He joined the Green Party in 1987 at the age of 20, and he organised the Party's 1994 European election campaign. He infiltrated the military base at Aldershot dressed as Ivan the Terrible during an arms fair. He was saluted by the guards as he drove through the gates in a large limousine with tinted windows. He tried to buy arms with Monopoly money.
He graduated from Goldsmith's College, London, with a first-class degree in politics and economics. He started to work on his PhD until the London Assembly distracted him. In May 2000 he stood as a Green candidate for the mayor of London and also for membership of the London Assembly as a London-wide candidate. He was elected to the London assembly.
"A vote for Darren Johnson on 4 May is a vote for a politician wholly unsullied by the kind of moral equivocations, exhibited by the other candidates. The only openly gay candidate in the contest - he's also the straightest." (Will Self in the Evening Standard)
He was given the Environment brief by the mayor Ken Livingstone.
Source: The Knitting Circle, U.K. - http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/people.html
