Yesterday I saw something unusual. While sitting in a jam near London’s Parliament Square I noticed a huge queue for one of those old-fashioned phone boxes. The complicated red jobbies that take some poor chap six years to paint.

Why, I thought, are people queueing to use a phone box? Everyone has a mobile these days. And why is the woman who’s actually using it not using it at all? She’s half in and half out, with one leg in the air and a silly grin on her face.

It turned out she was a tourist posing for a photograph in the only slice of olde England she could find. And what’s more, all the people behind her were also tourists queueing to have their pictures taken with it as well. This made me rather sad.

How far have they travelled, I wondered? And how much have they spent on this once in a lifetime trip to the former capital of the free world? And this – this crummy old phone box – is the only evidence that they’ve landed in the right place.

The policemen have replaced their Dixon of Dock Green helmets and cheery demeanour with body armour and sub-machineguns, the home county turds in the river are now otters, no one is allowed to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and the absolute last language you will hear spoken on any street is English.

There’s more, too. Today the beefeaters are women, the Cutty Sark has melted, Greenwich is a dome, the Queen has become Helen Mirren and the old double-decker buses are gone, purged by the maniac Livingstone, who sees everything from yesterday as an example of the global corporations’ love affair with money, slaves and carbon dioxide.

You get the impression that if some City chap actually walked across Waterloo bridge wearing a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella he’d be mobbed by a grateful Sony-toting horde.

On my trip to London last week I did a river trip, saw the Eye, tootled about near Tower Bridge for a bit and went to Piccadilly Circus. And after a while I began to think I might be in a strange place, the result of an unusual sexual liaison between Geneva in 2027 and Moscow in 1974.

Hanging from every single lamppost in the West End – and that’s a lot of lampposts – there’s a big sign saying “DIY Planet Repairs”. I have no idea what this means, any more than the workers in the People’s Tractor Factory No 47 knew what the politburo’s encouraging slogans meant.

I guess it’s a sort of diktat from the commissariat, urging us to take exercise, work harder and gain strength through joy. Certainly in every bus shelter there’s a poster from the mayor that says, “London was made for cycling”.

No it wasn’t. London was made for people to come and do business. There was a gap of several hundred years between the invention of Londinium and the day when some idiot invented the pedal and handlebar.

To take refuge from the constant political bombardment, I sought shelter in a well known restaurant where a pot of tea for four and some cake cost me £78. That is not a misprint.

Then there’s the river. Oooh, the banks these days are a funfair of funk and groove with lots of smoked glass and teak decking. But you can see all the Korean ladies on the cruise ships not knowing what the bloody hell to take a picture of. There’s absolutely nothing that says to the folks back home “I’ve been to London”. Rather it looks like they’ve been to a retirement home for people whose silly architect specs were so thin and so fashionable they couldn’t actually see what they were designing.

Of course, despite the idiotic prices and Ken’s best efforts to ruin everything, London is a better place to live now than it was 20 years ago. But in the drive to make it “modern” and “edgy”, the period features, the things that make people want to come here, have been thrown out. No, really. How many people sit down with the travel brochures every year and think, “This year, for our summer holidays, let’s go somewhere really multicultural and green”?

None. What people want when they come to London is pomp and circumstance. And this brings me on to the Union Jack. I know it’s offensive to certain portions of the Muslim community and I know it got a bit hijacked by the British National party. But do you think it might be possible to fly it somewhere? You won’t even find it on Tower Bridge.

Helen Mirren does a good job. All the way from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, the DIY Planet Repairs nonsense has been replaced with a lot of big flags. And as a result the Mall is a seething mass of relieved tourists happily filling up their memory chips with something other than the lone red phone box.

But the truth of the matter is this: London is now further away from its image than any other city in the world. The postcards still paint a picture of the day when Rules ruled, but the reality is a city where tourists are greeted at reception by a Latvian and shown to their room by someone from Poland. They eat arugula from titanium plates and are reminded every time they go outside that the mayor thinks he’s Stalin. They want steak and kidney, and we give them Tate Modern with a hint of the Baltic.

Coming to London now is a bit like tuning in to an episode of The Ascent of Man to find it’s being hosted by Pamela Anderson. In a lime green thong.

It’s not wrong. It’s just not what anyone was expecting.

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