Ken Livingstone’s attacks on Boris Johnson seem to conceal admiration
How does Ken Livingstone think he is going to beat Boris Johnson in the election for Mayor of London to be held next May? When I put this question to Ken, he launched into an almost admiring denunciation of his opponent: ‘He’s Britain’s Berlusconi. He just gets away with things nobody else could. And like Berlusconi he doesn’t really do the day job either.’
At the risk of undermining my hard-won reputation for impartiality, I ventured to suggest that Boris works quite hard. But Ken accused Boris of not being a full-time mayor: ‘The fact he carried on the Telegraph column. The fact he took an awful long time off to write the book. I don’t know if you’ve read his book. It really is dire.’
As it happens, I enjoyed reading Boris’s book, which is called Johnson’s Life of London, and I doubt whether it took all that long to write. But I did not want to break Ken’s flow for a second time. He had launched into a riff about Boris having the second-best job in politics, but spending all his time trying to get the top job.
Ken predicts future greatness for his opponent: ‘He will be the next leader of the Tory party even if I beat him.’ According to Ken, Boris has a 70-to-30 lead over George Osborne among Conservative activists.
Once again, I thought I detected an undertow of admiration in Ken’s attack. He covered himself by lamenting that politics has become so ‘ideology light’ and obsessed with celebrity. But later that evening, as he addressed an audience of about 600 Labour activists beneath the lofty dome of the Camden Centre, he assured them: ‘This Tory mayor is more Tory even than Cameron and Osborne.’ Tom Watson, whom Ed Miliband recently made Labour’s campaigns co-ordinator, had earlier told the rally that Boris is ‘an ideological Thatcherite’. In my view this is nonsense, but whether or not it is true, it suggests that Labour has still not worked out whether to portray Boris as a mere celebrity or as a latter-day Norman Tebbit.
I put it to Ken that some of us used to enjoy voting for him in order to annoy Tony Blair, but next May some of us might enjoy voting for Boris in order to annoy David Cameron. Ken is ready for this argument: ‘If Boris was re-elected on 3 May, that evening you’d have Cameron and Osborne saying this is a vote of confidence in the way we’re running Britain.’
Ken hopes Londoners will support him in order to deliver a mid-term kick to the Tories. Nor would I rule out the possibility that the wily old socialist will pull this off. Ken is the underdog: Peter Kellner of YouGov has established that about a fifth of Labour voters intend to vote for Boris. But Ken has just unveiled an astute electoral bribe. He promises that, if elected, he will cut fares by 5 per cent in the autumn of 2012, and from January 2014 will raise them by no more than the rate of inflation.
Boris had already announced a fare increase of about 8 per cent from this January: a figure which George Osborne this week reduced to 6 per cent, presumably in response to Ken. Low-paid Londoners will still find that from next month the cost of getting to and from work becomes an even heavier burden. Because the tube is so expensive, many people are forced to submit themselves to slow daily bus journeys, which mean getting up much earlier in the morning. Livingstone claims that London has the highest fares in the world, and condemns them as ‘a stealth tax’. He says that when as leader of the Greater London Council he simplified and cut fares in the 1980s, traffic rose so much that there was no loss of revenue.
This is an interesting inversion of the Tory argument for tax cuts: that by reducing rates you can actually increase revenue. Ken is not quite so far removed from the Tories as one might think. The first time I heard him speak was at a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference in 1983. On being challenged by furious Tories who demanded to be told whether London ratepayers were footing the bill for his trip to Blackpool, he replied that he would set their fears at rest by having buckets in which they could make their donations as they left. Ken was so amusing that he transformed the mood of the meeting, and even got some of the Tories thinking he was not as bad as they had expected.
In You Can’t Say That, his new volume of memoirs (reviewed along with Boris’s book in last week’s Spectator), Ken describes his upbringing in south London as a member of the respectable working class. His parents were Tories who worked all hours so that in 1957 they could leave their council house and buy their own place: ‘Two or three “slum-dwellers”, as Mum called them, had moved on to our estate and she feared that this was the start of a long decline.’ His Uncle Ken, who ‘became more intolerant with age’, belonged to both the Tory party and the National Front, and would go through ‘the Radio Times and TV Times each week with a marker pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost’.
This is the world against which the young Ken rebelled by joining the Labour party and campaigning against racism and in favour of gays and Irish republicans. Yet which of us can ever entirely eradicate his childhood? Somewhere inside Ken, his respectable upbringing survives. He claims that in a televised debate during the mayoral campaign of 2008, ‘Boris started bellowing over me. I was brought up not to interrupt others and was at a disadvantage up against the braying culture of the Bullingdon Club and Oxford Union.’ If Ken really wants to win next year, I would urge him to play up his respectable antecedents, and indicate to Tories like myself who are charmed by the idea of the 1950s that he was never quite as revolutionary as he seemed.