Tired of American politics? Then why not look overseas and take solace that it's not quite as insane as the London Mayoral elections? Some limey named Rich Johnston holds our hand through it all, starting…now:

American spin doctors have become masters at sanding down any politician's hard spiky edges we normally refer to as "personality" so not even a timid-but-closed-minded field mouse with a heart murmur is offended. The only way Presidential candidates now differentiate themselves in the mind of the voter is by being black, female or Yoda. However, since the Great British Public see no need to bleach their teeth, why bother with their politicians?

Even so, the candidates for Mayor of London — the most powerful directly-elected position in the country — are as mad as a sackful of badgers. The incumbent candidate is maverick Labour Party politician Ken Livingstone (left, above), a never-married newt-loving hardline socialist with five children from three women, a penchant for comparing Jewish reporters to concentration camp guards and saying random things like "I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lampposts."

His challenger is the Conservative Party's Boris Johnson (right, above) — a straw-haired bumbling cross between Hugh Grant and the cast of "Deliverance" with a reputation for idiocy and drug use. He's also been accused of quibbling with a journalist he had an affair with over the price of an abortion.

And the third party contender is the Liberal Democrats' Brian Paddick, a gay ex-police commissioner famed for instructing his police team not to arrest cannabis users.

Any one of these would have been shot on sight by party figures in the U.S., but London actually seems to welcome such moral… let's call them eccentricities. And so, in the next installment of Indecision Internationale: London Mayoral Election, you will get to know Ken Livingstone. Intimately.