High Noon

With elections for London Mayor taking place on 1 May, The Other Side’s Dan Murdoch checks out the two main contenders

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This year’s elections are set to be the fiercest and most closely contested in the eight years of London’s mayoralty. There is little doubt it will come down to two men, both mavericks with reputations for eccentricity and controversy. The winner picks up the keys to City Hall, a £140,000 salary and responsibility for transport, policing, the emergency services, health, culture, and London’s environmental and economic development. So how does Ken ‘The Red Goblin’ Livingstone measure up to Boris ‘The Blue Blunder’ Johnson?

Despite his significant weight advantage over Wee Willy Kenneth, the biggest spear to gouge Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s toffy spleen with is that he’s actually a political lightweight. Career wise he’s a multi-award-winning journalist who made his name at The Telegraph and edited the determinedly controversial, elitist wankfest The Spectator. But the 43-year-old Henley MP can hardly boast any political achievements. Sacked as Shadow Minister for Arts by Michael Howard after lying about an affair, he recently stood down from the frankly worthless post of Shadow Minister for Higher Education. Not exactly the credentials for managing one of the world’s biggest cities and a £9 billion budget.

Compare this to Comrade Kenny, who can boast 30 years at the heart of London politics. In 1981 he was elected leader of the Greater London Council, aged just 35. After 15 years as a troublesome but resolute backbencher he saw off Blair by winning the inaugural 2000 elections as an independent and forcing the Labour party to ask him back. The 62-year-old has revamped the capital’s tired transport system and pushed ahead with controversial, but successful, schemes like the congestion zone, which is set to be mimicked in cities around the country. Latest brain waves include the C Charge on environmentally unfriendly vehicles, and plans to copy Paris’ successful communal bike hire scheme.

Boris’s main talent is for sweepingly un-PC comedy: during the Ken Bigley kidnapping his Spectator leader said Scousers should stop ‘wallowing’ in their ‘victim status’ adding they should accept some blame for Hillsborough. He has labelled black tribesman ‘picaninies’, linked Papua New Guinea with ‘cannibalism and chief-killing’, and said that voting Tory “will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.”

All fun and games. But compared to the political behemoth that is Ken Livingstone, Boris is little more than a floppy-haired fairy, prancing through the political consciousness on the back of tired tabloid hacks gagging for his next blunder.

“Say something ill-advised Boris,” begged one Sun ‘journalist’ as Blondy left last year’s Tory conference, simply because the red rag’s gutter snipe had nothing to file.

Does Boris court such publicity? Probably, but for some reason everyone is happy to tousle his hair and go: “ahhhh Boris you loveable, eccentric little posh boy, let me finger your bottom.”

Ken too is prone to ruffling feathers, comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard, claiming he’d like to see the Saudi royal family ‘swinging from lamp posts’, and allegedly pushing a male friend of his partner down the stairs at a house party.

Of course both of them promise to turn London into THE GREATEST CITY EVER, but what else are they going to say? I’ve never been too impressed with election promises. So let's put small details like policy to one side (It works for Boris. In fact, I think it is his policy). So what are they like? Well, strangely, they are both confessed thieves. In 2003 Boris nicked a cigar case from former Iraqi Deputy PM Tariq Aziz while on an official visit to the country. In contrast Ken pilfered a book from WH Smith in 1957.

Like a naughty schoolboy, Boris has been ordered off the booze for the duration of his campaign, where as Ken is known to drink whisky at morning meetings of the London Assembly. He claims it eases a bronchial condition.

Boris has an air of the shambolic Latin don about him, and rightly so, he studied classics at Balliol, Oxford. Ken the Red supposedly has a Ho Chi Minh bust in his office. He’s been accused of running London like his ‘personal fiefdom’. In fairness that’s exactly what London is - the elected London Assembly has no power over decision making, it would be hard to find a group of less powerful elected officials outside a parish council. So there’s little to stop Ken swanning around handing out favours and ‘allocating funds’.

“Skyscrapers? Yeah they’re brilliant. We’ll have loads. Thanks for the donation. Chavez? Cracking bloke, proper socialist, we can deal with him. Cheers for the gas.”

The gimlet-eyed incumbent has done well in previous year’s by distancing himself from national politics, but probably uttered a robust Lambeth litany when Gordon Brown ordered they appear together before the media at the end of March. That’ll force the floating voters - with friends like those…

Suggestions about Boris’s competence have seemed increasingly justified since an analyst pointed out a £100m hole in his transport budget. Hard to “Oops crikey” your way out of that one.

So who would you rather have juggling the 2012 Olympics and the £16 billion Crossrail scheme in the face of the much-heralded threat from international terrorists?

The foppish Etonian writer or the street fighting socialist that even Prime Ministers can’t rein in? 

Well it seems Boris is winning. According to the bookies, London’s five million voters have gone all blue. A reflection of national trends? Perhaps. Or maybe the bike riding, blue-eyed albino really has won us all over. Well Boris, if you get it, please don’t do anything ill-advised.

mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com

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