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> Vote for London, vote Ken on May 1

Vendredi 25 avril 2008

http://www.kenlivingstone.com/
http://www.labour.org.uk/
http://www.youtube.com/

Cet article a été publié le Vendredi 25 avril 2008 à 12:32 et est classé dans Socialistes.

6 Réponses vers “> Vote for London, vote Ken on May 1”

  1. kerzantrec a dit :

    Mardi 29 avril 2008 à 3:59

    So… Really, I hope for Ken ! Red Ken…

    Eh oui, “Ken le Rouge”, bien affaibli cependant par la politique travailliste (… ?) de Gordon Brown, après l’inneffable Tony Blair. Bon, OK, il n’avait pas trop mal démarré mais il est parti trop tard et trop Thatchéro-Bushiste (version caniche vis-à-vis du second, le crétin de l’Univers)…

    Il faut reconnaître que, comme David Cameron au plan national, tory plutôt “progressiste” et écolo, son adversaire Boris Johnson est un conservateur atypique, moins “réac” que la droite classique, donc potentiellement électoralement plus dangereux !

    A propos, cher nucnuc, on ne t’entend pas sur l’Italie, où la déroute des élections municipales à Rome complète et “achève” celle des législatives : un post (?)- fasciste à la mairie…

    Je sais bien que le Pape -le PanzerPape !- s’était permis récemment de critiquer la municipalité romaine -et avait donc appelé ainsi à voter à (l’extrême) droite, tout comme son porte-flingue le sinistre cardinal Ruini avait tout fait pour pousser à la chute de Prodi et au retour de Berlusconi l’escroc démagogue réac… (et vulgaire, en prime)-, mais quand même, quel désastre !

    Pourtant, Veltroni a “désidéologisé” au maximum… Il ne se voulait même plus de gauche !!! Il ne fallait plus attaquer Berlusconi -adieu Nanni Moretti !-, voire s’apprêter, sur certains sujets, à travailler avec lui…

    On a vu le résultat.

    Une ligne assez “blairiste”… oserais-je dire “qui te ressemble, cher nucnuc, parfois” ?!? Eh oui, on t’entend si rarement “à gauche”. Dommage, avec ton talent et ton dévouement, tu n’y déparerais pas !!!

    A Gauche, camarade !!!

    Moi, je suis nostalgique d’Enrico Berlinguer… Eh oui, en Italie, j’aurais voté PCI…

    Merci quand même d’accueillir ces lignes “dissidentes” sur ton blog (tu ne m’as censuré qu’une fois… une fois de trop, mais bon !).

    Gaucho nono

  2. kerzantrec a dit :

    Vendredi 2 mai 2008 à 8:22

    Complément… en forme de rectificatif !

    Pour avoir lu plus précisément les articles sur “Boris le Bouffon” hier, 1er mai, je nuance mon jugement de mardi : Boris Johnson est excentrique, certes, mais dans son comportement… Pour le fond il s’est honteusement autorisé nombre de “saillies” racistes ou homophobes… Plus que des dérapages ! Donc “moins réac”, c’était un peu vite dit. Méa culpa !!!

    Par contre, en ce vendredi (10 H du matin) où les premières estimations semblent indiquer qu’on se dirige vers une déroute totale, une Bérézina -la pire depuis 40 ans- des Travaillistes, notamment dans le Nord industriel, l’analyse selon laquelle le “modèle” blairiste est épuisé (laissons le à Jean-Marie Bockel et Eric Besson-le-félon !) et que les tories apparaissent quasiment plus “progressistes”, voire plus sociaux (… !), qu’eux se confirme cruellement…

    Veltroni en Italie, Gordon Brown en Grande-Bretagne, la “désidéologisation” -pour ne pas dire la “droitisation”- n’est, au moins électoralement, pas rentable… A méditer !

    Et toi, dear nucnuc, qu’en penses tu ?

  3. Hugues a dit :

    Vendredi 2 mai 2008 à 12:27

    Quand la gauche française sera épuisée d’avoir été réélue sur plus de onze années consécutives, alors tu nous appellera, comme d’autres, vers de nouvelles victoires. Si le modèle blairiste dont tu parles a mis autant de temps a s’épuiser, c’est qu’il n’était pas aussi foncièrement mauvais. Nous, nous avons l’habitude de mettre moitié moins de temps pour subir une défaite sans appel. Est-ce de l’essoufflement ? La République nous appelle à un peu plus de courage camarade. Et du courage et de la remise en cause, je n’en vois point de ce côté-ci de la Manche ou de ce côté-ci des Alpes…

  4. filipgraindesel a dit :

    Vendredi 2 mai 2008 à 7:24

    Where Ken’s campaign went wrong

    * Andrew Sparrow, senior political correspondent
    * guardian.co.uk,
    * Friday May 2 2008

    Beating Ken Livingstone in an electoral contest is a feat that was beyond even Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.

    Thatcher decided to abolish the Greater London council when Livingstone was its leader in the 1980s because she had no confidence that the Conservatives would ever be able to take control through the ballot box.

    And when Tony Blair and the New Labour machine managed to stop Livingstone being selected as the party’s official candidate before the first mayoral elections in 2000, Livingstone went on to run as an independent and, as he put it himself, “smashed” Labour into the ground.

    But if the predictions about the outcome of this year’s mayoral contest are correct – the Tories and Labour both expect a Johnson victory – the Livingstone election-winning magic has disappeared.

    Livingstone’s campaign was not disastrous. But there were several reasons why he failed to perform as well as he did in 2000 and 2004.

    1. Boris was right for the contest
    Mayoral elections are not the same as parliamentary or local elections. They appear to favour colourful exhibitionists (which is why a football team mascot dressed up as a monkey once famously won a mayoral contest in Hartlepool). It also seems to help if candidates are not associated with a party machine. In the last two elections, Livingstone has excelled at this kind of mayoral politics. In Johnson, he appeared to meet his match. Johnson is even more of a populist than Livingstone.

    2. The incumbency factor
    Livingstone argued that having done the job for eight years gave him invaluable experience. But Johnson’s message that it was “time for a change” seemed to go down well with the voters. Some observers said Livingstone appeared tired and old (he is 62), and that he was not campaigning with the panache he used to have.

    3. Scandals and cronyism
    In the run-up to the election, a series of stories emerged about the misuse of grants awarded by the London Development Agency. The sums involved were not enormous, but Livingstone seemed unwilling to take the complaints seriously, and the stories reinforced the impression that he was careless about the abuse of public money. Livingstone was also accused of “cronyism” because of the behaviour of some of his political advisers at City Hall. The mayor could have either rebutted the allegations successfully, or disowned his staff. But he did neither.

    4. The Evening Standard
    The allegations against Livingstone were not, on their own, necessarily fatal. But they were pursued aggressively by the Evening Standard, London’s monopoly paid-for evening paper, which published a relentless stream of anti-Livingstone stories. Media studies students will no doubt spend many hours investigating the exact impact this had, but one thing is certain: it didn’t help.

    5. Conservative cash
    The Financial Times reported yesterday that Johnson amassed a £1.5m war chest to spend on the campaign. Livingstone could not match this.

    6. Alienating the progressive vote
    Livingstone has a record of taking unpopular positions on foreign policy issues, but in his second term of office he did something that may have cost him much-needed support. In 2004 he invited the Islamic cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi to a summit in London. The invitation infuriated many of Livingstone’s supporters on the left who viewed al-Qaradawi as homophobic and anti-Semitic. Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman, cited this as one of the reasons why he thought Livingstone was unfit to be mayor.

    7. Crime
    Johnson put crime at the heart of his campaign. Livingstone argued that crime overall had gone down in London while he had been in charge. But Johnson focused on gun and knife crime, issues that seemed to arouse genuine concern. At times, Livingstone’s stance appeared complacent.

    8. The association with Labour
    Labour performed dreadfully in last night’s elections in England and Wales. As in previous years, Livingstone outperformed his party. He must be wondering if he would have done better to stand as an independent.

    9. Johnson’s zone 5 strategy
    The Conservatives invested an enormous amount of energy in getting voters in the pro-Tory London suburbs to vote for Johnson. In 2000 and 2004, voters in these areas appeared to take little interest in the mayoral election. It is said that some of them do not really consider themselves Londoners. But Johnson’s strategy of targeting them appears to have paid off.

    10. The anti-Boris campaign didn’t work
    Labour could never really decide whether to attack Johnson as a harmless joke or as a reactionary Conservative who would harm London’s interests. At times, both lines of attack were tried. But there was inherent contradiction between them, and this probably blunted their effectiveness.

  5. filipgraindesel a dit :

    Dimanche 4 mai 2008 à 6:58

    ‘Underdog’ Brown begins fightback after Labour election flop

    * guardian.co.uk,
    * Sunday May 4 2008

    This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Sunday May 04 2008. It was last updated at 17:05 on May 04 2008.

    Gordon Brown appears on the Andrew Marr Show

    Gordon Brown began his fightback on the Andrew Marr Show after Labour’s worst electoral performance in 40 years. Photograph: Getty Images

    Gordon Brown this morning admitted Labour may now be the “underdog” of British politics following its worst local election results for 40 years, but said the party was “fighting hard”.

    In the first of a pair of a television interviews, the prime minister told Andrew Marr on the BBC’s Sunday AM show that he had a “clear and unequivocal sense of direction”.

    It was vital for his government to show voters it understood their anxieties about rising prices and standard of living, he said, adding: “I feel the hurt they feel.”

    Later on Sky News he refused to end speculation that a measure to ease the cost of living – such as a further postponement of the fuel duty increase -
    would be announced.

    Visibly uncomfortable at times in both interviews, Brown fielded a series of questions about his personal leadership style and health and admitted to Marr it had “not been the best weekend”.

    The prime minister conceded mistakes had been made over the abolition of the 10p tax rate and allowing speculation about a snap election to run too long last year. He said he did not expect a challenge to his leadership of the party, however.

    “Of course we can recover from this position,” he said, “and I will tell you how.”

    “First of all by sorting out the immediate problem with the economy and showing people we can come through, as we have in the past, very difficult economic times.

    “Secondly by showing people we have a vision of the future that will carry the country – optimistically in my view – into its next phase.

    “That is all about chances, opportunities, a fair deal for working families, helping people get on to the first rung of the housing ladder, helping people get opportunity in education – more universities and more colleges – the big building blocks for the future that we are putting in place.”

    Speaking on Sky News, Brown fuelled speculation that the government would this week unveil a series of measures designed to ease household spending and help Labour recover from Thursday’s election results.

    He did not rule out the possibility of eventually dropping the 2p fuel duty increase already deferred six months in chancellor Alistair Darling’s budget, and due to take effect in the autumn.

    Asked whether the rise would go ahead, Brown said: “This is a decision for the chancellor. It’s a decision in time.”

    “He said he would review it and he will review it.”

    However he indicated that his immediate priority in relation to fuel was to encourage international pressure on the oil-producing countries in Opec to reduce their prices. He said: “I think there is a strong case for putting on pressure.

    “Clearly also there needs to be some international effort with Opec to get the oil price down.”

    Marr asked Brown if this week’s elections – which saw Labour trailing 20 points behind David Cameron’s Conservatives and forced into third place behind the Liberal Democrats – meant his party was now the “underdog” in British politics.

    Brown said: “If we are the underdog, we are certainly fighting and we are fighting hard.

    “We are standing up for people facing difficulties, standing up for what I believe – and what I believe is that opportunity for every citizen in this country should be greater than it is at the moment – standing up against a Conservative party that looks like slick salesmen but actually doesn’t have the answers to the real challenges this country is facing.

    “That is the choice the country will face over the next few years,” he said.

    Brown said the lesson he had learnt from the bruising blows dealt him this week at the ballot box was that “you have got to be resilient in the face of adversity but you have also got to understand, and understand very clearly, how people are seeing things”.

    He added: “I think I am someone who believes passionately in opportunity and fairness. I believe that, over the last 10 years, I have shown that I can take people through difficult circumstances, including economic problems.

    “I believe that the real Gordon Brown is someone who is standing up at all times for hard-working families in this country.

    “That’s what makes me tick. That’s what I am about. That’s what the dividing line in politics is.”

    Responding to criticism about his personality, Brown said: “I think its true that I am a more private person in a public arena.

    “Perhaps I have spent too much time … looking at the detail to solving people’s problems.

    “But to solve people’s problems you have got to understand their problems.”

    He conceded he was more private than his predecessor, Tony Blair, but said he realised he had to be an “open book” so people could know who he was and what he stood for.

    Before Brown’s interviews, the shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox, personalised the Conservative attack on the prime minister.

    Fox said of Brown: “He’s a man who spent his entire life trying to get to be prime minister but doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do with it now he’s there.”

    Speaking on Sky News, the Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond, predicted Brown would struggle to turn the Labour party’s fortunes around, saying that, after 11 years as chancellor, Brown was not a fresh enough face.

    Salmond pointed out that the prime minister not only now works in a city run by a Conservative and has a constituency in a country run by the SNP, but that Brown’s local council was also run by Salmond’s Scottish Nationalists.

  6. filipgraindesel a dit :

    Dimanche 22 juin 2008 à 4:24

    Interview: Ken Livingstone

    How is the ex-mayor of London spending his enforced retirement? We found him bemused by the talk of his ’secret love-children’, still hurling insults at his enemies, stalking the new mayor through the corridors of power… and refusing to rule out yet another political comeback. Watch your back, Boris.

    * Carole Cadwalladr
    * The Observer,
    * Sunday June 22, 2008

    After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, which includes me rejecting the first plan of meeting in Costa Coffee, Ken Livingstone concedes that I can come to the garden of his home in Cricklewood, north-west London. There are a few conditions, though. ‘You can write about the garden but you can’t mention the house, anything that’s in the house or anybody who might be at the house.’

    Eh? I can’t quite get my head around this although, afterwards, this strikes me as a very Ken-like accommodation – i.e. a massive contradiction, particularly over the delicate subject of what is and isn’t in the public arena on his private life. Still, when I ring Andrew Hosken, a BBC journalist and the author of the excellent Ken biography, The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone, published just before the mayoral election in May, he says: ‘I assume you’ll be meeting him at his new office – Costa Coffee in West Hampstead?’

    Ha! I say. ‘Oh well, you’re honoured. He rarely lets journalists into the house.’ I can’t help thinking it’s a shame Livingstone didn’t invite more journalists over. Seeing the mayoral residence might have dispelled some of the wilder allegations of corruption, since it’s located just off Cricklewood Broadway, a part of London where gentrification is still a distant dream.

    Ken is very proud of his garden, though, which he created from scratch and it is lovely, small but lushly planted with wild strawberries and blackberries, peach trees, grapes and olives, with a huge pond. Aha! I think: the newts, or his ‘cold-blooded friends’ as the Daily Telegraph once described them, back when he was still Red Ken, the bedsit revolutionary, noting that he seemed happier with amphibian company than any human sort.

    They got that wrong, given the tangle of lovers and ex-partners who came to light just before the election, not to mention the ’secret love-children’: three of them, by two mothers (in addition to the two he has with current partner Emma Beal), causing a thunderclap of tabloid astonishment.

    Disappointingly, I don’t get to see the newts, but there, in the middle of garden, is Ken in an off-duty T-shirt finishing the weeding and just off to the kitchen to microwave some soup. Hosken told me he thought Livingstone ‘is still fairly traumatised’. When he started interviewing him last autumn, nobody realised the scale of the Boris threat.

    ‘Everyone was so smug and complacent. He clearly didn’t know his time was up… I think he must be a bit lost at the moment. His office was almost an extension of his home – his senior advisers were his closest friends, his partner worked there. When I saw him, he looked a bit like he’d lost his magic wand.’

    I’m expecting to see a broken man. And although it seems rather odd to see him microwaving Covent Garden soup in the middle of the day rather than being out trying to conquer the world, in actual fact, he looks rather good on it. He had a cadaverous quality by the end of the campaign, all sunken eyes and hollowed cheekbones, whereas now he’s tanned from a holiday in Corfu. Wrested from his suit and stripped of his flunkies, he seems rather more like the Ken of old, the scourge of Thatcher, the thorn in Millbank’s side.

    And anyway I suspect that he’s even now plotting his triumphant return. There’s a silver birch in the garden he planted when he’d already been in politics for 20 years and it’s now higher than the house. He was first elected to political office in 1971 and, apart from a brief hiatus after the abolition of the GLC, it’s all he’s known for nearly 40 years.

    ‘I think Sean Connery had it right: never say never again. Nobody thought he would come back and do another film. What I said when I was asked this during the election is still valid – I’m not going to think about that until it comes to 2010 and the Labour party calls for nominations.’

    In other words, surely, yes, particularly since he’s adamant he’d never accept a knighthood and, although he’s just turned 63, he tells me he has the same heart profile as Sebastian Coe. He goes on: ‘Tell me if this is too much information, but my prostate is as smooth as a billiard ball. I had to have a medical every year as mayor and basically they came back and said you’re going to live a thousand years.’

    Instead of taking up golf, his new hobby is going down to City Hall and stalking Boris through his old corridors of power like Banquo’s ghost or, as Dave Hill on the Guardian’s Comment is Free put it, like ‘Cato Fong, the half-mad martial-arts exponent who used to pounce without warning on Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther movies’.

    ‘I’m going to watch every one of them [the mayor's question time]. My entire adult life has been London politics and I find it fascinating to see how someone else is doing this job and watching him get on top of it. He’s only done one so far and it was all, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” Well, I’m sorry but that won’t wash in a year.’ This is a feud that will run and run.

    Last Thursday Ken rang the Today programme, where Boris was a guest, and goaded him for not having bothered to read the relevant memorandum he’d been invited on to discuss.

    But then, he has got time on his hands these days, although he is going to do a weekly talk show on LBC, is in talks for TV work, is starting on his autobiography and has signed up with an after-dinner speaking agency. But he is still ‘a complete workaholic’. Only without an actual job, anymore.

    Isn’t that a difficult adjustment to make, I ask, and get a very Ken-like answer involving Africa and evolution, before he concedes that it was a shock ‘waking up and opening my own letters, answering my own phone calls, planning my own schedule. It’s nice being back in control of your life. But I’d rather not be in control of my life but still running the system’.

    It’s his defining quality, this lust for power. There’s a lovely quote from his mother, Ethel, in the Hosken biography: ‘He wasn’t interested in going out with girls or going to football. He wasn’t interested in anything except his pet lizards and friends – always wanted to be the boss. No, you couldn’t say he was all that popular when he was young.’

    Ethel had been a dancer in a music hall, his father, Bob, a merchant seaman turned window cleaner, and Ken was born in his grandmother’s Streatham flat before the family moved to a new council estate in Tulse Hill. He failed his 11-plus, and after leaving Tulse Hill comprehensive became an animal technician in a cancer laboratory. His political awakening came after he enrolled at a teacher training college, then a hotbed of radical lefties, and stood for election to Lambeth council in 1971.

    He always wanted to be the boss and he’s got to be one for a fair amount of his working life. First at the GLC and then as mayor. And he is, by all accounts, a good one. On the evening that we meet, he’s due to head off to a party for his former employees for which, impressively, he’s paying out of his own pocket.

    ‘That’s very generous,’ I say. ‘Well nobody else was going to pay for it,’ he says. ‘And there’s a lot of people about to lose their jobs who worked hard for me for eight years. The least I owed them was a party.’

    He has an eye for detail, he delegates well, and he gets things done. Even his worst enemies agree that he was hugely instrumental in London winning the Olympic bid, throwing himself behind it early on, and whatever you think about the congestion charge system, it’s not that it doesn’t work. The question of his Blairesque ‘legacy’ is still up for grabs, but it’s down to him that Crossrail is finally going to happen and by anybody’s measure there’s a whole lot more buses on the roads. You even occasionally these days see a copper on a mountain bike rather than a panda car – he’s very proud of the fact that he’s ‘the first politician in 30 years to get policemen back out on the streets’.

    It’s when he’s not boss that he runs into problems. His years as an MP were spent in the wilderness, ‘making the wrong speech at the wrong time on the wrong subject’, according to London’s Evening Standard. And he’s always boasting about the insults he delivered, like telling Kinnock that he couldn’t win the 1992 election and ought to resign. When Tony Blair invited him into his office for a chat after his first four months in power and asked him how he thought it was going, he said: ‘Well, quite frankly, much worse than I expected.’

    But then it’s his outspokenness, his anti-politicianness, which has always endeared him to the public. He says it how he finds it, and has a talent for insults like no other. When I ask about Veronica Wadley, editor of the Evening Standard, which campaigned against his re-election, he calls her ‘pure evil’. And he refused to compare Amanda Platell, the former Tory spin-doctor and now Daily Mail columnist, to an attack dog ‘because that’s unfair to attack dogs’.

    It was Platell who wrote: ‘The strangest aspect of Ken Livingstone’s love life is not that he’s got five children, it’s that he managed to find three women in the world who were actually willing to sleep with him.’

    She’s wrong though: the strangest thing is that, somehow, amazingly, the whole story never came out before, even though his oldest child is 15. It’s alleged he was born within two months of his daughter by another mother, at the same hospital, and all while he was still living with his long-term partner, Kate Allen, now director of Amnesty International.

    ‘It wasn’t secret – thousands of people knew about my private life. But why would people want to talk to journalists about it? I’m talking about thousands of people, parents in schools, and friends of, and all that… they all knew. Even while I was a mayor and as an MP, I’d take children from schools around.’

    ‘You mean your children’s schools?’

    ‘Yes, yes. I’d go into the schools and open fetes and things. And very encouragingly the vast majority of people, except for one person who eventually talked to Hosken, respected privacy. It gives you a bit of confidence in humanity, doesn’t it?’

    It’s remarkable, that’s for sure. Andrew Hosken, who made the discovery, says it was ‘a jaw-dropping moment’. ‘I was doing all this research on him, interviewing hundreds of people and I suddenly realised I actually didn’t know a damn thing about him.’

    What I can’t quite believe is that Livingstone is not, in some ways, relieved. I also can’t help wondering if the children resent the fact that he wasn’t more open about them. ‘I’ve always acknowledged my children in my life, but it’s been among a neighbourhood or a school, just never in the media. Those kids were always completely open that I was their father. All I’ll say is that so much of what was reported was hilariously funny, we all sat down and had a damn good laugh about it.’

    According to John Mortimer, Livingstone was ‘perhaps the first genuinely left-wing leader to achieve real power in England’. Perhaps the last one, too, although Livingstone has always maintained a certain flexibility in his views – refusing, as GLC leader, to attend the wedding of Charles and Diana for example, but publicly mourning the Queen Mother when mayor of London.

    The World According to Ken is that Gordon Brown will lead the party into an election in May 2010 and has ‘a chance’ of winning. Ed Balls is the most talented of the younger generation, ‘although that’s probably the kiss of death for him’. And Boris is already plotting how to use London as his base for winning the leadership of the Tory party after two terms and becoming PM. Maybe it’s that which bothers him most – the ambition that he never realised.

    It’s almost impossible to imagine the political landscape without Ken Livingstone. He’s been such a force in British public life, outspoken, unpredictable, incapable of toeing any party line. Everybody has a view on him and for the just under half of London who did vote for him, his loss is an almost personal blow. What seems most unfair is that he won’t be mayor when the Olympics, which he did more than almost anyone to win, come to town. ‘I’ll be watching it on the television along with everyone else,’ he says.

    Just possibly, losing the mayoral election may have been a blessing in disguise for Livingstone. Humility does not come naturally to him. He’s always right. And he’s mind-numbingly intransigent – pointblank refusing to apologise, for example, for comparing a Jewish journalist from the Evening Standard to a Nazi concentration camp guard. His criticisms of Boris Johnson are also telling. ‘None of his appointments so far has been for jobs that were advertised. None was appointed on merit.’

    ‘But isn’t that what you did?’ I say.

    Later I meet his partner Emma Beal, who’s lovely, friendly and, I’m sure, highly competent, but if you’re going to avoid charges of cronyism you’d be better off not making your partner your office manager. Boris seems to think so anyhow, as she, along with four other Ken appointments, got the push this week.

    Ken won’t have it, though: ‘All of the jobs were advertised and all were appointed on merit.’ But they still managed to go to his oldest friends and advisers and, of those, it turns out that a significant swath happened to be members of a shadowy group called Socialist Action, which he describes to me as ‘a small, left-wing organisation that was the most sensible of the organisations within the Labour party and the most effective’.

    Most damaging was his refusal for months to sack his race-relations adviser Lee Jasper, despite a stream of revelations about his dubious dealings in the Evening Standard

    ‘On what evidence?’ he asks.

    ‘There was loads of evidence.’

    ‘There were a lot of allegations, no actual evidence. We’re still awaiting the results of the police investigation.’

    What it all shows – the Jasper affair, the Socialist Action cronies, the years of silence that surrounded his secret families – is how strong was the web of loyalties that bound him to his closest friends and colleagues. But, then, he’s often said that he learnt more from The Godfather than any book on politics, and it’s true that there is something of omertà about his allegiances and loyalties. The trouble, of course, with the Mob is that you’re required to die in harness, but I don’t think that bothers him, and there’s almost zero chance that he’ll retire to Bournemouth. He genuinely loves London.

    ‘I could never leave. I love it here. It’s where I want my children to grow up. When people say to me, “You shouldn’t have lost to Boris, it’s not fair”, I say to them, “If someone can remove you from political power, you shouldn’t be there. This is the life that we have chosen.” That’s a line in Godfather II when Hyman Roth says, “Mo Green was like a son to me, but when he was killed, I didn’t complain because this is the life we have chosen.” And these are the rules.’

    Who knows? Last time he was turfed out of power, he did pretty much what he’s doing now and re-emerged, like the bionic politician, stronger and wilier than before. He wrote a book, If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It, landed a gig on Radio 2 and managed to transform himself from Red Ken or ‘the Most Odious Man in Britain’, according to the Sun, to Cuddly Ken of Have I Got News For You

    He’s been ruthless in his time, his path to power at the GLC was a model of well-executed political assassination, and yet he’s charming in the flesh, dandling his little daughter, Mia, on his knee and tickling her under the arms.

    Everybody loves him, apart from the people who hate him. He’s one of the shrewdest political operators around and yet floundered miserably on the backbenches when he was in Parliament. And, for someone who’s been so adept at communicating with the electorate, he’s managed to maintain the most mysterious private life of almost anybody in the public eye. If I were Boris, I’d be watching my back for those kung fu moves.

    · Ken Livingstone will present the afternoon show on London’s talk radio station LBC from Monday 30 June to 4 July
    Simply red: Ken’s career

    Early life

    · Born 1945 in Lambeth, London, the son of Ethel Ada Kennard, a professional dancer, and Robert Moffat Livingstone, a ship’s master in the navy.

    · Failed the 11-plus at Tulse Hill comprehensive, but managed to obtain a few O-levels.

    Career

    · 1968: Joined the Labour party. Elected to Lambeth Council three years later, serving as the vice-chair of the housing committee.

    · 1981: Became leader of the Greater London Council, where he acquired the nickname ‘Red Ken’; Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986.

    · Elected Labour MP for Brent East.

    · 2000: Elected as the first mayor of London, despite losing the Labour party’s nomination to Frank Dobson. …#9632; 2004: Won re-election for a second term as mayor.

    · 2008: Defeated by Boris Johnson on 1 May.

    Personal life

    · 1982: Divorced his first wife, Christine. Now with Emma Beal, with whom he has a five-year-old son, Thomas, and a daughter, Mia, aged four.

    Lucy Halfhead


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