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Question: Given your lack of direct political experience, why do you think you're the best person to run London?

Paddick: Because I've got a great deal of managerial experience. I've managed £37m budgets, I've managed teams of people in excess of 1,000.

I know London inside out, not only from being a Londoner, but from being a police officer you get to deal and to see all the issues, not just crime but all the issues associated with crime.

So all in all, in terms of actually running London, I think I'm by far the best qualified candidate.

Question: What would your priorities be if you were elected?

Paddick: My priorities are Londoners' priorities. Londoners' number one priority is crime, number two is transport and number three is housing. So they are the three issues that I'm going to major on. And clearly in one of those issues, I am by everybody's judgement the expert.

Question: You mention you're the best candidate, and policing and crime is one of your obvious skills. Ken Livingstone has increased the numbers of police in the city, where do you think he's failed on the policing and crime front?

Paddick: Well he's spent an enormous amount of council taxpayers' money on increasing not only the number of police officers but the number of police community support officers. But what he's done, he's given a blanket coverage across the whole of London. You have the same safer neighbourhood teams - three PCSOs, three police officers - in every ward in London.

Question: Where do you think Livingstone has failed on security and crime?

Paddick: Well he's increased the number of police officers, but he still hasn't dealt with the issue that 25 per cent of police officers' time is spent in police stations using two fingers to input crime reports.

What you really need to do is increase the level of administrative support so that these highly paid, highly qualified police officers spend more time out on the streets.

The budget is there now because we've got these unqualified people - police community support officers - who spend all their time out on the street.

What we need to do is get those people in the police stations trained up in keyboard skills to make sure that the fully trained and fully equipped police officers spend more time out on the street.

Question: It's fairly widely recognised that Livingstone has increased the number of buses and the tubes have improved somewhat and Conservative candidate Boris Johnson has promised to get rid of bendy buses. How would you take transport forward?

Paddick: Lib Dems are famous for recycling, so we're not going to scrap the bendy buses, we're going to push them out to the suburbs where there are nice long straight roads with big gaps between junctions, where bendy buses might actually be effective. But they are absolutely totally unsuited to inner city roads, so we'd certainly ban them from inner city London.

The tube is still a mess. We've got the catastrophe over the public private partnership, a Labour initiative, and we've got to sort that mess out. And anybody who lives south of the river will tell you that the underground system is at breaking point. So we've got to try and think of other ways of handling the mass movement of people into London.

As far as buses are concerned, bus jams have now replaced car jams in central London. It's the old joke that you can get from one end of Oxford Street to the other more quickly by walking along the roofs of the stationary buses than you can by taking a bus. We've got to have a far more intelligent approach to transport rather than throwing buses at it.

Question: What about taking forward devolution in London? Do you think assembly members need more powers or is the whole point of the devolution settlement in London that most of the powers are invested in the mayor and the assembly members provide a scrutiny role?

Paddick: The way it's supposed to work is you have the mayor with the powers and you have the London Assembly providing the effective scrutiny. What we've seen is because the assembly is powerless to do anything other than to interfere with the mayor's budget, and then only by two thirds majority, the mayor can actually do whatever he likes. And in Ken Livingstone's case he does do whatever he likes no matter what Londoners say. We need to make the London Assembly an effective check and balance against the powers of the mayor.

Question: In terms of the other candidates, Johnson has been criticised for some of the allegedly racist comments he's made in the past and for his non-traditional London background. What do you think of Boris? Would he make a terrible mayor given his background and some of the things he's said?

Paddick: Boris is a very bright guy - you don't get into Eton and Oxford by being stupid. But Boris has got into the habit of believing that nobody will like him unless he makes a joke. There are these accusations of him being racist and him being sexist, but at the end of the day he just can't help cracking jokes and quite often they're offensive to the people that he's making the joke about. And we need a serious ambassador for London to be our mayor - not a clown.

Question: It seems to be part of his strategy to restrict media access, but given his record, isn't a gaffe inevitable?

Paddick: There are two things there. One is that he appears to have some rather fearsome looking minders to keep him away from the press to make sure he doesn't drop himself in it.

And if the reports are to be believed he's given up alcohol for the duration of the campaign, presumably for a similar reason. What Londoners have got to realise is four years is a hell of a long time for the mayor to be kept out of the media so he doesn't make any gaffes, and for him to give up drink.

We're not talking about somebody who can behave appropriately for four months of a campaign, we're talking a mayor who can behave for four years in the interests of London. And quite clearly, Boris can't do it.

Clearly Boris is under strict orders not to be himself and clearly once you have had a drink or two you tend to become more yourself than if you haven't had a drink, you let your defences come down and the true you comes out.

I am quite happy for people to see me after I have had a couple of glasses of wine but clearly Boris's minders are very concerned that he will revert to type after he's had a couple of glasses of whatever his particular tipple is. 

Question: You've had some of your own experiences with the press. Do you think some of the newspapers that targeted you when you were a senior police officer have grown up a bit in terms of their attitude towards sexuality?

Paddick: I think there are still some thinly veiled homophobes within the media. And there are still some people who for some extraordinary reason believe that gay and lesbian people shouldn't be in positions of authority.

I don't think we're going to get away from that. But generally speaking, certainly my relationships with the newspapers who were the most rabid in their attacks on me in the past, certainly have improved significantly.