Sketch: There was only one star performer...  and he is not even a candidate

High above the stage was carved a quotation from St John: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly".

How very fitting that four would-be Messiahs met at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster to set out how they would make Londoners’ lives more abundant.

Astonishingly for hardened political veterans, they seemed nervous as hell. Boris Johnson clung to a vast folder full of facts and figures as though terrified that his huge brain would conk out. Lib-Dem Brian Paddick put his hands in his pockets, took them out, tucked in his shirt and hopped from foot to foot. And Ken Livingstone, mesmerisingly, turned more and more scarlet.

The real stars of the show were the audience — a fantastic crowd of 1,700 Londoners who queued around the block to get in: heart-warming proof of the capital’s passion for democracy. Sometimes they clapped for Boris, sometimes for Ken. And several times they made their displeasure clear.

Ken found out the hard way that questions about his murky tax affairs are not just a media obsession. As he tried to blather his way out of it, a hubbub arose that grew into heckling. Red Ken looked flushed when he arrived, but now his cheeks turned pillar box-red, and when someone shouted “Champagne socialist!” they darkened into an unhealthy puce.

“I’ve paid enough tax to fund an aircraft carrier,” he protested. Chairman Clive Anderson teased back, sparking huge cheers: “But not as much as if you had not put it through a company.”

That was Ken’s worst moment. But he had his revenge, when he pummelled Johnson for not dashing home at the outbreak of last year’s summer riots. “If you love this city, you want to be here,” he said, winning a roar of approval, twisting the knife by recalling his hands-on performance after the 2005 bombings. The Mayor squirmed, grumbling that it was “pretty low” to score points off the riots.

Jenny Jones, of the Greens, made an extraordinary gaffe by criticising the number of Met chiefs with chauffeur-driven cars and asking, “Why can’t they take taxis like the rest of us?” It was not the smartest comment in a hall of people who had trekked in by bike, bus, Tube and on foot. “What do you mean, ‘like the rest of us?’  ” someone piped up.

Paddick, sounding like a rerun of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, kept going on about how he lived in a humble flat “above Tesco’s by the railway line”, which sounded a bit hollow for a retired top cop on a £64,000 pension. By the end, the quartet was dividing into Ken and Boris factions. Ken promised Jenny a job as his cycling czar. Brian helped out Boris by attacking Ken’s fares plan. But the crowd was less easily won over: when Anderson asked how many had been swayed by the debate, only a bare dozen put their hands up.

Anderson was a star — as knowledgeable as the candidates and far more witty. Come to think of it, Clive, if you’re free in 2016, there might be a job going at City Hall…