Is this a shagger I see before me?
Key 'London mayor' into your internet search engine and you discover that two car salesman are running for the capital's new office. One is Steven Norris, who made his first million selling Volkswagens in Wiltshire and bought a pea-green Rolls Royce to celebrate. The other is Frank Butcher of Albert Square, diamond geezer and unlovable rogue. The 'Frankly, we'd rather have Frank' site was set up in response to the fact that there is no real independent mayoral alternative to the established party candidates.
'Frank', as Frank's 'frank-talking' supporters would have it, 'is not a politician, he's one of us.' The Norris site wants us to believe something similar. Their man, though he now has the somewhat grudging backing of his party, is not concerned with ideology, he's just impatient to get things done. 'Action not politics', his slogan says.
The rivals have a few other things in common: both men have a bit of romantic hinterland; both wear their hearts on the sleeve of a flash suit; neither is afraid to call a spade a spade, or get his hands dirty (or employ a populist cliché ). And both are, you suspect, essentially fictional characters.
The Tories' unembarrassable first reserve has long been at pains to present himself as a maverick. He's the champion of civil liberties who firmly believes in capital punishment; he was instrumental in the great railway sell-off, yet sympathised with the road protesters at Newbury; he's a campaigner for freedom of information and a subject of tabloid intrusions; he's a Conservative anti-hunt protester who cries at Broadway tunes.
'But hell,' he says, ever the bloke's bloke, 'I've never been afraid of being the only fella in the regiment marching out of step...'
Steven Norris likes to admit he may irritate some people but he is equally fond of suggesting those same people could trust him to get the trains running on time, make things happen. 'Y'know, ruffle some feathers, if that's what it takes...'
The first thing he has to make happen when I arrive to meet him is solving the problem of how to get into his campaign office in Victoria. 'We're locked out,' his PR man explains, and sends me over the road for breakfast. Eventually the key to the Norris nerve centre is located, the public transport guru's full-time chauffeur comes to find me, and I'm ushered inside where a jolly (but fundamentally serious) Norris leads me through a corridor decked with his jolly (but fundamentally serious) posters. There is then a little debate as to who will get coffee; several orders for our three cups are placed with different campaign staff; two coffees eventually arrive.
By which time Norris is doing what you imagine is his second-favourite thing: talking about transport. 'I'm standing for mayor because I'm an appalling anorak who happens to know more about London's bus and Tube network than almost anyone else alive,' he says, and over the course of the next hour goes out of his way to prove the fact, explaining how he is patron of Susstrans bike initiative and of the 'ultra-green' Transport 2000 group (this in addition to his lucrative non-executive chairmanship of one of London's bus operators, and former directorship of the Road Haulage Association).
There is something mesmerising in listening to Norris talk about the city's traffic. He gets an evangelical glint in his eye. His voice goes up half an octave. He's the Billy Graham of bus lanes; the Jimmy Swaggart of the Central Line. It feels like we've been round the North Circular a couple of times before I get to ask a question.
And when Norris is not talking about his own transport policies he's rubbishing those of Ken Livingstone. Though Norris is, according to the latest poll, lying a distant third in the campaign with 11 per cent of the projected vote, he is making every attempt to convince anyone who'll listen that 'of course it's essentially a two-horse race'. He dismisses Frank Dobson loftily as a party placeman and he does not deign even to mention Susan Kramer, who he bullied and patronised on last week's Question Time. In his wilfully narrowed view it's either himself or Ken. 'When we heard Livingstone was in,' he says in his bullish way, 'this place really got a buzz - at last you know who your enemy is, what the battle is.
'Our job is a simple one,' he goes on, never a man to get mired in petty politicking. 'The dinner party conversation may be that voting for Ken is a good way to poke Blair in the eye with a stick; but in fact, of course, the best way to poke him in the eye with a stick is to vote for me.'
Norris is keen to characterise himself in this sense as the London equivalent of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the unashamed pragmatist in a city of political correctness: 'I make that comparison unhesitatingly,' he says. 'The reality is that Giuliani is a Republican in a city of Democrats. New Yorkers don't like him much but they respect him. I don't see why you need to be disliked as such, but people always respect someone who can deliver.'
There are those in Norris's own party who might be just as likely to draw a comparison between Norris and another celebrated American mayor. Not since Marion Barry was re-elected in Washington DC in 1994 after having been filmed in room 727 of the Vista International Hotel trying to persuade a former glamour model into his bed while taking drags on a pipe full of crack cocaine can a mayoral candidate have enjoyed such a special relationship with tabloid newspapers. Though Norris now talks of the week in 1993 when every day produced another unlikely front page Norris lover 'as a long, long, long time ago', it has come back to haunt him in this campaign.
Initially his candidature was blocked when a small group of his former constituency members in Epping Forest sent a letter to the London selection committee. The letter raked over Norris's infidelities and suggested him unfit for public office. There was an extra edge to it in that one of its signatories was the mother of Tim Collins, now William Hague's press secretary and in 1993 the 'brains' behind John Major's doomed 'Back to Basics' campaign, which Norris did so much to promote. Norris, 'for once allowing myself to be ungenerous', dismissed those responsible for the letter as a 'monstrous regiment' of 'harpies'. Meanwhile, the day his original candidature was announced was marked by a letter to the Times from his father-in-law, a retired rear-admiral, expressing astonishment at Norris's public plans to marry the fourth of his famous five mistresses - Lucy Clayton graduate Emma Courtney, the mother of Norris's third son - since as far as the rear-admiral knew, Norris was still married to his daughter.
Norris's reaction to these stories has always been to build them into his personal mythology. 'He makes a great virtue of his amorality,' says Sheila Gunn, the political journalist. And she should know: she was in the odd position of being the mistress who discovered she was being cheated on by Norris when she read Nigel Dempster's column. Certainly the 'Rolex Romeo' is fond of a lowest common denominator defence: I may be a serial adulterer, he has always suggested, but, hey, aren't we all (and anyway who else is going to get the trains running on time, ruffle a few feathers etc). Parliamentary insiders say he rather enjoys his tea room soubriquet 'shagger'. I wonder if he thinks his very public private life is something that enhances his appeal?
He looks a little pained, shakes his head. 'Oh, no, no, no, Tim,' he says, suddenly grave. 'Not proud of it, no. That's not me at all...'
The thing that saved Norris's political life back in 1993 was the fact that, unlike some of his colleagues in the Major administration, he had never preached on lifestyle choices. He continues to annoy the right of his party and Telegraph leader writers by supporting the abolition of Clause 28, and suggesting the Metropolitan Police should have more important concerns than rounding up gay men cruising in the dead of night on Hampstead Heath. (Norris is fond of responding to the question 'what will you do for the gay lobby?' with the reply 'gays use the Tube, too.')
Unsurprisingly for a man with his track record, Norris does not see any link between public and private morality. 'I will run my campaign on the basis of Who I Am,' he says. 'And I won't fit into any identikit pictures if they clearly don't fit.'
Who Norris is, however, is almost anyone's guess: reading his autobiography Changing Trains , you have the sense of a man who has come to believe his own myths; talking to him, you feel he finds it hard to separate the stories from the reality (he describes his days running a car dealership in Salisbury, for example, as his 'Guys-and-Dolls-Damon-Runyon kind of life').
The son of a civil servant father and a teacher mother, he grew up in Liverpool, attending the same school as Paul McCartney (who used to play skiffle in free periods) and George Harrison. He says he still sees himself as a scouser and is as quick as ever to suggest how that makes him attractive: 'I have the huge advantage now of sounding and looking reasonably classless; I'm comfortable - after a good grammar school and Oxford - at any intellectual level, and at the same time I have the advantage of knowing that if I ended up back in a two-up-two-down in Liverpool I'd be fine. He smiles, and then corrects himself. 'Actually my mum will be on the phone: we also had a box bedroom in the front.'
Though the closest he apparently got to free love back then was a famous fumble with Edwina Currie behind the school bike sheds, does he see himself a child of the Sixties? He winces a little. 'I wouldn't go that far,' he says of his party's least favourite decade.
He believes his life is 'absolutely settled now with Emma'. She describes their relationship as 'extremely tactile' and displays a great capacity for trust. 'When someone says "I want your child", you tend to believe them,' she says of Norris.
Now 54, her jowly partner is enjoying his life as a new dad and suggests he has got his bed-hopping out of his system. Still, the closest he gets to introspection is to say that he 'internalises things too much, buries things too deeply, although I often cry in the car, which helps'.
Apart from a blocked nearside bus lane, what exactly opens the floodgates? 'Oh probably just a Cole Porter song or something,' he says. 'I am simply a hopeless sentimentalist and that might even mask a less attractive side of my character. Emma would say that I have an ability to cut myself off that is quite terrifying on occasions. It's the way some people respond to a challenge or to danger or whatever.
'I wouldn't say I was particularly brave physically - not,' he hastens to add, 'that I've ever had any problems in that line. I think we're all... you know ... I'm trying to find a thread. I'm a sentimentalist who might therefore not actually be prone to great swings of emotional depth.'
That superficiality is perhaps what allows Steven Norris to come across as having such an uncomplicated agenda. He has no problem, for example, in believing that though he walked from his job at the Ministry of Transport into extremely well-paid directorships with transport companies no one 'has ever once hired me for my contacts book'. Similarly he does not labour under the slightest Prescott-style guilt-trip when he discusses the problems of the 77a while his chauffeur idles outside.
But it is presumably this same relaxed conscience that prompted Sheila Gunn to say 'she fell in love with a man who didn't exist'. Norris's other one time amour, Edwina Currie, remarked in reviewing Changing Trains that Norris and his ilk, who grew up politically in the Thatcher years, 'just didn't get it': didn't understand that 'integrity and probity are not partial qualities... but must shine though every facet.'
Norris, typically, would rather let himself off more lightly. He once remarked that his epitaph would read 'Here lies Steven Norris. This is the first place he has taken seriously.' He has long proved the virtue of being able to laugh at himself; the difficulty he faces now, you sense, is persuading Londoners they don't have to share the joke.