As I’m sure you’ve heard, the green-eyed madmen of Richmond upon Thames in London have elected a bunch of über-loonies to run the borough’s services and now, predictably, everything is falling apart.

Instead of organising war memorials and better rubbish collection, the super-loons have announced that if you fail to send the council an e-mail before you go shopping, they will assume your car produces a great deal of carbon dioxide and, as a result, will charge you 40p an hour more for parking than someone who has sent an e-mail.

Quite what difference 40p will make to someone who has a £30,000 car, I have absolutely no idea. It will really hurt only the poor. But this is the way with the world’s mega-loons. They leap from bandwagon to bandwagon, simply not understanding that bandwagons are transient because they’re silly and the tune they’re playing always goes out of fashion.

Of course I quite agree that something must be done to unclog the nation’s town centres. And I’m not certain the banks have got the right idea either. By running out of money they are now ensuring that every restaurant, pub, building society, estate agent and shop is closing, so that soon there will be no reason for popping into the local conurbation.

This will definitely ease congestion but the side effects are even more profound than the ideas being implemented in Richmond by the giga-loons.

Happily, however, I have been giving the matter some serious thought and I have devised a plan of my own that might just work.

As we know, Monte Carlo is a fairly horrible place full of prostitutes, wedding cake architecture and greasy little men who’ve learnt their English from baddies in James Bond films and who meet in bars at night to sell one another machineguns. It rains more than you might think, too.

And yet it is perceived to be a glamorous place simply because of the cars that prowl round Casino Square. Big is good. Low is better still. Red is best. And plainly, if Simon Cowell lived here, they’d put him on income support.

The cars are what makes Monaco look so good and it’s the same story in Tokyo. Mostly, this is an all-grey 50-mile Lego set with concrete telegraph poles and a wiring system that seems to have resulted from a massive primary school game of cat’s cradle.

But once again we find ourselves amused and impressed, partly because you are encouraged to smoke indoors but mostly because of all the funny little Postman Pat cars that hop about the place, with their cheeky smiles and their lilac paint jobs.

And then there are the taxis with their antimacassars and their electric-opening rear doors. We know, as soon as we climb into such a thing at the airport and are overtaken by a Mazda Bongo in teenage lip gloss pink, that we have arrived in a funky go-ahead place and that we shall be happy there.

Exactly the opposite applies in San Francisco. Make no mistake, this is my second favourite city in America — after Detroit — with its hills and its sharp, clear afternoon skies. I adore the hills and the patisseries, but the whole place is let down by the cars. Because the people who live there like to sit around pretending to be French, they all drive crappy Hondas.

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