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 Ken Livingstone outside County Hall in 1984 |
Leaving no Livingstone unturned
Once exiled by New Labour, the party is now turning to the man of contradictions to rescue its future, writes Illtyd Harrington
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THROUGHOUT 1980, Ken Livingstone’s busy assassination squad had me high in their sights. I was, my comrades, unspeakable in every respect from speculation to perversion. This is the third biography of the mayor and all claim that within a year, 1981, I was to be the effective kingmaker as well as his elected deputy through five tumultuous and often exasperating years in County Hall.
This book has no index – a grave weakness. But all credit to Andrew Hosken, a BBC Radio 4 Today programme journalist, for a competent and objective look at one of the most powerful office-holders in Europe.
Hosken melodramatically reveals that Ken has five children by three mothers. He is, by all accounts, a good father to three lively daughters and two bonny boys. Surely a political plus? Although feminists will reprove him for his comparison of his sexual member to a broom handle.
The second and more interesting revelation is of the existence of a close group of “politically motivated men and women”, the Praetorian guard for a real future socialist Britain – Socialist Action. They operate in a red mist. Not even Special Branch has planted a mole among them. Ken has, according to Hosken, been the chief paymaster of the 127 members and only one, Atma Singh, has defected – after being given an adviser’s job near the mayor. This elite are, at the moment, in fine jobs within City Hall.
Enter John Ross, an economist and Ken’s personal guru. He sits nearest the throne; conspiracy theorists will be happy to learn that he spent four years living in Moscow. At one stage Ken paid £25,000 for a high-class computer for Ross’s use.
Ken’s finances, however, are transparent.
Ross is the first among the unequals. What is it within Ken that he grants his rare tolerance to people such as Ross? It is even more incomprehensible to understand his committed loyalty towards Gerry Healey, a Trotskyite thug who took Gaddafi coins – more than £1 million – and a large slice of Vanessa Redgrave’s bank balance.
Ken even crossed the picket line at Lambeth crematorium at the old devil’s final farewell. Healey’s opponents had mounted their protest at the gates of this sad place. He repeated this when his former ally, Bob Crowe, from the RMT union, stopped the Underground.
The meat and potatoes, of course, is the saga of our defiance of Thatcher when all others fell prostrate before the demon queen. Of all the ironies of this life, it was the GLC abolition that led to the London mayoralty in 2000.
Tony Blair disgracefully tried to hijack it. And that decent man Frank Dobson MP bore the full brunt of public humiliation by ending a poor third. Blair blundered and People’s Ken triumphed as an independent.
Three years later, the command went forth from Tony’s No 10 sofa that Ken must be enticed back into the Labour Party before the second election.
How the world has changed. The New Journal, more than 10 years ago, rebuked him for being a Hampstead safari socialist. Now he wears £1,000 suits from Ozzie Boateng.
This is a man of paradox; one who justified Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness’s former methods but was, in all fairness, dramatically moving and effective after the London bombs of July 2005. But, perplexingly, he stood firmly behind the Police Commissioner Ian Blair after the accidental but brutal killing of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Now in April 2008 comes the greatest irony. Labour’s electoral revival depends upon Ken.
Let me leave the last savage words to Sir Simon Jenkins, the Cassandra of Primrose Hill. In January this year, complaining about how ugly London was becoming under Ken’s rule, he wrote: “Livingstone has gone from Trotskyite to raw capitalist without an intervening phase of civilisation.”
In comparison to Paris, Jenkins said, London was a “shambolic, careless, sluttish hag”. The great new commercial office tower blocks, welcomed to the capital by Livingstone, were, he added, “the planning equivalent of private equity capitalism, emblems of a city whose governance is corrupt and whose leadership is philistine. They will be plain ugly.”
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