Meet 'Risky' Phil, the UK's leading anti-ULEZ campaigner

After the speeches, Cox seized the microphone to thank a chap standing alongside him in a hi-vis vest, saying: “Now give a big thanks to Risky Phil, who organised today’s meeting and the others leading up to it elsewhere around the M25.”

The subject of the congratulations urged everyone present to “keep up the good fight” before stepping off the bus and melting into the crowd.

I recognised him as one of the guys who had earlier waved me into the car park. Aspiring mayors and former parliamentarians aside, was Risky Phil the real power behind the anti-ULEZ campaign and others fought on behalf of disgruntled drivers and bikers down the years?

I had to know, which is how, a few days later, I found myself at Elliott’s home. I was keen to hear his story, but first I wanted to know why, living so far from London, he was so worked up about the ULEZ.

“Because people who live here and whose cars don’t meet the ULEZ regs but who have driven down to London on business or to see friends and family have told me that, before the scheme even goes live, they’ve received letters from Transport for London [TfL] warning them that it’s happening and that if they enter the zone when it has been expanded, they will be charged,” he explained.

“It’s outrageous that TfL is tracking people and wasting taxpayers’ money writing to them.”

Later, a TfL spokesperson confirmed that between February and July, the organisation sent more than one million warning letters to motorists its cameras saw driving non-compliant cars in Greater London. However, they wouldn’t reveal at what cost, on the grounds that the information was “commercially sensitive” to the DVLA, which posted them.

Elliott’s crusade against politicians who he believes are interfering with his and others’ lives goes back to 2008, when London’s Low Emission Zone was implemented to clean up diesel-powered commercial vehicles.

“I was living in London and running a truck-recovery business,” he explained. “The new regulations threatened my work. I tried to fight back, but nobody was listening and my business eventually folded, because I couldn’t afford to upgrade my truck.”

This experience left Elliott determined to push back on further incursions into people’s lives and livelihoods by what he described as, to put it politely, meddlesome politicians, but it was the expansion of the ULEZ and the threat of pay per mile as a replacement for vehicle excise duty and/or fuel duty that got him (and others) really rattled.

On the condition that I wouldn’t name names, he showed me the list of people with whom he shares a WhatsApp group – mainly popular social media figures and campaigners from motoring and related fields, plus a few politicians.

Its purpose seemed to be to share information and ideas. Nothing about it was extreme, although some members did have a whiff of the conspiracy theorist about them.

This is an aspect of Elliott’s argument that can become a little wearing, but he makes no apologies.

“The difference between the conspiracy theory and the reality is six months. One always follows the other,” he said. “The ULEZ is a money-raising exercise. You think they will stop once they've cleared the roads of older cars? They will just raise the bar so that petrol cars must be at least Euro 5 and diesels Euro 7.”

Elliott is intelligent, articulate, a natural organiser (“I get people together and find where they share common ground”) and sensitive, too.

For example, he recounted the story of a father with a disabled son who changed his non-compliant van for a newer one that he thought was compliant but proved not to be. “The new van has dropped in value, leaving him with a big debt,” said Elliott, genuinely concerned.