Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone by Andrew Hosken

The Lee Jasper scandal has turned Ken Livingstone's "up", almost certain re-election next month, into a "down" — months of bad headlines and a much tougher fight to keep his job. A story like that — late-breaking, potentially paradigm-shifting — is any biographer's nightmare, and Hosken has done well to get it in at all. He even mentions Jasper's resignation, an event which took place little more than a month before the book hit the shops.

Inevitably, however, the coverage of the saga has to be brief. The voters will decide in 10 days whether the paperback edition keeps it as a footnote to Livingstone's latest astonishing comeback or as the death-blow for one of Britain's most remarkable political careers.

Livingstone's extraordinary longevity in power is perhaps exceeded only by one of the many people he has insulted, the Queen.

He held his first office, vice-chair of housing on Lambeth council, in May 1971. Boris Johnson was six years old at the time.

Yet maybe that is the problem with Ken, and perhaps also a problem with this generally very good book. It is fascinating, for an anorak like me, to relive the GLC years, with their radical "wimmin" (they really did wear boiler suits and boots, Hosken confirms) and their bad poetry on the rates ("Today, two million pricks/Are riding, meek as lapdogs/The motorways One to Six".) It is illuminating to realise how far many practices of the new-model Livingstone — the abuse of public money to manipulate client groups, the gesture politics to conceal a lack of substantial real powers — are directly inherited from the GLC. So, too, after a bad falling-out over ratecapping in 1985, is Livingstone's estrangement from the mainstream Labour Left, and his adoption by a surrogate family of Trots. The policies of today's City Hall may not be Trotskyite; its controlling, paranoid methods certainly are.

But there is too much GLC in the book, and not enough mayoralty. Hosken has an important and widely discussed scoop on Ken's secret children, though he treats it in a faintly perfunctory way. His chapters on Livingstone's City Hall years, however, tell us little more than we knew before, and amount to only about a quarter of the text.

Here the author has clearly benefited from long chats with Livingstone's advisers and several sessions with Ken himself.

Although I think his verdicts are broadly fair to both Ken's supporters and critics, he sometimes takes the Mayor's professed achievements slightly too much at face value.

I wanted a little more digging into the record, and more of an acknowledgment that, outside the heated environs of journalism and politics, the mayoralty still plays a relatively small role in the lives of Londoners. On the subject of the media, Ken's relationship with the Standard, surely among the bumpiest in journalistic history, gets a whole chapter (we learn Livingstone actually believes that the "sole purpose" of the paper is to bring him down, a remarkable feat of solipsism even by his own lights).

Hosken is rightly scornful of some of Livingstone's wilder episodes at City Hall, such as the flirtation with Venezuela and the "concentration camp guard" outburst against the Jewish Evening Standard journalist Oliver Finegold. As the author coolly observes, "When it came to dodgy Third Reich analogy, few had greater form than Livingstone." After his superb exposé of Shirley Porter, the gerrymanderer of Westminster City council, Hosken has again managed to turn unpromising territory into a corking read. He is the John Grisham of local government..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk
From the provocative biographer of Shirley Porter comes a comprehensive and fascinating account of Ken Livingstone's extraordinary life and career. For nearly thirty years, this controversial political chameleon has been making headlines, antagonising, shocking, and delighting the public and press in equal measure. After taking control of the GLC through an audacious internal coup in 1981, his career was transformed in 2000 when he became the first directly elected Mayor of London as an independent in the teeth of a fierce campaign by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.Since then, he has won the 2012 Olympics and led the capital during the dark days following the 7th July 2005 terrorist attacks. In May 2008, he's likely to face his greatest political challenge in the shape of Tory Mayoral hopeful Boris Johnson. Andrew Hosken charts a unique political career of a man often described as Britain's second most powerful politician - a story characterised by ambition, controversy and ruthlessness.