Red Ken is now Grey Ken - but he is back in the fray

The old campaigner returns: Ken Livingstone launching his mayoral candidacy in Croydon yesterday
12 April 2012

He's back - the Londoner who never really goes away. Re-enter stage Left Ken, who has just used an article in the Standard to launch himself at the mayoralty.

It reminds me that I have spent much of my adult life watching Ken prepare to be Mayor, doing the Mayor thing, being defeated as Mayor - and then starting the cycle all over again: the eternal recurrence of Ken.

By establishing himself as the best- known Labour candidate now - with only one other (Oona King) in the fray, he immediately seizes momentum - he makes it far harder for any future leadership of the Labour Party to disown him.

I hope Ms King has thought about how her own campaign is to be sustained in the face of this robo-rival. She is an able and ambitious politician and one whose London background and appeal as a feisty ethnic woman is an asset.

But she has the shadow of her parliamentary defeat in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 to shake off - and must quickly define why she is running for the job in sharper terms than as the "unity candidate" (ie not Ken).

So far her organisation seems to consist of little more than an automated email reply service, which even these days is not quite a campaign.

With nominations closing on June 18 and a shortlist issued a week later by party officials, this contest will be fought largely while the national party is still trying to decide if it would rather be led by someone called Ed or someone called Miliband (or both).

Already 65, Red Ken is now Grey Ken. He does learn some things - launching his bid in Croydon, having been soundly beaten by Boris in the suburbs.

Pretty much all else is unchanged. As someone who worked closely with him in the last race puts it: "His problem is that he has such self-confidence that he doesn't listen to advice or criticism."

On key failures of the last mayoralty, he's still tone deaf. When I interviewed him on radio last year, he was unapologetic about the abuse of funds by his friend Lee Jasper at the London Development Agency. He feels no remorse about using the language of fascism to describe a Jewish reporter - on the grounds that this is the language of "the street", not over-educated elites, a specious defence of stupidity.

Oh, and he is the one politician I have spoken to in the past six months who seriously thinks Britain would be better off in the euro.

One very big thing has changed the light around Ken, however. This is a capital shaken by the financial crash and its consequences. So the rallying cry to favour "Londoners as a whole, not hedge fund managers" no longer sounds like the last rant of Dave Spart.

It chimes with a lot of reasonable people, who find Boris's robust affection for all bankers galling, given the consequences of moral hazard all around us.

Still, Mr Livingstone must be wary of fighting the last campaign all over again. The weakest part of his mini-manifesto yesterday were the jibes at Mr Johnson.

It is hardly a secret that the dear Mayor is interested in his next job and spends time on outside interests. That inspires some envy and resentment, but it probably does just as much to keep the mayoralty in the public eye.

Watching Boris holding a large crowd spellbound at the Museum of London last week as he delivered a waspishly irreverent tribute to Fergie "for her contribution to entrepreneurship", was a reminder that in the funny stakes, Boris has long outwitted Ken.

The real danger to Johnson's re-election is not his outside interests or status as a Tory. It is that once you get beyond the labels, the difference between the end of the Ken period and the beginning of the Boris one are hard to discern. After Boris came across all Tory-tough on expenditure, we discovered this week that Transport for London officials had been paid off in sums - some £6 million in total - that would have been seen as wanton largesse if it had happened under the last administration.

Whether on congestion charging, high buildings or buses - all those arguments over the blasted bendies, only to discover that Mr Johnson is about to cut the net numbers of red things on wheels anyway - it's plus ça change.

Clearly, Ken wants to run the sort of oppositional mayoral campaign that made the GLC in County Hall the enemy of Thatcherism at Westminster.

But the terms of trade have changed. We have (for now at least) a centre-Right coalition with that nice Mr Clegg signed up to the cuts to come, assuming that he can keep a Chief Treasury Secretary long enough to make them. It will be far harder to call Londoners to political arms against that hybrid, than against Maggie in her raucous prime.

And as one former minister in charge of London notes: "Boris is carefully not being branded as a Right-wing Tory. He's a moving target who is hard to catch or even to define. Ken will have trouble pinning him down as the class enemy." Add to that the mayoral election timing - just before the Olympics, which whatever the Jonahs claim will be a morale boost for London, and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

All these factors make Labour wary about the prospects of beating Ken. "We'd be better off focusing on the national battle," says one senior figure.

The party wants to hear a message of regret over fighting wars, turn back the tide on education reforms and ditch the "New" bit of Labour.

Mr Livingstone is well placed to exploit this retro mood, seeing as he was never new in the first place. David Lammy, who considered running, has thrown his weight pre-emptively behind Ken. Tessa Jowell would rather devote her post- Cabinet life to other things.

In the circumstances, you can't blame the Eternal Ken for having yet another go. Strange nonetheless, as the Conservatives and Liberals move to a new era of leadership, that Labour's favourite for the capital's top job should be the tough old buzzard who ruled the London roost when Wham! were in the charts. Some of us would prefer to move on.

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