AUTOBIOGRAPHY: MARK HENNESSYreviews You Can't Say ThatBy Ken Livingstone Faber & Faber, 710pp. £25
FOUR YEARS AGO, Ken Livingstone was in tears after being beaten in the London mayoral election by the Conservative Party candidate, Boris Johnson. Today, Livingstone desperately wants to return to City Hall: the hunger for a new term of office oozes from every page of his autobiography. You Can't Say Thatis a sometimes bitter book. On occasion the former mayor has good grounds for holding grudges against journalists, fellow politicians and others. His contempt for Johnson, though, is a constant. Clearly, the tousled-haired Etonian is everything that Livingstone hates.
Success has come easily to Johnson. For Livingstone, every step has been hard earned. In his eyes, Johnson’s worst sin is laziness. It’s a charge that was supported by many others, including Conservatives, in Johnson’s early years in City Hall, but has less credibility today. Nevertheless, Livingstone appears wounded that his legacy has been consumed by his rival: the multibillion-pound investment in the Tube; the Olympics; even the rental bicycles that he promoted have been maddeningly dubbed Boris bikes. In one carefully harvested anecdote, Livingstone relates how Johnson did not want to go to the Beijing Olympics, preferring a holiday in France. Eventually required to go to China, Johnson did so with poor grace.
Before becoming mayor, Johnson had insulted the Chinese in his Daily Telegraphcolumn – for which he is paid £250,000 a year – saying China's economy is smaller than Italy's, its cultural influence nil and its national game, ping-pong, a British creation. "He made things worse at the closing ceremony by shambling into the stadium with jacket undone, hands in his pockets, stomach hanging over his belt and forgetting to shake hands with Beijing's mayor or acknowledge the country's president," Livingstone writes.
Livingstone’s telling of his early years is poignant, the sense of loss felt at the early death of his father still raw decades after he collapsed with a huge heart attack brought on by years of heavy smoking. The death has left Livingstone with an unforgiving attitude to tobacco. His parents, Robert and Ethel, met at a music hall during Robert’s shore leave from the merchant navy. Afterwards, they went with friends for fish and chips. Later that night, they parted and rang their respective betrothed to tell them that they had found someone else.
In the book’s epilogue, Livingstone says that he wrote it for his five children – born to three partners over 30 years in a state of relative harmony, despite the complications – so that they would know the family’s history when he is too old and senile to tell them. He is scarifyingly open on the subject, detailing, for example, his grandmother’s “violent mood swings . . . possessive nature and . . . viciously wounding tongue” and the brief meeting of his father and grandfather, who had long since left the family home, at his grandmother’s funeral – the two parted within minutes, never to see each other again.
Livingstone ties the family's history to anniversaries in the local government of London. His grandmother Zona was "born in 1888, a year before the creation of the London County Council". It is hard to imagine any other politician making a similar linkage. A grandfather served and died in the first World War at Arras, but there was little glorious about the tale. He was a drunkard, often disorderly, and was jailed twice before eventually being sent to the front in the belief that the Germans would kill him before a court-martial could. The Germans obliged. An uncle, also Ken, divided his political loyalties between the Conservatives and the British National Party. In the 1930s, he was a blackshirt. "Becoming more intolerant with age, he went through the Radio Timesand TV Timeseach week with a marker pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost."
Livingstone was doted on as a child by his uncle – who accumulated three wives but no children – “until I joined the Labour Party”. During the uncle’s final five years, when Livingstone was head of the Greater London Council, the two never spoke.
The early chapters of You Can't Say Thatare the most interesting, focusing on Livingstone's youthful and carefully recorded travels in Africa, his love of newts and salamanders and his growing interest in local politics. During a truck crossing of the Sahara desert, Livingstone began to suffer from dysentery, soon passing "crystal-clear mucus laced with blood". Eventually, the driver became so worried that he "did a 90-degree turn off the road" and drove until they came to a barbed-wire fence, stretching the full length of the horizon, with a door in the middle.
Livingstone was soon in the hands of the Foreign Legion, which nursed him back to health with dozens of pills and clean showers and decent food. The troops were stationed there as part of the soon-to-be-abandoned French nuclear tests. “It is a nice irony that I owe my life to the French nuclear programme,” writes Livingstone, a lifelong campaigner against nuclear weapons.
Once he joined the Labour Party, politics seemed to consume all else, leaving a single man living in a bedsit surrounded by his pets, doing interviews with the Evening Standardas head of the Greater London Council as he ironed his shirts.
Contentment in his personal life, at least, has come with age, following his marriage to Emma Beal, a former Evening Standardjournalist and latterly City Hall employee, with whom he has had two children.
Throughout the book, Livingstone details his pride in his executive skills; the improvements he made to the lives of Londoners; his hatred for much, if not all, of the press for its campaign against the GLC, which Margaret Thatcher scrapped in 1985.
And, yet, despite all its horrors, Livingstone cannot stay away from electoral politics. Like so many others of the political class, he believes that he, and only he, can make the difference.
Next May, Londoners will decide his fate.
Mark Hennessy is London Editor of The Irish Times
