The Schalter

Written by: Ian Broatch

Ken Livingston, Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick. It’s not a happy roll call, but in the age the bland politician it is as exciting as we’re going to get. First you have the incumbent mayor, a man whose faults are many and whose achievements are, unlike his boasts, horribly few. Next, the Tory candidate, whose main campaigning strategy is to play the buffoon. And then Paddick, the rank outsider, an unexpectedly bold choice by the Liberal Democrats, but one suspects handicapped too badly by his party’s weakness to be a serious contender.

Despite the maverick characters of the three candidates, nothing has really fired yet. Not many in London could tell you that the poll is to take place on 1 May and they sure as shit couldn’t tell you any significant policy differences between the three men. Disappointingly, the two challengers have also failed to capitalise on the corruption scandal that’s engulfing the Mayor.

Basically, Andrew Gilligan (yes him!) of the Evening Standard, alleged that millions of pounds were given in grants by the London Development Agency (LDA) to projects run by friends of Livingstone’s main adviser Lee Jasper, with little to show for them. Typically, Livingstone went on the attack and demanded Gilligan’s sacking, claimed there was a full audit trail and the accusations were simply a result of Gilligan’s “dirty and mendacious” campaign against him. While it’s fair to say that the veracity of Gilligan’s stories can’t be taken for granted, it appears he got it right here. Two weeks ago Livingstone had to admit to an emergency session of the London Assembly that there was no audit trail and had only said there was “off the cuff” in the first place. A police investigation has been launched into six separate grants after an internal LDA inquiry was unable to conclude whether the money was fraudulently spent due to a lack of investigative powers.

On the results of this investigation, the fate of the mayoral race is very likely to be decided. Unless something directly is pinned on Ken (which is doubtful) he’s likely to come out of it intact and with the weary acceptance of voters who expect their politicians to be corrupt. Ironically, he is beginning to resemble the man who threw him out of the Labour party, Tony Blair, more and more - driven to absurd heights of self-justification, but somehow there he sits, secure in his powerbase.

Ken Livingstone is an odd figure really - he commands no real affection among Londoners, nobody is surprised by his cronyism or his calculated political positioning - he’s a vicious, unpleasant man who responds to any criticism with furious personal attacks on the critic.

Part of his justification for comparing an Evening Standard journalist, who happened to be Jewish, to a concentration camp guard was the wholly irrelevant fact that the Rothermere papers did give sympathetic early press to Hitler and the Nazis. That comparing a jobbing journalist (admittedly an intrusive one) to a willing overseer of the holocaust wasn’t an apt comparison and was insulting to victims of the holocaust (and anyone with a bit of perspective) didn’t really figure in Ken’s world of self-justification and neatly illustrates his rather black-and-white world-view. Basically anything anti-Ken is bad and probably fascist while Ken and what Ken thinks is good and noble.

Yet, he is more than just tolerated, he is accepted. Some of this is residual credit from his Thatcher-curtailed days at the GLC, but also the fact that, whatever his manoeuvrings, people believe he is driven by a real affection for London and, minor infractions aside, will always put London ahead of self-interest. He may well be the only senior politician in Britain who could have been elected without the backing of a major party as he was during the 2000 Ken4London campaign. Without the shackles of his party he was able to make some bold moves, which remain his only real achievements as mayor - the Congestion Charge and the improvement of the bus network and, moreover, he was a real independent voice for London. Since his re-admittance into New Labour he has merely bunkered down in the Gonad, killed off the Routemaster bus and been buttered up by rich businessmen.

Boris

Where Boris’s campaign is going to go is anybody’s guess. Ken has attacked him as a quasi-fascist joke - naturally. And it’s got to be said that he’s damaged property - there are so many hostages to fortune in his journalism, not least the infamous and offensive “piccaninies” and “water-melon smiles” comments. While his cult appeal will help him overcome some of the problems these create, it is also, in itself, part of the problem with his candidacy. The major challenge he faces is to fight the public perception of him as a joke figure and at the same time to trade on it.

As Paddick says of him: “a good clown is a very intelligent individual. They are very talented, very intelligent people who put all their energy, effort, charm and skill into making people laugh. That’s what Boris Johnson does. Boris a clown in that sense.”

Somewhere behind the gaff-prone buffoonery is a politician trying to prove he’s serious. So far, we know he opposes the westward expansion of the Congestion Charge zone and is putting a particular focus on the Met. In his Crime Manifesto he says, with characteristic flair:

“I reject the fatalism and defeatism of the Labour Mayor. I reject the assumption that we can do nothing. I believe that by systematically tackling small crimes we can drive out more serious crime. I believe that we can change the lives of kids who would otherwise be sucked into a nightmarish culture of violence and criminality.”

He then goes on to list a series of policy initiatives on crime that range from the sensible to the downright wacky. All of which is about as differentiated as the candidates are going to get in terms of policy.

Paddy

Brian Paddick is the former Lambeth police chief who turned Brixton in a safe cannabis zone, until an ex-lover said he was a dope smoker himself and he was promptly side-kicked into a desk job. Normally, I’d say his gayness, sadly, made his election unlikely, but seeing as he’s a Lib Dem it’d be superfluous to mention either his homosexuality or his unelectability. What are his policies? Well, it’s late now and I can’t be arsed to investigate them, especially as he’s about as likely as Vera Lynn to be the next mayor.

Still, he told the Observer the following things: “The clubs with the best music are gay”; “People look after each other in Brixton”; “Political correctness has gone too far”; “Ken Livingstone treats Londoners with disrespect”; “My father taught me several things: loyalty, determination and not to swear” and “You have to be yourself as a police officer”.

There is a lot of water to pass under the bridge between now and May, but this is very much Ken’s to lose.

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This post is tagged Boris Johnson, Ken Livingston, London, Mayor, Politics