Question: When does a problem become a car crash? Answer: When ‘convenient’, ‘smart’ decisions, devoid of integrity, lead to unpleasant but inevitable consequences. Ken Livingstone represents everything that New Labour fought the long, long fight to remove from the party: factionalism, extremism, racism disguised as inclusiveness, doublespeak, the wolf of megalomania wrapped in the sheepskin of the common man’s struggle.
Yes, we say, he’s a Monster… but he’s our Monster. No, friends, a monster is a monster - we dirty ourselves pretending otherwise. We jeer at Berlusconi, hyperventilate at Bush, but turn our ‘Nelson’s’ eye toward the fascism of ‘our’ Ken, the apologist for the IRA and the loony islamist right, groupie for Chinese totalitarianism and the latest upstart South American Caudillo. It’s a miserable contest against a TV celebrity with no measurably relevant experience save consistent self exposure: whoever wins will be responsible for the largest city in western Europe and an annual budget of more than 11 billion pounds....
