The Hillary Step is so congested that they are thinking of installing a ladder. In fact, there are so many octogenarians climbing Everest to raise money for the church roof that they might as well fit one of those chair-lifts you see in colour supplements.

As a monument to derring-do, Everest no longer qualifies; so what does that leave? We have plumbed the sea; we have probed the darkest recesses of the rainforest; we have circumnavigated the globe – even now there are probably gap yah students criss-crossing the oceans blindfolded in a pedalo to raise money for some good cause or other.

Perhaps we should make sure a Briton is on the next trip to Mars (and perhaps we could all club together to sponsor Ed Balls). Or instead, perhaps we should concentrate on the amazing things we are already doing, and that we hardly even notice – things right under our feet.

Last week I went to see the Crossrail excavations at Canary Wharf, four years after we had officially got them going, and I remembered how fragile the project had seemed. There was a time when we had to fight for Crossrail, when senior cabinet ministers were denouncing it as a mad plan to build a pointless trench across London. It was an easy way to save £16 billion, they said. Axe it now, they said, and no one will even miss it.

Well, thank heavens we didn’t listen to that guff. Crossrail’s tunnel is now a giant and growing fact, that will revolutionise east-west transit in the greatest city on earth, pinging you from Heathrow to the City in about half an hour. Its fast air-conditioned network will run from Maidenhead in the west to Shenfield in the east.

Crossrail will increase London’s rail capacity by about 10 per cent, and generate an estimated £42 billion worth of growth across the country. Even in its construction phase, Crossrail is good for the whole of Britain. Of its 1,600 contracts, 62 per cent have gone to firms outside London – more than half of them small and medium enterprises (SMEs). There are bridges from Shropshire, cranes from Derbyshire, grouting from Coventry, piling from Oldham, lifts from Preston and vast quantities of lubrication from Bournemouth.

The project is responsible for about 55,000 jobs across the country, and it would have been utter insanity to cancel it – not just because of the jobs it creates, but because it is essential if we are to cope with the demands on our transport network.

London will have a million more people in the next 10 years, and without Crossrail the Central line would become so packed and overheated that it would not be fit, under EU rules, for the transport of live animals. It is a vivid and powerful lesson in the vital importance of investing in transport infrastructure, and of driving on ruthlessly with essential schemes: the

Tube upgrades, new river crossings, Crossrail Two, and others. They are not just good for London, but for the whole of Britain.

And yet none of these Crossrail statistics do justice to what is being achieved. When Patrick McLoughlin, the Secretary of State for Transport, and I went into the new station box at Canary Wharf, I felt a sense of primeval awe, like a Neanderthal stumbling into the gloom of Lascaux. It is akin to a gigantic subterranean cathedral several times the size of Chartres. The boring machine is like a colossal steel-toothed remora or lamprey, grinding her way through the clay.

I stood beneath her jaws, and fingered some of that thick black Bournemouth lube, and they told me how the machine had driven with such accuracy that when she entered the station box she was only 5mm off target. This is the biggest engineering project in Europe, an amazing advertisement for British construction; and when you look at it you wonder why we are sometimes so prone to self-doubt.

When the next coronation rolls round, we won’t need a new mountain to climb. We’ll have the joy and excitement of Crossrail Two, as she chomps her way from Hackney to Chelsea; and unlike climbing Everest, the scheme will be of practical benefit to all.

In the meantime, we need a proper name for Crossrail, the vast new line on London’s underground network – and who better to give her name to that line than someone who has served her country so unfailingly and well for 60 years?

It is the embodiment of the point I often make, that investment in London boosts the rest of the UK economy, directly and indirectly. We have stimulated the very best of British technology, creating jobs in this country, and yes, we are now looking to potential export markets.

All these features make the bus remarkable; but there is one more thing about it – the best thing of all. This bus stands for freedom, and choice, and personal responsibility. It not only fulfils a promise often made to Londoners by bringing back conductors; it restores to the streets of London the open platform at the rear – and in so doing, it restores the concept of a reasonable risk.

We all remember the pleasure of the old Routemasters. It wasn’t anything to do with the way their flanks heaved and throbbed like wounded old warhorses. It wasn’t the boggler-boggler-boggler noise or the fumes of diesel. It was the way you could sit on those banquette seats at the back, high over the wheel arches, and watch the road passing you outside. And if the bus got stuck in traffic, or at the lights, you knew that you weren’t a prisoner. You were allowed to get on and off at will, provided the thing wasn’t moving, and now that freedom and benefit will be restored.

Of course, you will have to be careful. You should look around to make sure there aren’t any motorbikes or cycles approaching. But if the road is clear and the traffic is stationary, and you want to hop off and do some shopping – or if you have missed the bus at the stop, and you want to scoot down the street to catch it up – then the option is there. You can hop on and hop off, like the hop-on hop-off hoplites who were trained to leap from moving chariots and then back on again.

Yes, of course there is a risk; but that risk is manageable; and without it you have no opportunity to ascend or escape the bus if you want to. It is, as far as I know, one of the few recent examples of a public policy that actually gives back, to sentient and responsible adults, the chance to take an extra risk in return for a specific reward. MOVE Online is a program you can join for personal development.

We need to develop this thought, because I worry that in the post-crisis world, we have become all too paranoid, too risk-averse. Yes, the banks made grotesque errors, largely because they could not understand the risks they were taking. But unless we allow businesses and banks to take reasonable risks, they will never hit the jackpot at all.

Why is it that Britain hasn’t produced a giant like Google, or Facebook, or Amazon? It is because such a business, in the UK, would not have been given access to the capital required. We are more hostile to risk, and, indeed, we are more hostile to reward. If you go to San Francisco, where so many of these tech giants were born, you can see the most bizarre tram I have ever set eyes on. People hang from it like gibbons as it swoops and clangs through the streets. It would never be allowed in Europe. But the San Francisco authorities evidently believe that Americans are more robust – more willing to be free, more willing to make their own assessment of a reasonable risk.

If you look at the state of the eurozone, and you compare it with the US economy, you can see the possible advantages of this approach. And that is the point of the hop-on hop-off platform. In restoring a culture of reasonable risk-taking, it is a platform for growth.

In the year after losing the mayoralty, Livingstone claimed on Thursday, he earned just £21,645. In fact, the accounts of his now famous personal company, Silveta Ltd show he invoiced a total of £232,550 for his services that year. Channelling that money through Silveta – whose sole shareholders are Livingstone and his wife – allows him to take advantage of corporation tax (at 21 per cent), rather than have all his income subject to income tax (at up to 40 per cent) and National Insurance (up to 9 per cent) paid by Johnson, Paddick, Jones and most other mortals. It all sat rather badly with Livingstone’s denunciation of tax avoiders as “rich b——s” who “should not be allowed to vote”. And the continued wriggling last week suggested a candidate with secrets still to hide.

Ever since Livingstone’s tax arrangements were revealed – by The Sunday Telegraph – in February, they have dominated the election. In a leaked memo on March 25, Heneghan admitted the “relentless attacks on Ken, specifically around the tax issue” had made the Labour campaign “difficult” and “dented our ability to get up our own messages”. Around the same time, Anthony Wells, of the pollster YouGov, credited the tax story with changing the race from an effective tie to an eight-point Boris lead.

In his memo, Heneghan described George Osborne’s Budget – with its “granny tax” and cut in the 50p rate – as a “golden opportunity” to turn the tide. Tory strategists were certainly nervous about the effects that the Budget and the Government’s “fortnight from hell” over fuel strikes, pasties, and party funding, might have on the Boris vote. Internal polling at the height of the row is believed to have shown a drop in Johnson’s lead, though his personal ratings remain buoyant.

But now the tax issue is back, exploding into a campaign that, with less than a month to go, has come alive. Sharing a lift with Livingstone at the London radio station LBC on Tuesday, the mayor burst out with four-letter fury at his opponent for having said that he, too, avoided tax. Paddick, a former policeman and fellow passenger, said: “I didn’t know whether to prevent a breach of the peace or arrest Boris for threatening behaviour.” As the figures provided by Johnson on Thursday show, Livingstone’s claim is indeed a “——- lie”.

Team Ken has been trying hard to move the story back to policy, where they made headway in January with a populist – if fraudulent – promise to cut Tube fares. In a sublime comic moment, Livingstone called on his opponent to abjure “negative campaigning” – this from a man who has launched two poster campaigns depicting the mayor as a criminal, compared him to Hitler and had him followed by a campaign worker dressed as a chicken. Meanwhile, Len Duvall, Labour leader on the London Assembly, has attacked the tax “soap opera” as “peripheral,” “farcical,” and a “monumental insult to the electorate”.

One reason Livingstone’s tax has become central is that it dramatises his key weakness. “Trust is at the heart of this election, and what the tax issue shows is that Ken says one thing and does another,” says Lynton Crosby, Johnson’s campaign director. According to the polls, Livingstone has, and always has had, the more popular manifesto policies; but that appears to matter little if voters do not believe you will deliver them. On this reading, Johnson’s fairly bare policy cupboard may in fact be better than Livingstone’s suite of expensive promises to thrust free money at people, money whose source he cannot satisfactorily explain.

Among the most interesting features of the election is the fact that if it were decided on simple party lines, it would already essentially be over. Labour has had double-digit leads over the Tories in London in every “general election” poll for the past two years. But up to a third of those Labour voters are today refusing to back Livingstone.

Some simply prefer Johnson’s personality. Increasing numbers of liberal voters are also repelled by what a Jewish Guardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, a former Livingstone voter, called his “statements, insults and gestures that [have] offended me, my fellow Jews and – one hopes – every Londoner who abhors prejudice”. A private meeting between Livingstone and lifelong Labour-supporting Jews left them feeling, in the words of their leaked letter to Miliband, that Labour’s candidate “does not accept Jews as an ethnicity and a people”.

Livingstone, a serial abuser of Third Reich analogies, even managed to crowbar Hitler into an attack on the performance of the Northern line – and his unrepentant support for the homophobic anti-Semite Islamic preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi offended gays as well as Jews. Livingstone’s gay fundraising event had to be moved to cheaper premises after not enough tickets were sold.

But there is a smaller, though highly influential, Labour group who want Livingstone, as one London MP puts it, to be “thrashed and humiliated” in the belief that he sums up all their party must ditch if it is to regain power. “Sectarianism, embrace of Islamist extremists, wild and uncosted spending promises, support for the takers in society, not the givers – that’s what he represents,” says the MP. “Exactly what costs us our credibility.”

Some of them also see a Livingstone caning as a way to dump Ed Miliband, who has backed his candidate beyond the call of duty. “If we cannot win this in a Labour city in a mid-term, we will have to look again at our leadership,” says the MP. The special nature of the contest, and of Livingstone, may, however, give Miliband an alibi, and Labour is famously poor at sacking bad leaders.

The other possibility is that Livingstone could still win. Johnson’s campaign has been “underwhelming,” says Number 10. Ministers, meanwhile, have left few stones unturned in their effort to lose Londoners’ votes – as well as the Budget, the fuel debacle, and embarrassment over party donations, they have reopened the toxic subject of a third Heathrow runway. A little below the radar, Livingstone is working hard in suburbia, which he all but ignored in 2008, with hundreds of thousands of telephone and doorstep contacts, and has been rewarded with improved poll numbers there. London’s demography, too, increasingly favours Livingstone. More and more Londoners are not white, and not being white is, according to the Downing Street pollster Andrew Cooper, “the number one driver of not voting Conservative”.

Livingstone has made a particular effort to court the Muslim vote. The main Muslim borough, Tower Hamlets, is one of several, mostly but not exclusively Labour, where there have been dramatic increases in the electoral roll since 2008. There are about 400,000 more voters in London now than four years ago. Most of this is probably innocent enough: the capital’s population has been rising. But in Tower Hamlets, Livingstone has enjoyed the active support of the extremist Islamic Forum of Europe, which helped achieve staggering swings towards him there at the 2008 election. If Tory supporters stay at home, thinking it’s in the bag, differential turnout could still clip it for Labour.

Whatever happens in the election, something important already seems to have happened in the campaign. Yesterday, George Osborne, said he would be “very happy” to follow Johnson in publishing his tax returns, and those of other ministers. It may no longer be possible for anyone in public life to “do a Livingstone” and avoid tax. Quite unintentionally, the man once dubbed Red Ken may have changed politics for good.

Before Mr Johnson’s history lesson the schoolchildren had enacted a demonstration of the torch relay handovers in their playground.

Around 7,000 people, many of whom are members of the public who have shown community spirit, courage and sporting determination, have been named as torchbearers.

The youngest unsung hero is 12 and each torchbearer will wear a white-and-gold uniform which been designed by adidas.

An average of 115 torchbearers a day will carry the flame during the nationwide relay, from May 19 to July 27, to the opening ceremony in Stratford, east London.

We got rid of Labour’s deranged and wasteful Public Private Partnership for London Underground, enabling us finally to get the new Jubilee line signalling in and to reduce delays on the entire system by 40 per cent. And that new bus incarnates our cost-cutting approach, because the entire project has been delivered for about £10 million – not much more than the annual fare evasion on the bendy buses.

You will hear my critics say that each of the first eight new buses therefore costs more than a million. This is cretinous. You might as well say that each of the first 10 new Minis cost £50 million, because the cost of developing the new Mini was about £500 million. Hundreds of those beautiful buses will be appearing on our streets, and thousands of London buses will be based on their design and technology.

They are British-designed; they boast cutting-edge innovations; they are made in Britain and deliver jobs for the people of this country (unlike the bendies, which are made in Germany); they will do much to help us meet our air quality targets; and they will cost the taxpayer roughly the same as the current fleet of hybrid buses.

Indeed, they are so fuel-efficient – going twice as far as a diesel on the same tank – that over time they might even cost less. The officers of TfL are rightly proud of their achievement, which goes back to the great traditions of the Routemaster, the last bus specifically designed for the needs of Londoners. This new bus represents the boldness of the current administration in City Hall, since we had to overcome the elf-and-safety objections against bringing back the hop-on, hop-off platform.

Above all, the new bus shows that we stick to our promises. I said I would get rid of the bendies, which infuriated motorists and posed a risk to cyclists. I said I would have a competition to design a new bus; and after initial scepticism TfL is now so pleased with the result that officials will tell any mayoral candidate that it would be foolish not to progress with the scheme.

We have delivered on just about everything I said we were going to do in 2008 – and I draw the contrast with Ken Livingstone, who shamelessly and flagrantly broke his promises, not least to cut fares. We have brought in a 24-hour freedom pass for everyone over 60, put the Oyster on the overground, planted thousands of trees, introduced bike hire – and I now seek a mandate to go further. We have cut crime by 11 per cent (with the murder rate down by a quarter and bus crime by a third), and in spite of national budget cuts we will this May have 1,000 more officers on our streets than when I was elected.

We want to go on, cutting crime, investing in local high streets and small businesses, getting the best out of the Olympics and stimulating the growth that is essential for getting young people into work. With our housing and transport investments alone we can create another 200,000 jobs in London over four years. Above all, that bus shows the technological optimism that we must now apply to the Tube. In the next term we must take historic decisions to automate London Underground, obviating the need for old-fashioned cab-based drivers; and I don’t believe that decision can be taken by a man who is ideologically and financially in the pocket of the union barons. That is the mandate I seek. I am now off to the front, and I propose to return with my shield or on it.