The zen of Ken

That’s a hell of a lot of questions,” Ken Livingstone laughs, sneaking a quick peek at Hot Press’s notebook as he pulls up a seat. “We’re not likely to get through that lot.”

Unfortunately, he’s probably right. It’s not just that time is tight. As interview situations go, this is hardly the most ideal. Following his recent defeat by Conservative candidate Boris Johnson, I’m meeting the newly ex-Mayor of London in The Porterhouse on Covent Garden on a gloriously sunny Monday evening. A hugely spacious Irish bar, with numerous discreet nooks and crannies, it would normally be an ideal location for a quiet chat.
However, we’re at Livingstone’s farewell party. There’s a noisy free bar, end-of-the-affair atmosphere, and the place is jammed to the rafters with his family, friends and colleagues.
Livingstone is sipping a pint of Temple Brau (possibly not his first of the evening) and, understandably enough, seems slightly more interested in partying than being interviewed. At times, we both have to shout to be heard.
As for questions, well, of course there’s a lot of them. Since he began his political career in 1971, when he was elected to Lambeth borough council at the age of 26, Livingstone has always been controversial. Some of his more maverick policies in the 1980s made him a tabloid hate figure. Snidely dubbed ‘Red Ken’, when he engaged in talks with the Sinn Fein leadership in 1982, the Sun described him as “the most odious man in Britain.”
A natural born dissident, he’s had an uneasy relationship with the Labour Party throughout much of his political career. Although always a favourite with the party’s grassroots, a seriously strained relationship with Neil Kinnock (who detested him), and later with Tony Blair, kept him on the backbenches throughout the 1990s. Despite this, Livingstone always had an amazing ability to hog the headlines.
When Labour declined to back him as their candidate for London Mayor in 2000, he left the party and won the position as an independent. However, amidst much gnashing of Blair’s teeth, he rejoined Labour before being re-elected in 2004.
While he achieved much during his eight-year reign (his flagship policy was congestion charging for Central London), there were numerous hiccups. Most memorably, in 2006, he was briefly suspended from office for comparing a Jewish Evening Standard journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard (he refused to apologise). This incident may partially explain why the Standard engaged in such a serious smear campaign against him over the last few months.
Boris may now be wearing the mayoral chains, but their war’s obviously far from over. The day before this meeting, it was reported that an investigation commissioned by Johnson’s office had uncovered what was described as an “endemic waste in the way taxpayers’ money was spent by the former regime of Ken Livingstone.”
It was also mentioned that Johnson had found 39 bottles of fine wine, including a criminally expensive Chateauneuf-du-Pape, left behind in his predecessor’s office. It has been rumoured that criminal charges may yet be pressed against Lee Jasper, a close associate of Livingstone’s, over missing or misallocated funds.
With just 30 minutes of Livingstone’s precious party time promised, best just to see how we go . . .

OLAF TYARANSEN: I guess I should start by saying commiserations on losing the election.
KEN LIVINGSTONE: Yeah, it’s really sad [pulls face and sips pint]. Ha, ha!
How are you feeling about it now?
Well, what’s interesting is that when I went back in the Labour Party four years ago, I ran 10 percent ahead of the Labour vote. And I thought in this election that gap would close. Actually, it widened to 13 percent. So you’ve now got a quarter of a million Londoners who vote for me, but not for the Labour Party. And that’s quite a warm feeling, really. But it wasn’t simply a rejection; the Labour vote collapsed.
It collapsed everywhere?
It went down to 24 percent nationally, but I got 37 percent in London. The other problem is the Liberals collapsed; it was their worst result in 40 years. And the Liberals went straight over to the Tories, where previously they had gone to Labour. Then there was the international situation, the 10p tax band, and the Evening Standard campaign. It’s amazing we weren’t slaughtered.
The Standard ran an unmerciful campaign against you. You used to write for them.
I did when it was Max Hastings’ time. The Evening Standard wasn’t part of the Rothermere Group, it was actually owned by Lord Beaverbrook. And then it came under some sort of joint control and then eventually the Rothermere Group owned it completely. But under Max they left it as independent. So I used to write their restaurant column. And very fattening it was, too! I mean, why can’t someone give you a job like that when you’re 20? When you can have two three-course meals a day and remain as thin as a rake! But I got the job just as I started to grow.
You’re not even an MP any more.
I gave that up [in 2001]. When they first talked about setting this up [London Mayor], I wasn’t a cabinet minister, so I thought you could do the job and stay in Parliament. But it’s massive, you know. And, I think as well, I knew that if I kept my seat in Parliament as an independent, all the Labour leadership would be worried that I was gonna make a bid for the leadership at some point in the future. They’d be nervous. But I knew that if I said this is the last job I’ll do in politics, they’d be more relaxed about giving me more money, more power. So once I made it clear that I wasn’t going to be in the running for the Labour leadership again, we got billions out of them.
Do you regret not running?
Oh, I did everything possible to get the Labour leadership. From about 1989, when the party moved decisively to the right, and I got kicked off Labour’s NEC... then Dennis [Canavan], then Tony Benn... and then you had the emergence of Tony Blair. I mean, ten years earlier I might have done it, but by the time I got into parliament the tide was going out. I really regret that. Britain would be a much better place, to say nothing of Northern Ireland. We could’ve done all that in half the time.
You’ve always had a strong interest in Irish affairs. Do you have any Irish ancestors?
No. My mother’s side are working-class Londoners going back through several generations before it peters out. My dad came down from Scotland. So you’ve got Scottish protestant, and I suppose my mum would’ve been Church of England, if she hadn’t been a spiritualist. My first real engagement with Catholicism came when Pope John XXIII was elected. He was just this incredible figure. Pope Pius XII had been so removed and inward-looking and so on, and suddenly here was this unbelievably charismatic figure transforming Catholicism in the eyes of the world. That’s when I started getting interested in the Catholic Church – and then inevitably, in Britain, that leads you into contact with a lot of Irish Catholics. I started reading about our history in Ireland. Because when I went to school, we did a lesson on the Irish famine – or the ‘great starvation’ as it was sometimes known – and that was it, really. Oh, I think we did a lesson on Cromwell and Drogheda. But that was it. Ireland was just not part of our curriculum.
Are you religious?
I’m probably agnostic. I certainly don’t believe in the all-seeing being, no. But I don’t dismiss religion. I think it’s a very powerful force – both for good and for evil. I recognise that people need a value system. Mine is basically socialism, and what my parents taught me. But Islam, Catholicism, Hinduism – they give people a framework and a moral code, and it shouldn’t be dismissed. I’m not a secularist. I’m not anti-religion. People should be free to choose. But I’ll be very surprised if I die and wake-up to a guy with a beard asking me to justify my life.
Your opinions on Northern Ireland and willingness to engage in talks with Sinn Fein made you a political pariah in the early ‘80s...
It’s interesting you say that. When I first invited Adams and Morrison in November 1982, and then [Home Secretary William] Whitelaw banned them – that Christmas on the Radio 4 ‘Man Of The Year’ poll, I came second to the Pope – Pope John Paul II. So I was a funny kind of hate figure. But it is a funny thing: public opinion polls in Israel show the majority of Israelis think it’s time to talk to Hamas. There’s no point talking to the people who aren’t killing you. If you want peace, you have to talk to the people who’re fighting with you. This is just such an obvious thing. When I talked to army people, they would all say there’s gotta be a political solution. It can’t be a military victory. When I talked to the IRA, they said there’s gotta be a political solution. The only people in denial were the British government. I mean, I came back from my first meeting with Adams and Morrison in February ’83, and they were absolutely clear – they knew there had to be a negotiated settlement. I reported all that in Britain, and Thatcher was just never going to negotiate with the Irish Republican movement. I think she would’ve rather died. But the intelligence officers used as go-betweens exaggerated the IRA’s commitment to de-commissioning a bit ahead of time, I think, just to hook the British government. I mean, all the security services reports to government said you’ve gotta have a political solution.
Back to the present. Your thoughts on Boris Johnson?
Boris is one of that sort of elite group who just thinks that the rules don’t apply to them. He’s one of that group who thinks they should just be allowed to get on and run things. No one can blame Boris because his parents sent him to Eton and to Oxford. But when he was in Oxford, he made the choice to join the Bullingdon Club – which is this raucous drinking group with a £2,000 annual fee. And this was in 1986! The price per head at their meals was £200, which shows the kind of wines they were drinking. They’d trash the place, but don’t get arrested – just tip the guy £500 to have it redecorated. I’m not certain that that’s gonna translate very well to the minutiae of managing a complex city. You can’t trash it and then ask someone to patch it up.
Boris has already said that the annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities – which you introduced – are going to be scaled down next year.
Well, short of a programme of mass-murder of London’s Irish community, I suspect that the same numbers will turn out in March of next year. The only thing Boris can do is reduce his contribution to it. But the hundred grand a year that I put in as Mayor was doubled or trebled by members of the Irish community or Irish firms. And I suspect that if Boris snubs them by cutting his input, they’re gonna say, “Sod you!” and put in more themselves. That march will go ahead. I mean the idea that everybody Irish votes for me and none vote for Boris is nonsense – gratuitously offensive. And it wasn’t just Irish Londoners who turned up on St. Patrick’s Day. All sorts of Londoners came because it’s a great day out, just like Chinese New Year, Russian New Year, Hanukkah and all the others. We celebrate every community in London, except the Buddhists. And I was negotiating with them just when I lost.
The Sunday Times reported yesterday that an internal investigation ordered by Johnson showed that millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was squandered under your regime – most especially by Lee Jasper. What’s your response to that?
Well, if I’d said I was going to have a commission to investigate Lee Jasper, and I appointed only members of the Labour Party, nobody would take it seriously. I had on my desk, just before I lost the election, a recommendation from the GLA’s head of law, who’s appointed by the assembly, to appoint an independent barrister to look into these charges. Boris hasn’t done that. He’s gone and appointed a load of Tory party hacks and friends. So who’s gonna believe any of it?
Probably the Evening Standard.
Well, the Evening Standard will report it but, if people believed the Evening Standard, I wouldn’t have gotten so close to winning a third term. I actually got more votes this time, when I lost, than the two I won.
What was the lowest point of the campaign?
It’s been very demoralising just having this endless stuff in the Standard, because you don’t have another evening paper. I mean, when I went to New York and met Giuliani, and we held a morning press conference... [in the US] there was loads of coverage in regional papers, local papers, loads of TV and radio programmes. It’s a mass media there, and it’s their way of communicating. Here, you’ve got two half-hour slots on BBC and ITV... and the Evening Standard. The giveaways have started to do a bit, but they’re still local news. Which is why we have The Londoner [free newspaper-styled newsletter from the London Mayor’s office; described as “propaganda” by his critics - OT]. I mean, most of the things we were doing weren’t getting reported. We had to get them out. So anyway, in the end it went so over the top... There were two days in the campaign where the front pages of the Standard had, ‘Ken’s campaign run by suicide bomb supporter’. The next day ‘Boris is new Messiah’. I mean, it got so bad.
You publicly supported the Metropolitan Police following their fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes – an unarmed Brazilian simply taking the Tube. Do you regret that now?
Well, of course, everyone regrets they shot him. The trouble is that mistakes happen. The question is: was there anything malignant in it? There wasn’t. Was there an attempt to cover it up? There wasn’t. At a time when you got four or five bombers on the loose, with the potential to let off more bombs... but what led to that catastrophe was that in the mid-1990s, John Major’s government had to make a decision about police radios. They wouldn’t fund the ones that operate underground, said they were too expensive and went for the cheap option. If police radios were more expensive and operated underground, he’d probably still be alive.
Cannabis was controversially de-criminalised in areas of London during your tenure as Mayor.
Really, it wasn’t. All that happened was [then Deputy Assistant Police Commissioner] Brian Paddick told his staff, “Don’t waste time arresting someone coming in to Brixton to buy a bit of dope for their own use. Go after people pushing crack and heroin and the harder drugs.” And I think, in theory, that was right. The reality of course is that, the way the media reported it, suddenly Brixton was besieged by people looking for drugs. It was a bit like living in a red-light zone. In a red-light zone, ordinary women get a lot of harassment from people thinking they’re prostitutes. And you suddenly had Brixton swarming with a load of middle-class people from North London looking to buy drugs without getting arrested. It was a mistake. I mean, the first thing I knew about it was when the police announced they were doing it. If you did it all over London, it might have worked. But to do it in just one area was a mistake.
Have you ever tried cannabis yourself?
No. Drugs weren’t easily available when I was a teenager. Five years later, the place had gone wild. And the other thing was that, once I’d decided to become a politician – I first stood for election in 1971 – I mean, nowadays you’ve got all these politicians fighting to proclaim, “I smoked dope when I was in college!” That wasn’t the case in my day. If you got caught smoking dope, your career was over. I invested so much of my life in what I still conceive as public service, I wasn’t gonna throw all that away. And also I worked for eight years as a technician in a cancer hospital. I was always very worried about any unnatural chemicals that you’re banging into your system. And some of my friends, who’re a few years younger, did do everything – one or two of them ended up in psychiatric hospitals.
Your opinions on Blair are well known, but what’s your take on Gordon Brown?
The trouble with Blair was that he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He had good intentions, but he hadn’t got a lifetime of thinking and planning. Gordon had. And then you had this terrible tension between the two of them. I so disagreed with Blair about all his privatisation angles and the war in Iraq, but, with the passage of time, you’ll balance that against Ireland. There are good things that he did. As Mark Anthony said, “the good that men do is buried with them.” I think that, 20 years down the road, people will be a little less acidic about Blair. And the jury’s still out on Brown. If he can avoid the economy sinking into a recession, he may even squeeze back. But he’s not a man built for the television age. That shouldn’t be a handicap, but it’s a world of celebrity politics – terrible. Blair got away with murder because he was charming. Brown’s never gonna be able to do that.
Surely you’ve done a fair amount of “celebrity politics” yourself – appearing regularly on Have I Got News For You and stuff like that?
Hmmm [sips pint and mock-glares]. It’s a way of reaching people that don’t watch the political programmes. I’ve only ever done that because I have a set of core beliefs I wish to promote.
You also made a vocal cameo on a track on Blur’s The Great Escape album.
Yeah, I enjoyed that. They had this song called ‘Ernold Same’ about a very dull, boring man. And they wanted someone with a dull, boring voice. And they first approached John Major, who said ‘no’. They then asked me, and I said ‘yes’. I really like them. I’ve done various things with Damon Albarn since on campaigns. I like the fact that he refused to get caught up in all that ‘Cool Britannia’ crap.
Are you a music fan generally?
I’m completely promiscuous in my musical tastes. Heavy metal perhaps less so, but I enjoy listening to some of the popular opera stuff, like Nessun Dorma, right the way through The Beatles and the Stones and so on. Katie Melua is probably the person I’ve listened to most in the last few years. I thought her debut album was brilliant. Recently, I’ve also been listening to the kind of stuff that appeals to five-year-olds [Livingstone has two young children with current partner Emma Bea, and three others who were unheard of before the election campaign – OT].
You once described George W. Bush as, “the greatest threat to life on this planet.”
Well, he is! Not because of his wars. Bush’s war has killed perhaps a 100,000 people in Iraq, and he may even kill millions if he was to go mad in Iran. But the real threat is to the environment. If Al Gore had been elected, he might have started to reduce carbon emissions. But with Bush in power, they’ve let it rip for eight years. And, if we’re really lucky, tens of millions will die from global warming. If we’re not, it’ll be hundreds of millions.
Do you think we’ve passed the tipping point?
I think we most probably have. I do think it’s gonna be hundreds of millions rather than tens of millions. Some countries will be wiped out. They’ll become deserts and their fresh water will go.
Will London end up underwater?
No, because we built the Thames barrier. And even with the melting ice caps, we’ve got 50 years clear. And by the time you get 50 years down the road, we’ll have built a bigger one a bit further out. That was an amazing bit of luck. We didn’t know anything about global warming when we built it, it was just to protect against storms in the North Sea. And it’s given us a breathing space. When I met Bloomberg in New York... [pauses] There – as the North Atlantic gets warmer, the hurricanes get more powerful. And they’ll eventually have a full squall hurricane. And two million New Yorkers will need to be put in shelters. Everything on the coast can’t be protected. We’re lucky in London. It’s gotta get past the River Thames. There, the sea is around the whole city. And when it hits! I mean, they’re building the shelters. They’re expecting very little loss of life. But the city will take months, if not years, to recover. And then they’ll have it again – and again. It’s a real problem. Half the world lives on coasts or on tidal rivers. Bangladesh, you’re talking 50 million people living in areas that will be submerged. I suspect that in 15 years time, all the advanced economies will have to do effectively what we did in WWII. This huge retrofitting and diversion of resources to tackle climate change. They’ll leave it too late and there’ll be a massive loss of life. But they’ll have to do it.
Otherwise what?
There’s no guarantee that human civilisation will make it to the end of this century unless we really move on this. And that’s why Bush has been a catastrophic disaster for the whole human race – let alone the poor buggers he hangs and bombs and leaves in poverty.
What’s next for you?
I’m writing a book about the last eight years. And I’m back on the after-dinner circuit [raises glass]. I’m available to the Labour Party for fundraising. And I’m going to campaign against all the bad things Boris does. And work my guts out to win back councils and save Labour seats in the next general election. And after that, I’ll decide.
What’s been the most important lesson you’ve learnt from four decades of British politics?
Never give in to British newspapers. There’s no point being a politician if you follow their agenda.