Life, the Universe and Everything

Let me be perfectly clear right from the start: I am a socialist and if I had a vote in next month’s election for the London mayor, I would vote for Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick would be my second choice. Instead I shall be voting for Labour in the West Thurrock & South Stifford ward of the local elections: hopefully I can help Oliver Gerrish onto Thurrock Council. I realise that I refer to Livingstone as Red Ken throughout these pages, but it is a term of endearment rather than criticism.

Reading the press coverage of the campaign Londoners actually appear to be united on their take on the issue of the city’s mayor for the next four years: “I can’t wait to see the look on that git Livingstone’s face when he loses; or the look on that idiot Boris’s face when he cocks up.”

I am not really going to be affected by the outcome of the London mayor elections: but I do not want to see whoever gets the job makes a mess of running our capital city. Red Ken was wrong not to apologise to a Jewish journalist for likening him to a Nazi concentration camp guard and extending the congestion charge zone into an uncongested - but wealthy - area of London, but he has done a good job on the whole. Red Ken managed to offend one journalist; Boris Johnson can trump that: he managed to upset an entire city!

Should the unthinkable happen and  Johnson is elected mayor of our fine capital city, I think I shall be able to console myself. Following on from initial gloating by the Conservatives will come the apologies for the mistakes that will - and I say will, not probably - follow. Johnson shall then become the Labour party’s best political tool whenever Gordon Brown decides to call a general election.