Now, I am no political ingénue. I have read books (one) by Will Hutton, voted in every election (they give you a free biscuit at the Stroud Green polling station! Gigantic swing to me!), and know the difference between Geoff Hoon and Chris Huhne. I think. Other than the spelling.

So this is why I feel more than qualified to talk about the forthcoming mayoral election in London. Indeed, to be honest, in many ways my awesome political knowledge is a positive hindrance when it comes to talking about the mayoral election. Or, indeed, any elections. Let's face it: these days, people don't vote for political reasons. Hahahaha - of course they don't. I imagine there are, literally, more people who have had sex with Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone than have read either of their manifestos. Literally. Perhaps this accounts for their “modern lifestyles”. Maybe's it's all “horizontal campaigning”. They're just getting “ticks” in “boxes”. Brrrr.

Those who vote do so for dozens of different reasons, hardly any of them political. They vote for someone because they're bored with “the other one”. They vote because they like someone's hair. The great majority of voting is done, I suspect, on a simple, hereditary basis. Certainly, my four-yearly vote for Labour was passed down to me from my father - who, in turn, had it passed to him from his father.

“And before him, there wasn't a Labour to vote for. Which is why the poor bloody Irish were all forced to live in caves, under the Englishman's colonial mansion, eating mud, sleeping on mud, and making statues of Brendan Behan out of the mud,” as my father explained, in my formative introduction to the British political system. Continuing this tradition, I have explained politics to my children in a similarly biased manner. “The Tories don't believe in the redistribution of wealth by the State,” I told them, on the way home, eating my voting biscuit. “They think that middle-class people just kind of ... give their money to the needy, anyway. But let's face it: we don't, do we, darlings? So vote Labour.”

Voting isn't about politics, analysis or clear, rational thought any more. It has become an odd cross between family tradition, belligerence and whim - the same kind of basis on which the British choose a picnic spot, only with radically greater consequences. So having got that clear, here, then, is the full, truthful reasoning of my voting on Thursday. This comes with apologies to everyone who doesn't live in London, couldn't care less about the mayoral election and might very well be 4ft under a gigantic, unreported flood, for all we know, in our self-important, London-centric frenzy. Sorry, provincial guys.

I will NOT be voting for Boris. Quite aside from being a ditzy, posh, albino fanny-hound, he has a far greater impediment to running one of the greatest cities in the world: he is disabled by his own funniness. I understand Boris's weakness. I understand it only too well. As someone who spends most of her life trying to be funny, I know just how much effort it takes. It's like running a quiet heroin habit on the side. It's a full-time commitment. It makes you fatally, fundamentally, unsuitable for a job with genuine responsibilities and consequences. In the past, I have totally ignored people who have admitted that they are pregnant, in love with me or have increasingly suicidal feelings, simply because I was too busy trying to think of a pun off the back of something they'd said five minutes previously. Suicidal friend, counting out pills: “ ... and that's why I am going to put an end to this. I can't do anything right any more. I'm ruining other people's lives, now. I just want to stop this existential madness.” Me: “... so that short guy in the café, right, you could have called him Leonardo Dave Inchy!!!!!”

Any effective politician shouldn't be making more than four jokes a year, tops - and at least three of those should be made quietly, at home, among friends and family. The distressingly large number of people who seem set to vote for Johnson simply because he's “funny” - what we might term the “BorisROFLMAO”* vote - don't realise that Boris is ideologically committed to something that will always take precedence over budget meetings, and the city's security, which is: Boris being funny. Voters! This isn't Britain's Got Talent! This is the bit when we decide who's emptying the bins, booking the buses and moving on the tramps for the next four years. Boris wants an audience, not an Assembly. We might just as well vote in The Friday Night Project's Justin Lee Collins as Boris.

I AM voting for Ken, on the basis that he's done the job for so long, no one's going to be able to come in and work that filing system now. No one. There's probably a way of flushing the tricky toilet on the third floor that only Ken knows. The whole housing department's lottery-rota could go to pot if he gets the boot.

Seeking his third term, Ken is suffering the same problem that Tony Blair did last year - people are just a bit bored withhim, and want to try something a bit different. But everyone should remember that this is the very same reasoning that led more than 60 per cent of the female population to get Alexa Chung-style fringes last year - fringes that we all regret now, don't we, ladies? We wish we'd just stuck with what we knew worked. And London is - and I genuinely do believe this - even more important than hair. We don't want the metropolitan equivalent of 18 months in hairgrips, growing out an unwise choice of mayor. We should stick with what we know. Vote Ken!

Poor Brian Paddick, then. George to Ken and Boris's John and Ringo, he's destined always to be fatally overshadowed, even though he wrote Something. He should go solo, now, and try to be mayor of Portsmouth instead.

*Rolling on floor, laughing my ass off.

An Apple accident shakes me to my core
I have written here before of how, while bowing to no man in my love of the Apple brand in general, I have found every iPod of my experience to be a feeble item, the electronic equivalent of Victorian children with rickets - warming the hearts of all it meets, then suddenly dying of “the Fever”, just before reaching its first birthday. The iPod is not a robust item. I've never had one last longer than five months. In many ways, you are plugging your earphones into a single unprotected slice of electronic Ryvita, one that could crumble at any minute.

This is not, however, the case with its modish cousin, the iPhone. Having had mine for four months, and loved it as passionately as any item of my possession - how can one not give one's heart to a device that brings a pub to a standstill when you demonstrate its “rotating photograph album” function? - I lived in fear of suddenly dying of “Cyber the Fever”.

Then, last week, that terrible day came. In an unfortunate sequence of events, I dropped the iPhone down a toilet on the Gower while reading Grazia and, fairly understandably, presumed that it was dead. No electronic item in the world can, surely, survive a U-bend filled with the fresh waters of Wales. The Mac “White Screen of Death” was displayed. It wouldn't respond to my entreaties of “Gah! You cannot leave me! How will I talk to people in London?!”

We laid the iPhone out on a hand towel, in state, like Lenin, and everyone filed mournfully past its cold, dead, nickel body to pay their last respects.

Imagine, then, the collective joy in the room when, barely two hours later, the device made a brave, spluttery ringing sound - then put through a call from the office! It was like the bit in Fatal Attraction when you think Glenn Close is dead, and then she screams back into existence again, but in a more positive way. “Why are you screaming and crying?” the editor asked. “Because I've had my faith restored in a recently troubled, boutique brand of electronic communication and entertainment equipment!” I wept. “It's a big moment for me!”

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