Did you stay up for Ken?

Well, we missed the first broadcast because we were having dinner, but thanks to Channel 4 +1 we were able to catch Martin Bright's Dispatches programme on Ken Livingstone. The chargesheet, in summary:

Ken likes a drink
He keeps some bizarre company
Some of London Development Agency's money has gone astray
There are - gasp! - socialists inside Ken's inner circle

The docu made the classic mistake of overselling a strong story - its attempt to make out that Ken was in the business of nation state-building, with embassies in favour territories, was particularly amusing.

There were some eye-popping numbers: Ken's room service bill for one night on a recent trip was six hundred quid. That's the kind of number BoJo could really get his teeth into.

For us, the big story here is how fundamentally screwed up London's government is. Checks and balances simply don't exist, the London Assembly is a joke, and any Mayor with anything about them would have had some fun with this mechanism. So who's responsible for that?

Step forward, Tony Blair and Nick Raynsford, the Minister for London at the time of the creation of the new infrastructure. Raynsford got a bit of face time on the Dispatches show, criticising Ken for his dalliance with Hugo Chavez. But no-one asked him about his involvement in legislating the Mayoral office.

And we don't expect the Tories to go in hard on this issue because (as the recent YouGov poll demonstrated) they've got a decent stab at getting their grubby hands on this shiny, gleaming, unconstrained executive powerhouse. And having seen just how much power the London Mayor has, we can only assume that Cammers is confident that BoJo will be doing exactly what he does on Have I Got News For You - reading stuff that someone else has written for him. With varying degrees of success.

Written by Lloyd Shepherd on 21 Jan 2008 10:16 PM. Permalink