In February 2022 the Green Party rejected the chance to bag a famous defector. Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 to 1986, Labour member of Parliament from 1987 to 2001, Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, and once the most talked-about Left-wing politician in the land, was now too strange, even for a party whose dearest friends admit it has a predilection for the wacky and weird.
Although Ken Livingstone flourished before the term became commonplace, his rise and subsequent descent into obscurity illuminate the limits of populism. For about 30 years Livingstone was the cheeky voice of London. He stood up to the elites, whether it was the Thatcherite government’s attempts in the 1980s to destroy trade unions, local authorities and any other centre of opposition, or the suffocating control-freakery of Tony Blair’s New Labour administration in the early 2000s.
For about 30 years Livingstone was the cheeky voice of London, standing up to the elites
“Red Ken” was London’s Ken: a leader who was neither a former president of the Oxford Union nor an ambitious adviser to a government minister. Livingstone was from the mid-twentieth century, English lower-middle class: the son of an acrobatic dancer who worked in music hall and a ship’s master in the Merchant Navy. The music halls and shipping lines of the 1900s feel as remote to us now as the Middle Ages, and so does Livingstone’s dominance of London Labour politics.
We ought to remember him both as an example and a warning. His greatest achievement was not helping secure the 2012 Olympics but understanding the social and environmental importance of transport. Politicians can shout all they like about wanting to move the unemployed or single mothers out of welfare and into work but if bus fares take too large a chunk of low wages, those people cannot afford to accept low-paid jobs. Indeed, the poor won’t even be able to buy cheap food if the nearest supermarket is too far from their homes.
Livingstone’s first great initiative when he led the Greater London Council was to reduce the cost of travelling by bus and tube. The judiciary declared the Fares Fair policy unlawful in the early 1980s – which only burnished Livingstone’s image as a fighter for ordinary people against an establishment that cared only for the interests of the rich.
His activism persuaded Margaret Thatcher to abolish the GLC, a vindictive act that left London as the only great city in the west without self-government. Before she attacked municipal democracy, Livingstone was not a popular figure. Londoners had voted for a Labour-led council headed by moderate local politician Andrew McIntosh. The left organised a coup and replaced him with Livingstone. Naturally, many thought he’d pulled a shabby trick.
Thatcher’s anti-democratic refusal to accept that Londoners should decide his fate at the next election hugely enhanced Livingstone’s reputation. He was no longer the manipulative politician but a hero to a large proportion of the city’s population.
When Tony Blair gave Londoners the right to choose an elected mayor in 2000, he blocked Livingstone – way too far left for Blair’s tastes – from running as the Labour candidate. Once more, Livingstone could pose as the man of the people fighting the establishment. He stood as an independent and Londoners put him in the mayor’s office – twice.
Back in power, Livingstone again focused on transport. And once again his legacy is worth remembering. If we are to cut pollution and greenhouse gases, and moderate the obesity epidemic, the car can no longer be king of the city. Today’s push for people-friendly streets where we can walk and cycle began with Ken Livingstone. In 2003, he introduced the congestion charge to deter motorists from driving into central London.
Socialists are often accused of being nostalgic for a vanished past of long-closed pits and factories, and the union-led, white, male working class. For all his faults, Livingstone was a modern left-wing leader. He was funny and irreverent. He embraced ethnic and sexual diversity. He identified the problems of the future and offered solutions. One could go farther and say he was the only genuine far-left politician to change Britain. Tony Benn never came close to power after he converted from technocratic social democracy to socialism in the 1970s. Jeremy Corbyn lost two general elections.
Like Johnson, Livingstone exploited the excessive attention that being mayor brings
Just as the Tory right venerates Margaret Thatcher, so the Left sanctifies Benn and Corbyn. Livingstone is the exception. He is an embarrassment to the Left for the same reason Boris Johnson will become an embarrassment to the right: populist politicians believe they are exempt from the rules that bind everyone else.
There are healthy ways for a sceptical public to address a politician in a democracy, and using their first name is not among them. The familiarity of first-name terms implies they should be shown the same indulgence we give to our mates. In the same way a former mayor of London became known by the familiar “Boris” rather than Johnson or Mr Johnson, so his predecessor became known as, and very much wanted to be known as, “Ken”.
The parallels don’t stop there. Livingstone, like Johnson, wanted to become prime minister. The office of mayor of London encourages ambition. It has control of public transport, the right to intervene in planning disputes, and shares powers over the Metropolitan Police with the home secretary. However, in centralised England, where politics, media and finance are concentrated in the capital, the real power lies in the excessive attention the London mayor receives, and the opportunities for self-aggrandisement that attention brings. Both Johnson and Livingstone exploited them to the full.
In his meticulous biography Ken, the BBC journalist Andrew Hosken makes two arguments that explain Livingstone’s fall. He was fantastically ambitious, but could never build alliances. No Labour leader, from the affable and unworldly Michael Foot to Jeremy Corbyn, could work with him. Neil Kinnock summed up the views of so many Labour politicians when he said: “Everyone likes Ken, except the people who know him.” (A line that applies equally well to Johnson.)
Even the left regarded him with suspicion. He fell out with John McDonnell, Tony Banks and others who worked with him at the Greater London Council. As Donald Trump has proved, successful populist leaders prefer sycophants to allies. But Trump ran in a presidential system in which ambitious men and women need well-placed supporters who can propel them up their party hierarchy. He could build his own base.
Livingstone never tried to find them. His belief that he was exempt from the normal rules manifested itself in his obsessions. Hosken documents his love of the Godfather films and suggests he saw himself as Michael Corleone, manipulating his way to power by wiping out his enemies – as David Cameron and a disturbingly large number of politicians did. Livingstone’s second obsession was more niche: Adolf Hitler.
He appeared to accept the conspiratorial gibberish insinuating Europe’s Jews worked with their Nazi killers. It had a long history on the far left that began when Stalin turned antisemitic in the years before his death in 1953. From then to the fall of communism, Soviet propaganda insisted that Jews were really Nazis and the Nazis were really Jews. For a modern variant on this old fake news look at how the Putin regime characterises the Ukrainian government and its (Jewish) leader as “Nazis”.
Hitler was actually a supporter of Zionism in its attempts to move Jews to Israel when he came to power in the 1930s, Livingstone told BBC Radio London in 2016. Unfortunately, Hitler then “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. This was too much even for a Labour Party then led by Corbyn, and Livingstone resigned.
While historians argued against the revival of Soviet propaganda, the general public cut to the quick and saw Livingstone as a nut who could not stop banging on about Hitler. His memory survives as a social media meme. When he was filmed with his foot stuck in a train door in 2019, Twitter wags cried: “You know who used to get his foot stuck in the train door? Hitler.” I could say that variations on this gag appear whenever Livingstone’s name is mentioned but, in truth, few mention his name today.
Boris Johnson’s political career is over because he believed that the adulation of his supporters gave him licence to say whatever he wanted without ever being held to account. Too cranky for the Greens, too Jew-obsessed for Corbyn’s Labour, Livingstone is all but forgotten because he made the same mistake.
Nick Cohen writes for the Spectator and the Critic. His “Writing from London” can be found at nickcohen.substack.com
