Just Like That !

From The Sunday TimesApril 20, 2008

Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone by Andrew HoskenThe Sunday Times review by Simon Jenkins
Ken Livingstone, for eight years the mayor of London, thinks the best guide to politics is Mario Puzo's The Godfather. It is, he says, "a much more honest account of how politicians behave than any self-justifying rubbish spewed out in biographies and textbooks." He particularly loves the mafioso being executed for trying to kill his boss who cries, "Tell Mike it was only business."

This might tell us all we need to know about the ethically challenged Livingstone. But The Godfather was for grown-ups. Andrew Hosken's Ken is 433 pages of infantile double-crossing, cheating and play-acting in a political fifth form, redeemed only by the subject's puckish flashes of self-awareness. When so charged, Livingstone shrugs and remarks that he has always "loved meetings and plotting". He dances a constant jig, Dick Whittington and his newt.

Had it not been for the total decay of British civic democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, Livingstone would have been a footnote in the comical-tragical history of London's loony left. Instead, thanks to Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair, he was elected to public office not once but twice on the most sweeping franchise in Britain.

Hosken appears alternately mesmerised and appalled by his subject, honouring Neil Kinnock's maxim that the only people who like Livingstone are those who don't know him. He was an adept swimmer in the murky swamp of the metropolitan left. He admitted to being an insecure teenager, shy and uninterested in girls or football, keen only on lizards. Pop psychology finds such people easy prey for the cod discipline of fundamentalism, whether religious or political.

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The ideology to which Livingstone took most naturally was ambition. Apart from working briefly in a laboratory and some half-hearted teacher training, he never did a job and was soon living and breathing political activism on the public purse. He was elected to Lambeth Council at the age of 25 under the patronage of the Trotskyite Ted Knight, who led the council to financial ruin. Two years later, he contrived to represent successively Hackney, Camden and Brent, joking that his election-night speeches would involve thanking the people of "wherever I am".

Disloyalty and treachery became the hallmarks of Livingstone and his circle. He undermined Reg Goodwin, his party's London leader in the 1970s, and declared that the left's job was "to leave Thatcher but get Callaghan first". Whether he was a communist or a Trotskyite was immaterial (Kinnock called him merely a "Kennist"), but to this day he has kept around him a tight-knit Marxist cabal from a group called Socialist Action (now getting six-figure salaries from London's taxpayers). Livingstone's first putsch was against Andrew McIintosh, the leader of the newly elected Labour GLC (Greater London Council) in 1981. The butchery was done within hours of the election by manoeuvres that would have made Robert Mugabe blush. The hapless deputy leader, Illtyd Harrington, was jeered as a "miserable old git" and told he could stay on if he became "the acceptable face of [Livingstone's] extremism".

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