“ONLY SOME ghastly dehumanised moron,” observed Ken Livingstone, “would want to get rid of the Routemaster.” Four years on — having campaigned for the mayoralty on a platform of safeguarding London’s much-loved hop-on, hop-off buses — Mr Livingstone has become that moron himself, as he prepares to decommission the last of these gloriously practical vehicles.

Destroying the Routemaster represents a rare misjudgment of the public mood by this most acute of left-wing populists. Mr Livingstone claims he performed this U-turn for the sake of disability rights, to make all buses fully accessible to wheelchair users. But a Policy Exchange/Populus poll published yesterday shows that 81 per cent of disabled Londoners oppose the scrapping of this icon.

One explanation for this overwhelming rejection of the mayor’s policy is that the disabled are a far more diverse bunch than the wheelchair lobby would have us believe. Livingstone-funded pressure groups for the disabled such as Transport for All — which seek to intimidate politicians into believing that they constitute a mass movement — stand exposed as representing very few but themselves.

The scrapping of the Routemaster has been taken with hardly any democratic accountability. The legislation creating the mayoralty gave Mr Livingstone the power to appoint the Transport for London Board and it left the Greater London Assembly largely impotent. The creation of an elected mayor was supposed to bring city government closer to the people. In practice Londoners enjoy about as much say over a crucial part of the mayor’s work as the residents of such remote Crown dependencies as Diego Garcia.

Hence the need for extra measures to make good the democratic deficit. Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat MP, is proposing that a referendum be held on the Routemaster’s fate on the same day as the May 2006 local elections. Boroughs have every right to put the issue on the ballot — they should use that power.

If the worst rulers are former slaves, then the most arrogant politicians tend to be former men of the people. The title of Mr Livingstone’s first book — If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It — is looking eerily prescient. He made his name as a “cheeky chappy”, but his cheek is now largely directed at his own voters.