The Observer Profile

Beyond our Ken?

On Tuesday Labour's selection panel sits down to vet the party's candidates for London's Mayor. Frank Dobson and Glenda Jackson will almost certainly get the go ahead... but will the newt fancier from Norwood, the man Tony Blair despises?

The London mayor: special report
In May 1981, shortly after taking control of the ruling Labour Group on the Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone lunched with a journalist from this newspaper and announced, quite simply, that 'it is very difficult to dislike me'. Tony Blair would disagree. He has no trouble disliking him at all. To the Prime Minister, Livingstone represents everything he has fought against throughout his career; an unpredictable, unsaleable Leftism which made the party unelectable for nearly two decades. On Tuesday New Labour's 13-strong selection panel will meet to decide whether the name of the MP for Brent East should be allowed on to the party's short list for the post of London Mayor, to be elected next May.

In Blair's dream scenario, Livingstone would be rejected for failing to commit himself to government policy. It would become a straight fight between Glenda Jackson and the favoured Frank Dobson. The nightmare of the London mayoralty being turned into a seat of permanent opposition to a modernised Labour Government, by the very man credited with creating Labour's 'Loony Left' image in the Eighties, would be banished forever. Unfortunately for Blair it seems that vast swathes of the London electorate genuinely do find it difficult to dislike him. Polls regularly put him well ahead of all other candidates, Labour or otherwise.

If he were barred from the shortlist he could still stand as an independent and win, splitting the party. This weekend came the news that the Prime Minister will let his name go forward, in the hope that he loses the party's ballot. It's a big gamble but Blair knows now that he has no choice. 'People remember good things about the GLC and the real Londoner who stood up to Thatcher,' says Mark Seddon, editor of Tribune, who knows him well. 'He doesn't speak in the clipped, professional language of new politics.' In short, an ordinary bloke, an image he's not afraid to play up to. 'I'm a populist at heart,' he once said. 'Perhaps more of a populist than a socialist.'

Ken Livingstone was born in Norwood, South London in 1945, the son of a dancer and a merchant seaman whom he has always described as 'working class conservatives'. He was not an able pupil, failing his 11-plus and eventually leaving school early to take up a job as a hospital research technician. But it was his political commitment, born during the Macmillan years when he felt the country was being run by 'bumbling country gentlemen', that came to dominate his life.

'I call myself a radical socialist,' he once said. 'With the emphasis on radical. Not a Marxist.' He joined the Labour Party in 1968, and became a full-time councillor in the London Borough of Camden in 1973, the same year that his short-lived marriage to a teacher came to an end. For most Londoners, however, his name meant nothing until the day after Labour narrowly won control of the Greater London Council in May 1981. In what would later be described alternatively as a 'coup' and a 'putsch', the moderate leader of the Labour group, Andrew (now Lord) McIntosh, was voted out by his party and the 35-year-old Livingstone voted in.

Livingstone has long claimed that the move had been signalled months in advance both at meetings and in articles for Labour Party journals. His opponents - there are many - insist that this was merely 'Red Ken' starting as he meant to go on. There is no under-estimating the impact he had on political life. An instinct for the controversial soundbite combined with a fondness for what were then considered exotic causes combined to keep him in the headlines. He dispensed with the official leader's car and continued to live in a Maida Vale bedsit. He refused to attend the 1981 royal wedding, choosing to spend the day in the office. He welcomed the mother of an IRA hunger striker to County Hall and talked of the struggle for 'a free united Ireland'. He doled out money to gay, black and women's groups and announced: 'Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything.' (Livingstone is known to be particularly fond of newts. His long-term partner, however, is Kate Elliot, director of Amnesty International UK.)

Livingstone argues, with some justification, that many of his policies were ahead of their time. In 1982 he was denounced for calling the Metropolitan Police 'insensitive, reactionary and racist'. Post Macpherson and Lawrence, that is practically government policy. Likewise, while it has become fashionable to declare Livingstone's five years at the helm of the GLC an administrative disaster, there are many involved at the time who accept it was otherwise. According to Bill Bush, his chief of staff at the GLC, Livingstone was 'an astonishingly good bureaucrat. He read papers fast and got the point. He was good at delegating'. (Ironically, Bush is now employed by Downing Street where he has helped compile a dossier of material to be used against Livingstone.)

But his time at the GLC is most fondly remembered by Londoners for Fares Fair, a policy of subsidy for London Transport that saw ticket prices plummet and passenger numbers rise. It lasted for just three months in 1981 before a challenge by Bromley Council - who argued they were subsidising a transport system that did not reach them in the suburbs - was upheld by what Livingstone described as 'the vandals in ermine' of the House of Lords. In 1986, taking the perceived excesses of local government under Livingstone as her excuse, Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC. The former Labour leader was selected for the parliamentary seat of Brent East and moved on to what he thought would be the next stage in his political career, as it would prove to be for David Blunkett, Margaret Hodge and Frank Dobson, other local government leaders transferred to the Westminster hothouse.

For Livingstone, who refused to tack his politics to the electoral needs of the party, the ride was to be rather less smooth. Many inside the Parliamentary Labour Party blamed him for the 'Loony Left' image that was credited with losing them the 1987 general election. Others resented his carefully cultivated personal profile and accused him of 'posing and posturing'. Certainly he was hated by Kinnock and the rest of Labour's front bench; the Chief Whip saw to it that he was the last MP to get a desk, forcing him to wander the dark corridors clutching message slips and looking for a phone. Livingstone returned the compliment, describing the Commons as being like 'the Natural History Museum, except not all the exhibits are stuffed' and accusing MPs of spending too much time 'at the bars and brothels of Westminster'.

A maiden speech accusing MI5 of carrying out assassinations in Northern Ireland to the benefit of the Tory government did not help his image. The problem for Livingstone was one of boredom. He had gone from running an entire city to the drudgery of the backbencher's life. A bungled attempt to forge an alliance on the left of the party between the Tribune and Campaign groups - which he thought would lead to his leadership of the party - stripped him even of political influence. He was reduced, instead, to working for just one cause: himself. After years of decrying Rupert Murdoch's papers he began writing a column in the Sun, took to reviewing restaurants for Esquire and the London Evening Standard and became a regular fixture on the after-dinner speaking circuit.

Following the 1997 election, Tony Blair offered Livingstone a junior post in his government but he refused. He knew that, on the inside, he would be gagged once and for all. The fact is that if he wins the election to be the Mayor of London - for Labour or as an independent - it would offer him one last chance to do a real job. 'I don't think he would have dreamt of returning to London local government if the circumstances hadn't occurred as they did,' says his biographer, John Carvel of the Guardian. He has declared that he will not run as an independent if the party does not select him but, say close observers, he has to say that because anything other would force the selection panel to bar him. 'He has already made the emotional leap to leaving the Labour Party if that's what it takes to stand as independent,' says one. Tuesday's selection panel has to avoid giving Ken Livingstone the chance to make that stand. And Tony Blair knows it.

Ken Livingstone

Born: Norwood, London, 1945

Lives with: Kate Elliot

Educated: Tulse Hill Comprehensive

Hobbies: Collects newts

Home page:

Journalism: Evening Standard and Esquire restaurant reviewer, columnist for the Independent and Tribune

The election: 4 May 2000

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