Ken or Boris? A terrible cross to bear

When I first became a political journalist in the 1970s, I made the mistake of asking a Sunday Times colleague whether he was going to vote in that day's local election.

He looked at me very strangely, as though I'd asked him to fill in one of those 'rate us for service' forms in a fancy hotel.

He said he would always happily write for money about what was happening around him. But give an unpaid verdict that no one else would ever know about? No way.

This week I went back in time and wrote a bit of political journalism about the London mayoral race.

I have also just now voted.

It was much, much easier writing the piece.

The article was for The Wall Street Journal, for whom I've written happily, on subjects ranging from Tony Blair to Alexander the Great (ok, not much range) for many years.

Writing, especially for an overseas audience, is enjoyable when the race is between two unsuitable exotics of the British political  system, a Labour incumbent who has likened a Jewish reporter to 'a concentration camp guard' and a Tory challenger who calls black children 'picanninies'.

I was not expected to express a preference - unlike the excellent Alice Miles in The Times this morning. Describing the show was enough.

By contrast, facing a pale pink ballot  paper in our Hampstead polling station was no fun at all. Description was no part of the job - and deciding  was a terrible task.

We Londoners get two votes for our Mayor. So we can express our personal exotic first choice preferences - for a Green an English nationalist or whatever. And then we have to make a second choice, the vote which will actually matter, for Labour 'Ken' or Tory Boris' as we must unaffectionately call them.

If you do it the other way round - voting 'Ken' first and then 'England for the English', your second choice will not be counted at all.

Not just a terrible task but a terribly complex one too - for British voters used to simpler ways.

Ther are also pale beige and yellow ballot papers for people and proportionalities on our London Assembly.

Occasionally, in the past, I've heard of plans to incentivise ballot-crossers, to revive democracy, to get the vote-shy into the booths with some kind of bribe.

Just like those 'tell us what you think of our hotel and win a free dinner' pleas.

This morning that seems a suddenly good idea.

If you are reading this far away and want the London Mayoral scene set (by an incentivised journalist),  continue with the version below.

The Ken and Boris Show
By PETER STOTHARD
April 30, 2008

"Boris surges ahead in poll," says the battered copy of the London Evening Standard on the back seat of the black cab. This is not litter but the fervent hope of taxi drivers throughout the capital for a new mayor by Friday.

Any foreign correspondent, here to cover the London elections and questioning his most traditional source, will find out fast that the Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone has no chance of a third term in City Hall, that he does not deserve a chance, does not "in all honesty" deserve to be alive.The name "Ken" is almost the foulest term of abuse in a cockney slang not lacking in competitors for that title. Pick up a cab in Trafalgar Square, mention the K-word and the mayor will be the single reason that "bendy buses" and "bloody immigrants" are in your way – and that the Fourth Plinth around Nelson's Column, where statues of other war heroes ought to be, is a place for disability campaigners and "arty glass."

Only, however, the most committed believers in the Tory challenger, Boris Johnson, trust the latest "surges ahead" claims. Mayor Livingstone, sometime "Public Enemy Number One" of both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, a man mired in cronyism and corruption allegations, a mayor who has likened a critical Jewish journalist to "a concentration camp guard" and called other Evening Standard writers "scumbags and reactionary bigots" is not dead yet. After 25 political years without an election defeat, he is still in contention, the verdict of the combined opinion polls too close to call.

If Ken Livingstone were merely a garden-variety Labour vegetable he would, indeed, be chopped salad tomorrow night – as hundreds of other Labour candidates expect to be in local elections across Britain. Their party leader, Gordon Brown, has never recovered from running away from an election last October and, amid strikes and a clumsy retreat on raising income tax for the childless poor, has suffered the steepest fall in public opinion for a prime minister since Neville Chamberlain in 1940. He offers no coattails for Labour's local politicians to cling to, only a death kiss of the Scots, one of the few ethnic groups in London not enthusiastically embraced by the mayor.

But Ken is not just a supermarket brand. He is a rare breed from the farmer's market, a former left-wing extremist of the kind long accustomed to struggling for survival in the drab fields of New Labour since 1997. In 2000, when he sought to be the first mayor of the capital, the official party view, in the words of Tony Blair, was that Mr. Livingstone "would be a disaster for London." After he won that election, he was welcomed back for 2004 with a smile of gritted teeth from Messrs. Blair and Brown. In 2008, both men have been helping him – and hoping, for all of Labour's sake, that he wins again.

The Conservative candidate is an equally exotic creature with no less a whiff of his party's past. Boris Johnson is, in the same antique cab slang, a "toff," a bit of a "cad," a journalist MP and free-thinking Old Etonian who has been forgiven by many people for most things – but was still fired by a previous party leader for telling untruths and by a previous newspaper editor for falsifying quotes. Until this mayoral campaign he was best known for comic quiz show appearances, insulting the civic character of Portsmouth and Liverpool and for dubbing black children "Picaninnies" and Papuans "cannibals." Alongside these two – in a race where second preferences count and could be decisive – is an ex-policeman for the Liberal Democrats and a host of publicity-seeking activists, red, Green and red-white-and-blue.

Britain's grayer politicians who, in the Greater London Authority Act (1999), gave London its first office of elected mayor have had the experience – so often unnerving – of getting what they wished for. The big political idea of these mayors, and not just in the capital, was to revitalize local democracy, to increase accountability, to add variety and individuality to public life. The job has nothing to do with London's Lord Mayor, successor to the 14th century's Dick Whittington and his pantomime cat, who still drives with coach and horses each year through his City domain. It is executive, with an £11 billion ($21.85 billion) budget for planning, policing, transport and emergency services, but inspirational and diplomatic too.

Mr. Livingstone, an early supporter of an Irish peace deal with the IRA, has invited Islamic extremists to City Hall. He has doggedly supported Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair after the killing of an innocent Brazilian in a counterterrorist raid in 2007. Alongside Prime Minister Blair, he worked successfully to bring the 2012 Olympics to London.

To his supporters, Ken has shown more good independent judgment than bad, successfully forcing drivers to pay an untried system of "Congestion charge" and vigorously opposing the Iraq war. He has broken taboos in public art and introduced long – "bendy" – high-capacity buses. His election strategy is a new one for him – to make fewer acid jokes against his enemies, to play the man of proven judgment, the experienced leader for London, the promoter of development and jobs. To his detractors, from local cab drivers to newspaper writers, he has abused both his own office and his powers to give jobs to others, concealing his sympathies with the extreme Left, fiddling traffic figures to make his C-charge look good and handing money to ethnic minority groups that employ his friends.

Until last year it seemed that Ken Livingstone had successfully carved a fiefdom, a classic mayoral constituency of the inner city poor, ethnic groups, party loyalists and property developers. He was talking confidently not just of a 2008 win but of standing again to welcome the Olympians to London in 2012. Boris Johnson (seated right) became the Conservative candidate only when no one else would take the job. Leading Tories were quite content six months ago that their most colorful character would raise a bit of publicity, ideally more good than bad, gracefully lose, as his predecessors had done, and not threaten the personal supremacy of David Cameron ( back-row, second left), his fellow Old Etonian party boss. How many top figures from England's top fee-paying school did a modern party need?

All has since changed. City hall scandals gave the Tories ammunition and hope. The charge of closet Marxism has not stuck but that of seedy cronyism has. The Tories have drafted in the toughest handler they can buy, Lynton Crosby from Australia, a tactician who is steering a "doughnut route" around the outer suburbs, promoting the seriousness and sincerity of a performer who is effortlessly likeable as long as he stays away from loose-lipped talk.

So far, "Boris" has avoided any new gaffes, offering modest proposals to check street crime and riding (on his trademark bicycle) the mood of national hostility to Labour. Ken has also kept himself under tight control – with his reins held in extra check by the shrewd and emollient Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell. The race has been less entertaining than the list of runners might once have suggested. But, with Gordon Brown's prospects of a general election win looking as dark as his demeanor, no one now says that this London result is a local matter alone.

Comments

[Susan Balée]

As an American trying to understand your recent elections, this is helpful. But I still don't get what "bendy bus" means. Whatever the earlier refs to it, I missed 'em.

Your new guy desperately needs a good barber, though. *That* even an American can see!

[Terence Hale]

Hi,
Charisma against practicality. Time will tell. I not certain if I would buy a hover or fridge from Mr. Johnson.
Regards Dr. Terence Hale

[Dion Per Sona]

They promised a feast, and they gave us a famine;
Don't you remember the Trickle-down shamans?
Rigging and jigging, they danced the Third Way
Till they met that dead end such beginnings betray.

Free money for all
Has been pissed at a wall,
And wolves whose intentions were artfully cloaked
Took aim at electors they gleefully soaked.