John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, has resisted the siren call of the Tories and come out as an independent candidate for the 2008 Mayoral elections. I’m delighted. And delighted, too, that he’s standing at all. The London electorate desperately need some fresh blood on the local political scene, and most especially a challenger to the newt-fancying incumbent, who’s beginning to take on the mantle of an Estuarine Fidel Castro, such is his unopposed longevity in office.

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We’re eating at a restaurant in the ‘burbs to the east of Santiago, which has been recommended to us as distinctively Chilean. We were driven out here by one of the plush hotel cars, and swishing over overpasses, and swooping through underpasses, we might have been anywhere in the developed world. Still, I’ve read my stats — I know that while the average income here is around $12,000 per annum, perhaps 40 per cent of the population remain below the United Nations poverty line. Even so, if Chile is the England of South America, Santiago is doing a remarkably good job of looking like its Basingstoke.

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The Santiago Metro could make any other mass urban-transit system feel like a raddled old whore. I’m staying in a flashy hotel in the upmarket El Golf district, and from the 10th floor this teeming, Latin American capital appears cluttered with the banal forms of mirror-shiny buildings. They transform the city into a desktop covered with modular trays: are there office workers in that one, or paperclips? But the Metro, now there’s a thing. I’ve never come across a subway station with its own preserved-fruit shop and lending library. There are also oil paintings on the platforms, and how clean is that? They’re big, well-lit canvases of seaside views and rural farms, perhaps a little neo-realist for my taste — but you can’t have everything. Hell, in Santiago, if you so desire, you can ride smoothly into the centre of town, while reading a Spanish translation of Ken Follett, and stuffing yourself with peaches in syrup. Moscow, eat your dark heart out.

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Today, 1.2 million parents will find out if their children have got the secondary school place of their “choice”, and loud will be the cries of rage when many of them find that this choice is, at best, Hobson’s, and at worst no place at all.

In my own borough, Lambeth, every year thousands of secondary pupils have to leave, in order to seek an education in an adjacent one. Under Labour the idea was to create a more “diverse” state system. Duff schools were to be shut down, good ones expanded. Tambourine-banging Tony was happy to see the expansion of faith schools, and, of course, there have been the privately sponsored city academies.

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