Boris falls out in public with fellow Tories for tactical reasons. His recent squashing of erstwhile close ally Stephen Greenhalgh’s plans to plant stacks of luxury, skyline-piercing flats in King Street, Hammersmith and Fulham, despite the angry opposition of the local well-to-do had a strong whiff of that about it: “We must protect historic buildings, green space and the views of our great city,” and so on.

The truth is that Boris, far from impeding Tory-led coalition policies as they affect the capital, is essentially their keen facilitator, whether on planning, housing, public spending cuts or anything else. Livingstone needs to gain a lot of ground if he’s to win next year’s election, but in this Labour-leaning city he seems to have a solid plan for going about it.

From Boris Johnson’s transport strategy:

In the life of the strategy, the Mayor may consider road user charging schemes if other measures at his disposal are deemed insufficient to meet the strategy’s goals and where there is a reasonable balance between the objectives of any scheme and its costs and other impacts.

It’s point E21 in the executive summary – see page 19. Similar material was present in previous mayor Ken Livingstone’s transport strategy too. Some London Conservatives and Ken-haters, who’d convinced themselves that Transport for London was a conspiracy of Communist vegetarians, leaped upon this as proof of hidden agendas to ban go-faster stripes, cross-dress Mondeo Man, nationalise the Victoria sponge and so on.

Such screams of outraged discovery have not been repeated under Ken’s successor, despite the existence of point E21. This is unsurprising. Boris has cut the congestion charging zone in half and made plain his view that extending it to the suburbs would be “a blatant tax on the motorist.” Please note in passing that Boris calls the C-charge a “charge” when he’s feeding the media tales of billing Obama for his embassy’s poor manners, but a “tax” when he’s thinking of ballot boxes in Bromley.

But whatever it’s name, he’s against more of it. And so, for now at least, is Ken who has ruled out bringing back the western extension that Boris – in the end rather reluctantly – abolished should he re-take City Hall in May. This a sad state of affairs given that estimates of the annual cost of congestion to London’s economy range from £2 billion to £4 billion and that it is calculated that 4,000 Londoners a year die prematurely as a result of poor air quality generated mostly by road traffic.

The report commissioned by the London Assembly’s Greens published last Friday is therefore very welcome. Compiled by Professor John Whitelegg, it is called Pay-as-you-go: managing traffic impacts in a world-class city, and takes as its premise that Boris’s ambition to make London the “best big city in the world” cannot be released unless its road traffic is controlled more effectively.

The report reviews research which has found congestion charging effective wherever it’s been introduced and looks at technological advances that would make a London-wide pay-as-you-go road pricing system technically possible. It addresses the problem of selling such a radical idea to the public as follows:

Public support is very closely linked to concepts of fairness and equity. In the context of London with millions of trips being made by public transport, walking and cycling it is self-evidently fair to levy a charge on the much smaller number of car trips that cause a much larger environmental burden than non-car trips. If that revenue is then deployed for the benefit of all Londoners and for a cleaner, greener London then that is likely to win and retain public support.

This may seem madly optimistic in view of recent public rejections of congestion charging in Manchester and Edinburgh, an issue explored by a man from London Travelwatch at the City Hall launch of the report. He reminded us that mayor Livingstone introduced charging in the face of opposition from everyone from (surprise, surprise) the Evening Standard to his own advisors and that not every politician is as single-minded and ready to take big risks as Ken.

Still, as the report points out, road pricing is unusual in that it unites economist concerned with efficiency, enivronmentalists concerned with pollution and CO2 emissions, and social justice campaigners who want transport policies that help women, children and those on low incomes. There is also the question of London’s need to raise money in the age of austerity. Professor Whitelegg reaches the following conclusion:

The revenue benefits of a London-wide pay as you go scheme are substantial and it is highly unlikely that the objectives of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy can be achieved in an era of declining public finance, rising costs of supplying and maintaining public transport operations and no significant increase in revenue from road pricing.

Put in very clear language it is our view that a London-wide road pricing scheme is essential and without it congestion will worsen, air pollution will worsen, the legal consequences of failing to meet air quality standards will grow in severity and fall on the GLA, the health of Londoners will suffer, CO2 reduction targets will be missed and London will stand no chance whatsoever in achieving “best in class” status that it so richly deserves.

Read the whole report here.