Tired old Ken deserves a permanent holiday

Three months ago, it was inconceivable that Livingstone could lose today. Even now, it feels like one of those movie scenes where Sigourney Weaver thinks she's killed the alien, only for it to leap out at her from behind a control panel. But if this is to be the end of Livingstone's 37 years in political office, it will be a demise very largely of his own making.

Ken's more or less explicit pitch that Boris Johnson would destroy London as a financial centre, smash racial peace and jeopardise the very future of the planet are just the latest, and possibly last, of what has been a quite remarkable series of misjudgments from a Mayor who claims judgment as his strongest card.

We are not choosing the president of the galaxy today. We are choosing the man who controls the buses. And however hard Ken tries, Boris cannot credibly be presented as a monster. His policies are rather similar, almost too similar, to his opponent's. London would not change dramatically under Johnson. Londoners know these things. Why doesn't Ken?

After so long in power, he has gained an over-developed sense of his own importance, and of the Mayoralty's. We want the Mayor to worry about ordinary, small, boring things, like the Circle line, or the Brent knife crime reduction strategy. We don't want pointless grandstanding about climate change and foreign policy.

Livingstone has done a number of good things for London, things of which he can rightly be proud. The congestion charge was brave, and initially effective. There are more buses. He has been good at prising money out of Whitehall to pay for his schemes. That was a record to justify re-election - in 2004.

The blunt truth is that nearly all the achievements of which he boasts today happened in his first term. Since he was re-elected, there has been a striking decay in the quality of his judgment and in the results he has obtained for us.

The benefits of the congestion charge have atrophied; the scheme was extended, unnecessarily and sometimes damagingly, to the west; and the Mayor now proposes to vandalise his own flagship policy by allowing 80,000 small cars into the C-charge zone for nothing.

The first term saw more buses; the second term saw the scrapping of the Routemaster, the introduction of the bendy bus and the arrival of children's free travel, all of which have dramatically reduced the quality of service for passengers.

Mr Livingstone himself has decayed. His campaign has been awful, largely negative, its smears often puerile, shamelessly using race as a weapon - so much for the great statesman and champion of harmony. The old Ken charm makes only cameo appearances now.

The second term has descended into grandeur, cronyism and straightforward nastiness. The Lee Jasper scandal could, at a pinch, be ascribed to carelessness. The real damage was done, the real misjudgment shown, by Ken's response.

The whole thing could have been over in days, had he got rid of Jasper. But he stuck it out for more than three months, ensuring that when the inevitable end came, it was about 30 times worse than it need have been. He never says sorry, never admits mistakes.

Whistleblowers such as Brenda Stern and Atma Singh were publicly smeared as racists and terrorist sympathisers, respectively. Straightforward questions about the Jasper projects, from the press and the elected Assembly, were greeted with abuse, ranting, and obfuscation.

What this showed Londoners, better than anything I could write, was someone who has come to believe that he should not be held to account, and who has come to take power for granted. Underlying the over-the-top fury of his whole election campaign, and that of his supporters, has been a similar idea - that Johnson's challenge is not just wrong, but is somehow illegitimate.

I was struck, last month, by a comment from the rather underwhelming Green candidate, Si‚n Berry, a Livingstone ally (if he is Ken, Si‚n is Barbie). "Boris doesn't share Londoners' values," she said. Surely that's up to Londoners to decide?

Ken, Ms Berry, and various Guardian columnists genuinely do, I think, believe that "Londoners' values" are the same as theirs. They genuinely cannot accept that their much-vaunted "progressive consensus" might not actually exist; that many Londoners are actually ( shudder) Right-wing, or middle-of-the-road; that many do not see Boris as the Antichrist but rather like him.

Ken and chums deplore Boris's pitch for the suburbs, as if it were somehow wrong to seek votes outside N1. They take it as read that cars are terrible things which must be suppressed; many Londoners quite like their cars. They say the top issue is climate change; we say it is crime. They have only just realised, with a horrible jolt, that the voters do not buy their dodgy statistics showing how life has improved in every possible respect.

The election result is still very uncertain; Livingstone could still win. But perhaps the real number that matters is not the two-point or 11-point or six-point gap between Boris and Ken in the latest polls, but the 19-year gap in their ages. Johnson, 43, is the change. Livingstone, 62, is set in his unappealing ways.

Despite his (now all too literally true) "Father of the City" image, Ken has never actually been all that popular. Last time, he got only 36 per cent of the first-preference vote. But there was never before one single convincing candidate around whom opposition could coalesce. So Boris deserves credit, too. If the polls are right, he has built a broader coalition of support than any Tory for years.

Unlike Ken, Boris Johnson has in this campaign exceeded expectations. Unlike Ken, he has refused to take Londoners for granted. Over the past six months, perhaps the most eventful in the short life of the Mayoralty, we have learned two important things. Ken is a buffoon pretending to be a serious man. And Johnson is a serious man who has given up pretending to be a buffoon.