There are three months to go until the London mayoral election, but the fight between “cheeky chappie” Ken Livingstone and “Tory card” Boris Johnson is already “turning nasty”, says Simon Jenkins in The Sunday Times.
Livingstone, London’s first – and so far only – elected mayor, is a politician “besieged”, says William Langley in The Sunday Telegraph. A Channel 4 Dispatches film last week portrayed him as a man who “calls a slug of whisky breakfast, the facilitator of a network of cronyism, fawned-over by a sect-like garde du corps of ageing Trotskyites”. The presenter, New Statesman’s Martin Bright, concluded, “I believe Livingstone is a disgrace to his office and not fit to be mayor of London”.
Livingstone should never have been allowed to stand for a third term in any case, says Jenkins. “That a new law passed last year not only [allowed this] but actually gave him even more power, notably over London borough planning, is scarcely believable.”
His contribution to the City has not been entirely negative, and a London mayor is far preferable to direct rule from Whitehall, but the manner in which he has run his ‘personal fiefdom’ is scandalous. When he was granted extraordinary power by John Prescott in 2000, Prescott told Londoners that a mayor would cost them just 3p a week. Ken is now costing the average council taxpayer £300 a year. Staff costs have bloated from £12m to £33m, while his “luxuriously upholstered front organisation”, the London Development Agency (LDA), is “apparently immune to serious scrutiny”.
Many beneficiaries of its £400m budget don’t seem to be registered as companies or charities, and the LDA paper trail is said to “defy audit”. This is “government worthy of Haiti”. The mayor’s spending is supposed to be accountable to an elected London assembly, to auditors, regulators and Whitehall’s ‘government office for London’. “None of these has even remotely done its job.”
Quite, and these matters wouldn’t have come to light were it not for the “dogged reporting” of the Evening Standard (which has managed to instigate four police investigations into the LDA) or the outspokenness of Labour MP Kate Hoey, who has likened Ken’s regime to “Thirties Chicago”, says Camilla Cavendish in The Times.
But Livingstone remains unmoved. Defending himself on the radio, he sounded like a “Third World dictator”, arguing that his “unfettered executive power” was necessary to drive through changes such as the congestion charge. Nonsense. US mayors are accountable to legislative councils, but they still get things done. Michael Bloomberg has reversed New York’s fiscal crisis, built a record number of starter homes and taken control of all schools in less time than Ken has been in office. The post of mayor is vital, but so is accountability.
All this fuss is ridiculous, says Seumas Milne in The Guardian. Ken isn’t blameless, but when it comes to the vote in May, who would you rather have? A candidate who implemented congestion charging, cut traffic by 70,000 cars a day and boosted bus use by one and a half million journeys a day, pushed up the supply of affordable housing and played a key role in cutting crime? Or a Thatcherite who “thinks it’s witty to refer to Africans as ‘piccaninnies’ and regrets the end of colonialism”, is an “enthusiastic Bush and Iraq war supporter” and opposes the Kyoto Treaty and the welfare state?
At the very least, Channel 4 should screen a programme about the business interests of Mr Johnson and his “colossal disrepect for people outside his class and privileges”, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent. But it won’t solve the problem, which is that our capital deserves far better than either of them.