Losing candidate in 2008 mayoral election says he was threatened after suggesting rival's relative may have been a spy
Ken Livingstone has claimed Boris Johnson threatened to "punch his lights out" during the last mayoral campaign, after Livingstone had suggested his rival's Turkish great-grandfather might have been a British spy.
In his autobiography, published on Monday, Livingstone chronicles the mounting tension during the 2008 mayoral race. Publication comes months before he faces a rematch with Johnson at the 2012 mayoral election in May.
In the book, titled You Can't Say That, Livingstone dismisses his Tory rival as a politician used to "getting away with it" through humour when responding to difficult policy questions. But he says Johnson's "mask slipped" a couple of times during the campaign.
Livingstone recounts an appearance on the BBC's Question Time with Johnson: "After Question Time the cameras were still on us as a smiling Boris draped his arm around my shoulders and said, 'If you carry on talking about my great-grandfather I'm going to punch your lights out.'"
The veteran politician also reveals he thought he would have to stand down in the run-up to the last mayoral campaign because of a cancer scare, and cried as he cleared his office after losing to Johnson.
In a book which sheds little light on his emotional life, Livingstone alludes to being "down and depressed" during the 2008 mayoral race and, despite his political experience, says he was "still shocked" by the way the "right wing" threw everything at the campaign.
Livingstone refuses to concede any major mistakes during his time as mayor. He blames defeat on the recession, an unpopular government and the media, singling out the Evening Standard ? under the editorship of Veronica Wadley ? for the campaign it ran against him that alleged corruption in his office. The allegations were unsubstantiated.
He complains that he felt like a "non person" at City Hall after losing. "My first experience of Boris's pettiness came when I turned up at City Hall to discover my security pass had been blocked and I was only to be allowed in the building if accompanied by an official," he says.
Livingstone, the son of working-class Conservative parents, also highlights what he believes to be the advantage gained by Johnson's privileged background in the eyes of the media, where "one rule applies for Boris and his class and another one for the rest of us".
Livingstone, who has often championed policies and causes long before they were accepted by the mainstream, tells the Guardian that the animosity he has attracted over the years is down to being a working class person in a profession now "exclusively middle class, reported through the prism of a media that is exclusively middle class. And I think it's because they see me as an effective socialist.
"They're used to Labour politicians who come into office and end up being a tame pussycat, or being totally ineffectual. They're quite used to ones that they can seduce or buy off, or are incompetent. They wouldn't mind me if I was useless and they wouldn't mind me if I was a hireling. But I don't make the compromises they always want me to."
Living up to its title, the book is interspersed with tracts about Livingstone's uncompromising views on controversial issues such as Israel, which are likely to raise eyebrows in senior Labour ranks. His says views were formed in the 1980s after reading up the history of Zionism and from that point on: "I was not going to be silenced by smears of antisemitism whenever I criticised Israeli government policies."
Despite his staunch criticism about New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he reveals that he tipped off Brown, via his ally Ed Balls, after he was asked by the Labour peer Margaret McDonagh to lead the call for Brown's resignation as premier. "For all my doubts about Brown I wasn't going to help hand the party back to the Blairites so I phone Ed Balls on his mobile to warn him."
After he had lost mayoral office, Livingstone says that Brown called him to commiserate. "He seemed genuinely upset, but whether this was because I was losing or that my loss might open up a leadership challenge to him wasn't clear".
Livingstone also reveals that he decided not to have children because of his "dysfunctional childhood" and his anxiety that he would not be a good parent. Despite this, he has fathered five children.
He suggests that he offered to father two children (both daughters) with a local newspaper journalist, and one (a son) with a political activist, because their biological clocks were ticking and they had no partner at the time. He claims to have pre-arranged the role he would play in their lives, but does not describe how this was received by his partner at the time, Kate Allen. Livingstone later had two children with Emma Beal, whom he married in 2009.
A spokesperson for Boris Johnson said: "Any allegations like this in Ken Livingstone's autobiography should be viewed in the context of his candidacy for the mayoralty next year."
He also reveals that during his time as mayor, he thought his phone was being bugged by MI5, despite the insistence of Eliza Manningham Buller, then MI5 chief, to the contrary.
He said at the time didn't believe her as he often picked up the home phone immediately after finishing a call and heard a playback of his conversation. "However, given the Guardians 2009 expose of phone tapping by newspapers, I may have blamed the wrong culprit."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/21/boris-johnson-threatened-ken-livingstone
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