Raise a glass today for Ken Livingstone, who appears to be leading the polls in the London mayoral contest, in a YouGov/ITV survey.
Despite being the subject of a vitirolic Channel 4 Dispatches documentary and coming under attack on a daily basis from the Evening Standard, Livingstone appears to be leading Boris Johnson by four points at 44%. This is perhaps surprising given the intensity of the smear campaign and the popularity of Johnson in the Tory party.
There is a simple explanation for Livingstone’s lead though: over the past eight years he has done a good job and remains the best candidate for London mayor.
The personal attacks on Livingstone from the Standard are amusing considering the chequered past of it’s favourite son. Darius Guppy, Boris’ old mucker who defrauded Lloyds to the tune of £1.8 million and who collaborated with the Tory candidate to beat up News of the World journalist Stuart Collier, remains a stain on his past. Petronella Wyatt, the daughter of the late Lord Wyatt, with whom Johnson had a four year affair whilst he was married with children, remains another. This is without mentioning the embarassing run-ins with Liverpool and Portsmouth, Jamie Oliver and Papua New Guinea (read here for more). No wonder he struggled to hold down a proper jobs in the Conservative party and was regularly forced to apologise by whoever was leader at the time.
To the general public he may be the clown who appears on quiz shows and rugby tackles Germans in charity football matches, but as the Compass group asserts, in reality he is little more than ‘Tebbit in clown’s clothing‘. His appeal to Londoners stretches as far as those residing in Kensington and Chelsea and people who only spend five days a week in the city and are back on the commute in the evening. He doesn’t represent London – just ask the 750,000 ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ who make up 10% of the city’s population.
Livingstone has undoubtedly made mistakes, and some of the accusations brought up by Martin Bright’s Dispatches programme should be answered and investigated in full. However, he has proven over eight years to be an effective and charismatic leader of London, which under his tutelage, has established itself as the world’s leading city. Crime has been cut and there are record numbers of police officers. He has boldly introduced iniatives in public transport, the environment and affordable housing and taken tough political decisions, such as publicly standing up for Sir Ian Blair in the wake of the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. He has spent his political life working for London, with his two terms as Mayor, his 14 year spell as MP for Brent East and as leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s. He should be allowed to continue to excel as leader without the distraction of personal attacks from Boris, the television personality and sometimes politican.
Following the campaign, I keep recalling the episode of the Simpsons when Homer runs for the office of Sanitation Commisioner. Homer is elected after a smear campaign on the incumbent and is elected on the back of a series of unfulfillable promises. When it all goes predictably tits up, Ray Patterson (voiced by Steve ‘why are you not funny anymore?‘ Martin) declines the offer to return to the job telling the Springfieldians to ‘wallow in the mess they made’.
