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There are some news stories to which the only proper response is gentle incredulity. Thus it was this morning, when I unfolded my Guardian to learn that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell have been offering their services to Ken Livingstone. Talk about kicking a man when he's down!
One of the great mysteries of the Livingstone campaign is the way it has rushed to embrace so many of the most unpopular people in Britain. Gordon Brown, fresh from his triumph over the 10p tax band, has been seen with Ken at least twice, and is apparently due back on the campaign trail next week. If it were me seeking re-election, I would walk to Cockfosters in my bare feet to avoid being caught in front of the same TV camera as Gordon.
Then there's Ed (Balls), Hazel (Blears), and now Tony and Alastair, apropos of whom a Livingstone "source" told the Guardian: "You only have to see the importance [Ken's] campaign gives to issues like opposing the war in Iraq ... to understand the character of his campaign." Would that be the same Tony Blair who actually started the war in Iraq, or a totally different one? All we need now is Heather Mills, Paul Burrell and Michael Winner to back Ken and we've got the full set.
There is one particular theme that explains a lot about British politics just now, one thread that links together Mr Campbell, Mr Brown's decline as a Prime Minister, and Ken's difficulties. That thread is credibility.
Mr Campbell's credibility problems are too well known to detain us further. Mr Brown is reaping the whirlwind from trying, at the beginning of his premiership, to present himself as too much that he was not: inclusive, collegiate, a man who knows where he's going. The 10p tax band retreat is so very damaging because it is the third time on tax alone that Mr Brown has panicked, making and unmaking long-term fiscal policy on the hoof in response to immediate, shortterm political demands.
Remember the hasty rush, back in the autumn, to trump the Tories' non-dom tax proposals? Or the 80 per cent rise in capital gains tax which so infuriated business? Both were produced in haste and have to some extent unravelled. So, too, may yesterday's concessions to the victims of the withdrawal of the 10p tax band.
We still don't know exactly what the proposed compensation package amounts to, whether it will be backdated for all the losers and whether it will indeed compensate all the losers. The 10p band plays on.
Mr Livingstone, too, is clearly starting to panic about being hitched to this crew - witness his extraordinary attempt yesterday to claim that he has "always been an independent". No, Ken: you are the Labour candidate. You will have a rose next to your name on the ballot paper. You are the representative at this election of the governing party.
And if you win it will be a huge shot in the arm for that government, not to mention the green light for various unpopular policies it wants to pursue, such as the expansion of Heathrow. "A vote for Ken is a vote for Gordon" sounds like a good slogan for Boris and Brian - I can't imagine why they're not using it.
But Mr Livingstone's main credibility problems are of his own making, not his party's. The catalogue of Mr Livingstone's half-truths, non-truths, and broken promises is long (to hold the congestion charge at £5 until 2013, to "save the Routemaster", to serve only one term, and so on.) His style in debate is to come out with apparently detailed, authoritative-sounding facts and statistics, which convince many that he knows his brief but which, on examination, often turn out to be false. Central to his campaign is a series of lies about his main opponent - that he is a racist Muslim-hater who wants to scrap the Freedom Pass (a claim also repeated by Gordon Brown yesterday).
Ken's accomplishments in office are real but modest. His more grandiose claims, regularly made on the campaign trail, tend to shrivel when held to the light. How can he be mainly responsible, for instance, for the drop in racial attacks? How can he be responsible for London's economic and cultural success? Is the Mayor really as important globally as he thinks?
Boris, of course, is no simon-pure advocate of truth: as a young man, he was fired from a newspaper for making up a quote, and told a famous lie about his personal-life. But he is significantly more truthful than Ken. Courtesy of the BBC's Vanessa Feltz show, the Standard recently carried out a controlled experiment in the relative veracity of the two men. Each appeared separately on the programme on successive days for the same length of time, 35 minutes, answering questions from callers. In that period, Johnson said 11 things that were untrue or misleading, an average of one every three minutes 10 seconds. Mr Livingstone said 36 things that were untrue or misleading, an average of one every 58 seconds.
Unlike national politicians, examined by the Westminster media, Ken has until recently got away with little scrutiny. As a result, he has committed the potentially fatal error of believing his own propaganda.
Until the past few weeks, he seems to have found it impossible to take Boris Johnson seriously, or to believe that the voters could actually choose Boris over him. His reaction to the Lee Jasper scandal was slow because he genuinely believes his Mayoralty is a model of effective government. He has spent too much time reciting questionable recorded crime figures and failed to realise that people do not feel safer.
Polls show Mr Livingstone consistently rated ahead of Boris on most issues, but consistently behind on trust and, crucially, on voting intentions. As Blair and Campbell found, if people don't trust you, not much else matters. And they don't trust Ken.
Reader views (10)
Reading Gilligan's rants is bizarrely amusing. The lack of substance to the claims is only barely veiled, but the irony of such a discredited journalist talking about credibility is amazing.
This continuing campaign by the standard is getting more and more shocking, and will certainly prove to be a poor commercial decision. Newspaper buyers want news, not rants from journalists who clearly have a chip on their shoulder.
- Rob, London, UK
I know who I trust to tell the truth and it isn't the self confessed liar Andrew Gilligan.
- Billy Blighty, Sydney Australia
Congratulations Andrew Gilligan on your Journalist of the Year award! Very well deserved!
Thanks to your dedication and hard work Londoners have been made fully aware of the horrendous corruption and cronyism being perpetrated by Chairman Ken and his crooks.
I love seeing the ghastly Nu-Labour animals like Balls, Blears, Bliar,Brown et al. coming out to support Ken - keep hammering those nails into his coffin you crooks!
He's already got the backing of the lunatic fundamentalist Al-Qaradawi, backers of suicide bombings, who next....Abu Hamza, Heather Mills, Jade Goody?
We've got to get rid of Ken in order for London to recover from the horrendous damage inflicted by his regime!
- Daniel Howard, London,UK
The trouble is Andrew, it's a matter of trust. If anyone has come up with half truths in the past few months, it isn't Ken. The truth will come out, but when it does it will be tucked away in a tiny column on page 8.
Politicians can't be trusted, but they don't write headlines that lie, or distort. Look at today's Standard - Ken talks about losing - well obviously when the polls are close, any one would realistically say they might win, they might not. Ken said that in 2000 when he romped home. If it would have been the other way round, it would have been Boris talking about winning.
- Harold, London, England
Andrew Gilligan is a bit of a one man anti-Ken show, really. It's quite impressive that the Evening Standard, representing a city which is diverse and liberal pays a man to produce almost daily articles worshipping Boris and the ground he walks on, the same Boris who supports the war and opposes Kyoto!
Boris wants to raise our bus fares - I think that 90p is pretty cheap- and I'd like it to stay that way.
- James, London
In choosing between two candidates, it comes down to someone who thinks £3.1 million pounds of unaccounted for, syphoned off tax payers money by a close friend of his and someone who made a mistake on the cost of a bendy bus. Not a difficult choice really.
- Kevin Slater, elephant and castle
My voting will be to get Ken out and home that over the next four years that each party can come up with a decent candidate and that Ken doesn't restand.
- Sara, London
If you want a Mayor who'll demonstrate probity and truthfulness, Brian Paddick's your man. His honesty over the Stockwell shooting was outstanding. He could have kept stum, and not spoken out against inaccurate statements put out by his boss Sir Ian Blair, and then got a promotion. But he did the right thing, not the right thing for his career.
And, with the fairer voting system, Brian can win! A lot of people I speak to say that they've enough of Ken, but don't want to let Boris in. So they're voting Brian with their first choice, Ken with their second.
- Lee Baker, London
What about Boris' supposed £8 million cost of the imaginary routemaster replacement, that has now become £100 million now that he has been caught on camera then? Was that a lie, or just incompetence? Because it certainly wasn't honesty!
- Liam, London
My guess is that Livingstone will lose.
This will not be because Boris has committed himself to any sparkling new programme but because Ken has had two terms and the baggage of twisting and turning to retain power has caught up with him.
When the campaign started, I hoped Boris would announce the respectable and conservative position that he was not interested in race. He would represent everyone while trying to provide good local services and trying to make London a good place to live.
Unhappily, as I see it, he has flirted with the politics of minority groups to out-Ken Ken. I doubt they are impressed.
There is still time for Boris to announce a clean break from the Livingstone years of minority coalition building. This would be a breath of fresh air for us all.
- Mike Newland, London
