Question: There doesn't seem to be a lot dividing Ken Livingstone, Nicky Gavron and Simon Hughes politically. Does that strengthen your chances campaigning from the right?

Steve Norris: I do think that it strengthens my position in that from a technical point of view the other two candidates tend to take votes away from Ken Livingstone rather than from me. I don't think that it is a left-right campaign. I think it is slightly more subtle than that. There is obviously an element of left-right, but Ken Livingstone and I probably agree on more than we disagree. There was actually last time a huge consensus on what the big issues where and for that matter what the solutions were.

I expect that to be the case this time. I think there will be a lot of similar opinions being expressed and we didn't have a lot of the rather unpleasant debates that tend to disfigure modern political contests. But we disagree, obviously.

Question: So does that make it more a battle of personalities?

Steve Norris: I think it does. I don't mean to say that we have identical views. I tend to be more enthusiastic about seeing London as a city in which business has to be given some sort of serious role because the city relies on its financial pre-eminence.

I'm one of those people who believes for example in a much more flexible approach to planning than Ken Livingstone does. He has more of a socialist view of de registe planning and I tend to be more of a free marketeer in planning. All of those things are very obvious, so there are differences.

But in the end, yes, I think a lot of it may very well come down to personalities. It's a very personal kind of contest. It's a single individual that you vote for, not a political party. In fact I would go further. I would say if you only vote for me because I'm the Conservative candidate then you are missing the point. If you don't vote for me because I'm the Conservative candidate then you are missing the point. You should be looking at Ken Livingstone and Steve Norris and deciding which of the two is actually better qualified, suited, whatever word you want to use, to be mayor.

Question: So do you already see this as a two-horse race then?

Steve Norris: I think it's a two-horse race. I think when the chips are down you know very well that is what it is going to be. There are only going to be two of us in the second round. Picking up where we left off last time if anything the Tories are doing better now than we were doing in 2000, substantially better. Labour is doing substantially less well, there's never been much of a Liberal revival in London, in fact they've lost ground.

I think it's pretty clear that it will be myself and Ken. There's nothing to persuade me that it will be any different than that. Partly that is because we are both poster colour candidates. We both have a definable identity which you either like or dislike whereas other candidates tend to be seen as slightly more pastel shaded, perhaps less distinct.

Question: Do you think the second preference system could just make the difference then between you and Livingstone, given the closeness of the other three main candidates?

Steve Norris: The interesting thing is that second preferences are a very different proposition. For example in London the Liberal Democrat vote tends to be more ex-Tory than ex-Labour, except, funnily enough, in Bermondsey which is Simon Hughes' own constituency, which of course is ex-Labour.

But in the main the areas of Kingston, Twickenham, Richmond, Sutton, Cheam, Carshalton and all of those areas where the Liberals tend to be strong are areas which are if you like instinctively Tory or certainly previously Tory - and in fact in Richmond's case of course having gone strongly back to the Tories.

So on second preferences our evidence is that people will not necessarily vote Hughes and therefore Livingstone. They will vote Simon, if they do so out of loyalty to the Lib Dems, but their second preferences are very much up for grabs. And indeed it is on that basis that we believe my campaign will actually succeed this time because Ken Livingstone underestimates the strength of outer London, underestimates the issues. He is fixated on, in a sense, very few issues like congestion charging which actually don't affect the vast majority of Londoners and is on that basis very vulnerable.

Question: Has Ken Livingstone been as radically left wing and liberal as you and other of his opponents predicted in 2000?

Steve Norris: You don't need to ask me. You must make your own judgement on that. I suspect that most people think that he's been more successful than many of his opponents suggested that he would be. And that is very much to his credit.

In the course of that he has obviously had to trim quite a lot but then that's the reality of government. That is something some of us would have predicted with Ken. It's good for London and if it's good London I have no objection. I think to say that Ken Livingstone has been more responsible than some of us thought he might be is not something I view with displeasure, it is something I view with enormous relief.

Question: How will the privatisation of the Underground make it safer?

Steve Norris: Well what we ought to just distinguish is what is actually happening. Yours is, if you don't mind me saying so, a strange question because nobody's privatised the underground.

What's happened is that there is a long term investment contract for maintenance and renewal of the infrastructure which has been let to the two infrastructure companies: Metronet and TubeLines. The advantages there - which the government sees and I think most people recognise - are that you now have a steady stream of investment into the system which has been lacking for generations.

Under Labour governments and Tory governments, under the government of which I was a very junior member it was quite obvious to me that we were not investing enough in the Tube and I said so many times. I think from that point of view that's the big advantage.

The people who are doing the work are essentially the same people who have been doing the work either in the public sector or the private sector for many years. As far as safety is concerned, the more modern the system, the better the state of the infrastructure the less likely it is that accidents are going to happen.

As far as driving trains and staffing platforms is concerned, those people of course, the people who do those jobs, remain very much in the public sector. And they actually come under the mayor.

What will be interesting is to see what if any improvement the mayor is able to make with those staff when they are very heavily unionised. And he himself seems to be very heavily in hoc to the trade unions who funded his previous campaign and are committed to funding this one.

Question: Could you work with the train drivers' unions the RMT and Aslef?

Steve Norris: Conservative governments work with the trade unions, there is no question about that. I have no difficulty as somebody who is not a natural sympathiser of the worst excesses of the trade unions, I have some sympathy with the perfectly legitimate demands of working people and with the notion that they should be represented by a trade union.

I'm not one of these people who has a visceral detestation of trade unions and as far as I'm concerned if Bob Crow is the elected leader of the RMT and he wants to talk to me about issues that involve his members then he will have my full attention. Indeed is he's right then he'll get my immediate action.

I don't see issues like this as completely black and white. But I have to say that I also believe that my fundamental duty is the duty to the passengers rather than to any other group. And I therefore would be unlikely to be impressed if the trade unions talked too quickly about strike action when what we really need in London is sensible cooperation. They'll get that from me, they'll get a decent deal from me.

I have never ever in the whole of my political life ever suggested that we shouldn't have a good healthy trade union movement to represent working people. I'm quite sure I could work with Bob Crow.

Question: Would you keep Bob Kiley, Tim O'Toole and the other American transport experts the mayor has hired?

Steve Norris: I would keep Tim O'Toole because he seems like a breath of fresh air. But the other of them are hardly worth the air fare. I would dispense with their services immediately.

Question: Can bus lanes ever be enforced and the countdown system that you have made much of ever be made to work accurately?

Steve Norris: Well it is true that among the many things that need to be done Countdown needs to be improved and also we need to make bus lane enforcement work better. I've been very disappointed with progress in those areas over the last three or four years.

I'm not going to turn that on Ken Livingstone personally. But I have to say that within Transport for London there has been very little progress on what actually are key elements of any sensible public transport strategy in London.

You can't have a bus network operating efficiently in the city unless bus priority lanes work. And I don't think we have done enough frankly over the last three years in order to make sure that they really are enforced rigidly, that yellow box junctions are similarly enforced and the Countdown system woks at a technical level efficiently.

Now none of those things is difficult to do. They all just require concentration and effort. But I think the bigger issue is actually to make sure that the bus service is actually affordable and that bus services in the city are running sensibly in line with demand and what the city can afford.

On that basis I welcome much of the improvements there have been in the last two or three years. I just recall that it was actually when I was minister that the big improvement in bus services started in London. What Ken Livingstone's done has built on that and I would build on what he's done.

Question: Does your pledge to scrap the congestion charge not make you the gridlock candidate?

Steve Norris: What it proves is that some of us are thinking about the whole of London. You read a lot of journalists' reports and even quite sort of intelligent observers' reports who say traffic in London is a lot easier.

I suppose it's the danger that comes from using the word London in that context. Because what they mean is that traffic in a small part of central London is much easier. Actually in statistically 94 per cent of London traffic is completely unaffected by the congestion charge.

So I think it is Ken Livingstone who is the gridlock king. Because by putting all of his energies and a huge amount of money which will never ever be repeated into looking at six per cent of the city, which incidentally has suffered enormously in terms of the financial health of businesses, he has completely ignored the idea of doing anything elsewhere in the capital. And I just don't think that's good enough.

I don't intend to be a gridlock mayor but I believe that someone who doesn't want to be a gridlock mayor is somebody who is going to take on a solution that works across the whole of the city, not just in a small area in the middle. And that means looking at traffic light phasing, capacity enhancement, bus lane management, yellow box junction management, safe route to school expansion, a new freight regime, a better regime with utilities, faster roadworks - all of which is deliverable. Now those sorts of things, when they're put together represent a programme which you can roll across the whole of London, not just the centre.

The problem you see with congestion charging is that when you start to expand it, as the mayor is currently finding, (a) it's not very popular and (b) of course it's even less popular when you have to scrap the 90 per cent discount [for residents]. You have to scrap the 90 per cent discount because the more vehicles that come into the scheme. Because otherwise the scheme can't work, you've got too many people only paying 50 pence a day.

Question: You've mentioned in a previous interview with the Parliamentary Monitor that the congestion charge is helping your "mega-rich friends" and hurting poorer people who have to drive into central London. Is it a peculiar role reversal that the left wing mayor is assisting rich drivers and the Tory candidate championing the poor?

Steve Norris: That's one of the ironies of the whole thing. I find it really rather odd that what Ken Livingstone has done is to have created a situation in which some of our richest citizens are actually rather grateful to him because their journeys are nicely quicker. But actually tens of thousands of poorer people who can't just write off five pounds a day or the risk of a £40 pound fine are actually not able to come in to central London. I find that vaguely absurd.

If he'd had the honesty to say well we'll just put up a no entry sign, we'll just say no entry to the city between seven and 10 or four and six or whatever, if he'd done that at least we would have kept out the large limousine as well as the small family saloon. At the moment the irony is you just meet a nicer class of car.

Question: You've been talking about the economic costs of crime in London. What are you proposing to do about that?

Steve Norris: I've been doing a lot of stuff in London on crime because whereas as I said, the congestion charge is very much a journalists' issue right in the centre, a zone one issue, crime is something that affects every single Londoner. There is absolutely no doubt that crime is - and more to the point low level crime, the low level disorder that is such a threat to the quality of people's lives - number one whenever you ask people wherever you are in London, what is it you most care about in the area that you live. And that is very important.

I think it is all about how we deploy the police resources. I think it is about addressing the sort of crime that actually destabilises communities and gives rise to the fear of crime.

If I can put it in a nutshell. When Ken Livingstone says that he feels safer in New York than in London, he should take that as his own watchword and make sure that actually he does something about it. So far I've seen no sign of that.

Question: But we've got more police officers in London, more trainees in the Metropolitan force and community officers on the street as well. Is that not the answer?

Steve Norris: No it isn't. That's the whole point. This is a very typical Labour answer. It is a very typical Livingstone answer which is just to throw more money.

I think what you ought to be looking at is the really quite scandalously bad deployment of our current resources before we just then go and ask hard pressed council tax payers to find even more money. If you've got 28,500 police officers as we have in London right now and if you assume that about 8500 of them are actually engaged on what we might call national duties rather than local policing duties in London, that still leaves us with about 20,000 police officers in 33 boroughs.

That's about 600 per borough. And if you take that over three shifts it means that in any shift in any borough in London there ought to be available around 200 police officers. Now if you take 20 per cent of those off because of sickness and illness that gives you about 160.

Do you know how many will actually be working on the street, walking the street in Hammersmith and Fulham today, or in Kensington and Chelsea or in Croydon? You'll actually be lucky if 10 of them are on foot patrol in the area. Not many. Does that suggest to you that we should just be hiring more and more and more police officers?

I think what it suggests is we should actually be looking at deployment. We should be looking at where the other officers are. We should be looking at why we only have a 14 per cent clear up rate in crime. We should be looking at why we're not looking at the Compstat system in the way that it's used in New York. We should be looking at some of the lessons we can learn from New York before we just assume that all it's about is just opening the wallet. Particularly when it's somebody else's wallet. That's the thing that Ken Livingstone's probably best at.

Question: Is your party colleague Liam Fox right to say that London is becoming the TB and Aids capital of Europe? And if so, what can be done about it?

Steve Norris: I don't know whether those statistics are right. But it's no surprise to me to know that for example we do have a very considerable proportion of the Aids problem in the capital. That's been the case for many years.

It just seems to me that we ought to be looking at making sure we can provide the best quality possible services in the area. It's inevitable that a city like London is going to attract high proportions of people who suffer from these particular diseases. I don't think we should be criticising the people concerned. We should simply make sure that we've got the right kind of healthcare to treat them.

Question: Do you think there is a danger that by highlighting London so specifically the Conservatives are scapegoating the victims?

Steve Norris: I haven't read in any detail what Liam Fox said and frankly that's not for me, it's something you would have to ask him about. My only interest is in the health of Londoners.

That's the statutory duty the mayor has, to report on the health of London. And one of the things that I would be saying is that London does have a very high concentration of people who suffer. Certainly from HIV/Aids and no doubt from other notifiable diseases and what we ought to be doing is to make sure that this city can respond adequately to provide the kind of healthcare that's necessary.

Question: Should it be London or East London that has its name on the bid for the Olympics?

Steve Norris: This is about London, this is about an opportunity to showcase the greatest city in the world. And I'm an enthusiastic supporter of the Olympics.

The only concern I have is that I don't honestly believe that the government is at all signed up to the Olympics yet. The key fact to just alight on is that the government hasn't committed any money at all.

London has been required to commit money. Ken Livingstone has decided that London's council tax payers will have to find well in excess of £500,000,000, which is a huge amount of money for them to find.

But otherwise it is all coming from the lottery fund, it's coming from the London Development Agency, not a penny of funding is currently coming from central government. Now that is worrying and it does mean that as far as I'm concerned one of the first things that the mayor's got to do is to actually tie down central government.

So instead of just the warm words from Tessa Jowell we actually have some concrete evidence of commitment from central government. From the Treasury, from Number 10, from the Department for Transport, from Defra, from the ODPM, from all the departments involved in making this happen.

Question: Do you think therefore that London won't win the games as long as Labour is in power?

Steve Norris: I think that London ought to win the games and I'll certainly be doing everything I possibly can to make sure that it does. But I'm merely making the point that central government has got to look to its laurels.

Because so far we've had some honeyed words from Tessa Jowell who points out quite rightly that the Olympics would not only benefit London but benefit the rest of the country. But there is not a single penny of government money to indicate that Gordon Brown was listening when she was talking.

Question: Do you think Gordon Brown has got a problem with London in that he has defended the Barnett formula and he has been very parsimonious when it comes to cash for the Tube?

Steve Norris: Well we know that he dislikes Ken Livingstone enormously. The animosity between the two of them goes back many years and is largely based on Ken Livingstone frequently telling the chancellor that he doesn't understand anything about economics.

Now I don't want to intrude upon private grief, except to point out that when the mayor isn't able to talk to the chancellor of the exchequer, then the loser in this is London. They can have as many petty arguments as they like but it's a great shame when they spill onto the London stage.

Question: There's not a single mention of you being the Conservative Party candidate on your campaign website, are you running on your own or as the official candidate?

Steve Norris: I'm very keen to be the official Conservative candidate. But as I've said to you and it's really important to understand the significance of this, if you vote for me because you say "he's the Conservative" then it seems to me that's the wrong decision for you to make.

It's rather like not voting for me because I am the Conservative, that is equally daft. The point about all this is that the Conservative Party has - and I'm absolutely delighted that they have done - chosen me as its candidate. I'm the candidate that the Conservatives are going to support and I'm a lifelong Conservative voter and I intend to stay that way.

But the important thing is you should be looking at what Steve Norris says. You've got to be looking at what Steve Norris says he will do as the candidate. That's why, for example, I'm interested in what Liam Fox says and I'm interested in what John Reid says. But ultimately Londoners should be interested in what the candidates say about the big issues because that is what actually counts.

Question: Is it not deceiving voters slightly not to even mention that you are an official party candidate?

Steve Norris: On the contrary I think every single person in the city who is going to be voting is going to be well aware of my politics. That's not an issue. And as you know the election is going to be founded on that basis.

If you couldn't find it I've just looked on the site and it says "before standing as candidate for London mayor Steve was Conservative member of parliament for 14 years and minister of transport in London for nearly five".

Question: It doesn't say that you are the Conservative candidate though does it? It just says that you were a Conservative MP.

Steve Norris: I don't think you should assume that only through being a keen follower of the Westminster world are you aware that Steve Norris is a Tory. Our indication is that virtually everybody in London that you talk to is perfectly aware of that.

But the point is that this is a personal manifesto, not a Conservative manifesto. I'm very interested in what my Conservative colleagues say, I'm very interested in what politicians of all parties say, I'm interested in what people who are not politicians say. But ultimately this is a personal manifesto, that's the way it has to be.

That's what I did last time and that's what I'm going to do this time. I know it is the right way to go about this campaign.

If you look for candidates simply to see which political party they are connected to then, whilst everybody is entitled to vote according to their own likes, certainly my submission would be you are making the wrong judgement. You have got to look at whether this person is competent, capable, seems to be putting forward the right kind of policies, believes in the city, wants to do a good job in the city, if you see all of that, that's what you base it on.

Question: Are you saying that there is a negative connotation attached to having a party label?

Steve Norris: Yes exactly, precisely. And that goes for all political parties. That's the whole point.

If I believe that all Simon Hughes will do is ring up Charles Kennedy every time he wants new policy advice then they might as well elect Charles Kennedy. If Nicky Gavron can't move without talking to her political masters well then why on earth bother to vote for her?

The whole point about the fact that last time and I think this time that the two candidates who are going to battle it out are both seen to be people who have ideas of their own is that people very sensibly recognise that it is an individual you are voting for and not a political party.

Question: The polls show Labour Party may no longer be trusted but have the Tories earned the faith of the public yet?

Steve Norris: I genuinely am not interested in opinion polls in the way that you suggest, I'm not interested in party political developments either. I'm perfectly comfortable with how I'll be voting at the next general election, I'll be voting Conservative. And I would work to elect a Conservative government.

But as far as the election in London is concerned, I'm standing as Steve Norris, who's got a huge amount of experience as a Conservative MP, as a Conservative minister of transport for London - the first person to actually hold that job and certainly the person who has held it for the longest since it was instituted.

I'm standing as somebody who understands business as well as government, who has run large organisations in the public and private sector and who will do absolutely everything he can 24 hours a day, seven days a week for London. That is what you vote on.

In my view asking somebody's politics in this particular context is rather like asking a businessman whether they vote Tory or Labour before you buy the firms' shares. I suspect that would be a rather indifferent way to judge the future prospects of the company.