Ken wages a virtual war against his critics

The homepage of the mayor of London, by contrast, is a combination of travel agency and the municipal equivalent of a happy-slap.

As well as trumpeting his present taxpayer funded trip to India, in the last 10 days alone, Ken has issued press releases attacking: Assembly members Roger Evans, Tony Arbour and Richard Barnes; Westminster City Council; all 32 London boroughs; Tory frontbenchers David Davis and Dominic Grieve; The Evening Standard; and the entire UK media.

Of the 20 press releases issued by the Mayor between 9 November and this morning, no fewer than 10 have been attacks on other people.

Sometimes they're just wrong (I, for instance, am accused of "fabrication" for reproducing a statistic on bendy-bus safety supplied by Livingstone himself). Sometimes, they verge on the hysterical, in both senses of the word.

According to Ken, Grieve's call for Sir Ian Blair to be sacked has nothing to do with Sir Ian's responsibility for the policies which killed an innocent man, or his force's conviction by an Old Bailey jury, or his attempt to carry on defending the indefensible and smearing the victim to the end.

No, Grieve is pursuing a "reckless and cynical politically-motivated campaign of vilification" to cover up (wait for it) failings in Tory crime policy 15 years ago: a time, incidentally, when Grieve wasn't even an MP.

On one level, of course, there's a simple explanation: Ken is famously bad tempered. And attack is a good form of defence. Then there's the Mayor's inescapable tendency to grandstand: while, say, New York's Michael Bloomberg gets on with the drains, Ken is defending radical Muslim clerics or flying to Beijing.

Really, though, this is about positioning. Ken needs - cherishes - his enemies. Just as Margaret Thatcher did with the Argies and the unions, and just as Tony Blair tried to do with the "forces of conservatism", he seeks to define himself against his opponents.

But the ideological choice presented by Thatcher was real. The problem for Ken is that in substance, as opposed to rhetoric, he is quite Rightwing himself. That's why it's so important, with an election coming up, to present himself as beseiged by reactionaries, to convince us he's still really with the angels.

We should question whether it's proper to do this on a taxpayer funded website (what must visitors think, Googling London and getting this tide of bile against people they've never heard of?) But the more interesting question is whether it's working.

Ken repeated his ridiculous Ian Blair defence on the Guardian's website. Even acknowledging that many web commentators are both Rightwing and mad, the response, on this liberal site, was the most blisteringly negative I've seen, with barely one person in support. Given this, perhaps Ken should take his recent attacks to their logical conclusion. Perhaps he should do a press release attacking the entire world.