“Boris was horrified when he won, and so was Cameron”: The Ken Livingstone interview

Ken Livingstone is the former Mayor of London. He was previously leader of the Greater London Council, Labour MP for Brent East and a councillor in Lambeth. He met Alex Smith at his home in London on Tuesday, 14th July, 2009.

It’s been 14 months since you lost the mayoralty. How do you think Boris Johnson has done up to now?
Broadly, Boris’ strategy is that this is a platform that allows him to rise to the premiership. For him, it’s just 8 years to get through, so he’s been deeply risk averse. Lots of cuts have been made, but what’s striking is that almost everything that was already under preparation, but not yet committed – like extending the Croydon tram link up to Crystal Palace or building the Thames Gateway bridge or the cross-river trams or the DLR extensions to Barking – all these have been cancelled and the staff preparing them have been sacked for a short term saving. The only thing Boris has initiated is this idea of a £40billion floating airport in the Thames. So Boris will do his time and then go back into Parliament to seek the Tory leadership, and whoever is elected mayor in 2016 will find there are no projects under way at all.

How much does that concern you?
Well, before a month had passed after Boris’ victory, the President of France and the Mayor of Paris announced they would review their policy on tall buildings, because with Boris saying he didn’t want any, the French saw the chance to attract some business. That’s now turned into a full-scale strategy, and starting in 2012 there will be a 35 billion Euros of investment in public transport for Paris. So both Sarkozy and the Mayor of Paris have recognised that if London is going to stop marching forward, and instead just rest for a while, there’s a chance for Paris to overtake and they are introducing legislation in October to put in place new infrastructures to support their plans. The only city that rivals London is Paris – in its size and its confluence of being the main cultural centre, financial sector and government centre of the whole nation. So in the next 10 years, London faces a real threat of being displaced by Paris as the primary financial business centre in Europe.

You’ve already signalled your intention to run again in 2012. Is part of the incentive for that that you have all these unfinished projects?
There are loads of reasons. One is that if you’re running a city like London, you need to take risks. You can’t play a safe, cautious game because others will overtake you. The size of the finance and business services sector in London – where we finally caught up with New York – is now so crucial for London’s wealth that if we were to see that shifting to Paris, it would be a disaster for jobs and there’s a real risk of long-term decline.

Aside from Boris not being adventurous or pro-active enough, do you fear for some of the projects that you were implementing, such as Crossrail?
Boris is committed to Crossrail because the business community made absolutely clear that they would turn against any mayor that wasn’t. Although there are rumblings amongst Tories, I don’t think they’d dare cancel it.

And what about the annual cultural events – Simcha on the Square, Rise…
Well they’re all gone, but those are things that can be reinstated within a year. But building the DLR extension to Barking and Dagenham is 8 years’ work, as is getting the long-term transport infrasturce going, or proper skills training. Even more important is that, as the world wakes up to how bad climate change is going to be, everyone is going to want to be producing solar panels, wind turbines and other new technologies. These are high-tech areas, with high profit margins and those are exactly what we should be focussing on in London because we’ve got a strong education base and university research departments, and a range of very good green organisations.

What do you think happened to the transport system in January with the snow?
It was pathetic. We went through World War Two and there was never a day when the buses didn’t run. In the great flood of 1953, the buses still ran, even though dozens of people died. When I was mayor, if we’d had a harsh weather warning on a Thursday, my staff and I would have convened meetings with TfL that afternoon and the Borough officers responsible for gritting would have been meeting us on the Friday. We’d have made certain the arrangements were in place to have their gritting machines out on the Sunday. But it never occurred to Boris that you have to be proactive, that however good a bureaucracy you create, you still have to give it a kick on a daily basis, or you get disaster. It seems to me that the first Boris knew of the snow was when he woke up on Monday morning and the buses weren’t running.

And how might you have planned differently for the policing of the G20 summit?
We’d have planned it in the same way that we planned for all the other events. The Mayor will meet with the commissioner and the commissioner’s senior staff. We did that with the May Day riots in 2001, which we managed to contain and we did it when Hu Jintao came to London and there were lots of Chinese and Tibetan groups who wanted to protest. People have to be allowed people to protest within ear’s shot of whoever is visiting. But Boris was writing all this stuff in the Telegraph the week before, ramping it all up by saying the Orks were coming to London to destroy our way of life. That’s why we started to get senior police officers saying “we’re up for it if they want it” and that attitude forced its way down the chain of command.

So that public message was a mistake?
Well yes, but the point is that it makes you wonder what they were saying privately. If Boris’ line to the commissioner was that “nothing must be allowed to interrupt normality in London” then the Police were always going to be heavy-handed and they were always going to clear Bishopsgate with violence. The killing of Ian Tomlinson was clearly an example of one angry individual lashing out, but in a way the more worrying thing is that a senior officer would have taken the decision to use violence to clear a peaceful protest.

Do you still go to Boris’ press conferences?
Boris doesn’t have press conferences – that would allow journalists to ask him questions! Boris has media events. I used to have a press conference every week, and I never left whilst there was a journalist still waiting to ask a question. I go to Boris’ question times where assembly members ask him questions and he largely avoids answering them. It’s quite tedious at times. I think actually when Boris decided to stand, he’d just been passed over for promotion by Cameron and he realised he was going nowhere. So he took the decision to stand for mayor not on the assumption that he’d win, but on the assumption that he’d run a good campaign, win some credibility and get back in the game in Parliament. I think he was horrified to win, as was Cameron.

You think Cameron was horrified that Boris won the London mayoralty?
Yeah. If you look at the Euro election results thirteen months on, Labour had its best result vis a vis the rest of the country that we’ve ever had. We came second only to the northeast in terms of the size of the Labour vote – that’s unheard of. That is partly because people see Boris and he doesn’t give them confidence about what a Tory government would do. Londoners are privileged to see the slight outline of what a Tory government might be like. The first year after my defeat, people kept coming up to me saying “how did he get in, it’s awful”. Now they come up to me and say “I voted for Boris, but I’ll never do it again, please forgive me!”

All is forgiven! So what is it that you’re proudest of from your time as Mayor?
There’s so much! We took a completely run down bus system and turned it into the best anywhere in the western world, the most extensive and the largest and one which has seen passenger numbers go from 4 million a day to 6 million a day. Then, after years of decline in police numbers, we are up to the most we’ve ever had and they are actually on patrol on the streets. Then there was winning the Olympics – and I’m immensely proud of the way we planned for and handled the bombings in 2005. But the most important long-term thing we did was the work on climate change. We created the C40, the group of the forty largest cities on earth, and started to combine our purchasing power. As a result of that, in cities all over the world, buildings are being retrofitted to make them more energy efficient. We got that off the ground first by getting 22 old fire stations and police stations done and we made 25% savings on our energy bills in the process. And the result if that the mayor of Toronto is now insulating every tall building in the city; Rotterdam is leading work on ports, which are always a nightmare because of the high emissions of ocean going ships; and Los Angeles is leading work on airports.

Is it frustrating for you to lose control over all these things that you’ve created?
Well, no, because I’ve been in this game for forty years, and those are just the rules of the game. John Major lost his seat and I won mine in Lambeth even though that Tory council had been the best council there for years. So I really can’t complain.

You don’t feel a bit sorry for yourself sometimes?
No. Since the GLC’s first election in 1964, only once has the party in government won a London-wide election, and that was in 2004. London is a hyper-marginal – you’ve got the solid Labour areas in the inner city but you’ve also got Tory suburbs. What was striking about the election with Boris that there were huge swings to me in the inner half of London. If you took away 4 of the outlying Boroughs of the 32 – Hillingdon, Bromley, Bexley and Havering, not all of which wish to even be in London – I’d still be mayor.

Does that give you hope for 2012?
Well, yes, but not just that. I went into the election assuming – because of the viciousness of the Standard – that my personal vote would be squeezed down to close to the Labour vote, but actually the gap widened up to 13%. Of course, people overestimate the Standard; they still think it sells half a million, but it actually sells 160,000 and half of those readers are people who live in Home Counties.

And three years from now, it’s not inconceivable that there would again be a backlash against the incumbent government, which at that time could be a Tory government. That would help you, too…
Yes, and that’s why Progressive London is broadly aware of where we’re in agreement, but we can’t really put detailed policies in place until we know who is in government. If Cameron wins and there are huge cutbacks in transport, that will be felt more in London, which is more dependent on transport than anywhere else in Britain. But we just don’t know until it happens.

If you were willing or able to put into your next manifesto that you would modernise the tube and make it run for 24 hours, as it does in New York, you’d have a huge wave of support.
We would, but you’d have to spend about £50billion to do it. It works in New York because they have four tracks – two in each direction – and you close one for repair work while the other one still runs. In our system there is virtually nowhere with four tracks.

So if the election were held tomorrow, what would you run on?
Bringing us back to the forefront of tackling climate change, the work of expanding the transport services and a commitment against above-inflation increases. I’d also run on the basis that I would build 50,000 affordable homes in three years. Boris has got the money to do that but he’s wasted his first year arguing with the Labour government about building homes for sale for people on £70,000 a year. If you’ve got – as Boris has – £5billion to spend over three years, you should set out to build the maximum number of homes for rent because that’s what we’re desperately short of. But Boris does not like the detail. With the congestion charge, I was involved at every level of planning. Every presumption was tested to destruction and every bureaucratic claim was challenged. It was a brutal process, but it was the only big IT system ever delivered by a public body on time and on budget. And it worked. That’s one of the big failures of the Blair years – that he would dip into something for a bit, and then get diverted by foreign policy. You need a Brownite attention to detail.

A Brownite attention to detail and Blairite decisiveness?
Absolutely. I’ve been genuinely surprised at how long it takes Gordon to make a decision. But detail and decisiveness combined are crucial.

I was at Tavistock Square on Sunday and there was a very moving floral tribute to those who died on 7/7. It must have been difficult for you to be away from London on that day?
I remember Giuliani saying he hardly ever left the City…

Did you ever fear that something might happen while you were away?
We always knew there would be an attack and so we always minimised the time I was out of London. But we also structured everything and looked at every aspect of every way we could be attacked. So a system was in place that had to work without the Mayor and, in actual fact, without the national government. The plan we had for a multiple bomb attack on the transport system was predicated on it occurring during a Friday afternoon rush hour, with Scotland Yard demolished and the mayor killed in a second wave of attacks, while the PM and the rest of the cabinet were in their constituencies. So the whole system had to work with the decapitation of political and police leadership. That’s why, when it happened, everything worked perfectly.

Being in Singapore, though, you must have felt remote, powerless?
I sat in the hotel in Singapore because my mobile phone works when all the others go down, so we stayed in touch. The only decision I had to take was whether or not the tubes would run the following morning.

Was that an easy decision?
Oh, yes. You’ve got to run the system the next day.

What do you mean when you say you knew there would be an attack…?
I mean, after 9/11 we always knew there would be an attack and so we’d always planned for it. Often the police would come to us and say they were getting an increase in electronic noise, which means someone’s planning something, and then normally we’d catch them. We had that during the 2004 mayoral election, when there was a big spike in electronic traffic – that plot was nipped in the bud. But we had no spike in traffic in the run up to July 2005. We suspected Al-Qaeda no longer had the capacity to do the sort of attack it did on 9/11, because it’s had such a battering. But increasingly what you’ve got is angry young men sitting around feeling outraged by foreign policy, able to access the internet, and perhaps one of them has been to a camp in Pakistan or Afghanistan for a few weeks’ training. This doesn’t get reported in the press, but we’ve had nine angry white men that we’ve arrested accumulating arms and bomb making equipment. That’s difficult to deal with as these people are only peripherally on the radar.

So what did you do that day in Singapore?
By the time the bombs happened, it was early afternoon in Singapore. I’d already gone off shopping for the kids, and I was having a meal with Keith Mills on Santosa Island by the time news came in. John Ross phoned after his daughter picked up that there’d been a problem on the tube, and Joy Johnson phoned to say there’d been a power outage. The trouble is, because our system is so old and held together by string tape, you can’t quite tell what’s happening. So it could have been a power surge. A couple of years before, all the lights went out at about 6:30 in the evening as I was sitting at my desk at City Hall and I saw this wave of darkness sweep over London. The instant thought then was that is was a bomb. In the end, it turned out that was the collapse of old equipment – under-funding of public service is a British disease.

You were a member of the Labour party for, what, 32 years between the late ’60s and 2000. Then you were suspended and ultimately expelled…
I don’t think I was suspended, I think I went straight to expulsion! I did think of resigning before I stood against Frank…

But you must have known you’d be expelled?
Yeah.

Wasn’t that difficult?
It was very difficult. I’d spent my whole adult life in the party. But Blair was such an idiot in his assumption of what I would do. It was only after Blair had seen that the congestion charge worked that they asked me back into the party.

Blair later said that he regretted saying you wouldn’t make a good mayor…
He did. Blair’s problem was that he had no history in the movement. He’d joined in about 1972 when he came down from college and then he was in Hackney South and couldn’t get selected to get on the Borough council, so he did that hopeless seat in Beaconsfield in ’82, and the next year he was in Parliament. So he didn’t go through the same stuff that Gordon and lots of others went through. He had no contact with working class people until he was a Labour MP. I think that’s why he didn’t want to send his kids to comprehensive school. I think he thought comprehensive schools were a nightmare.

Was it easier for you to leave the Labour party at that time because he was leader?
No, but I did feel they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with rigging the selection in the way they did. The stupidity of what I used to call the “Millbank Tendency” is that they spent two and a half years issuing these anonymous statements saying Livingstone wouldn’t be allowed to stand. I thought, isn’t it us as members who are supposed to decide? It was so arrogant and it offended the party membership. So I spent the first week after I announced I would stand on the phone persuading Labour councillors not to follow me out of the party, persuading people to stay and fight. In the end, though, I’d guess something like two-thirds of Labour members voted for me in that election.

How’s your relationship with your CLP now?
My local party was never a problem and we still have a very good relationship. They didn’t want me to stand as an independent, but one of the things they did like is that once I’d been elected mayor, I told Millbank that if they let the local party select its candidate for the following election, I wouldn’t stand again. So next time they were allowed a free choice, and they were happy.

Do you still knock on doors for the party?
My major activity is eating for the Labour Party at all these fundraising dinners I do. I mainly do them in London. And then there are other things I do with old Labour activists.

Do you mean Old Labour with a capital O and a capital L or…
Both! The main weakness of the so-called New Labour project was that it was too young and too graduate middle class. I was surprised how many old right-wingers who had spent their lives trying to stop me ended up supporting me because of how bad things had got.

You know you can be young and graduate and working class and on the left of the party…
I’m sure there is one somewhere. But in the run up to the 1998 Borough council elections in London, they introduced al these tests. Instead of being selected, you had to write statements of your values and management experience. But it wasn’t just the left wing that was stripped down by that; it was the working class people, black and white. I thought that was absolutely disgraceful. Blair and Brown between them took a functioning, broadly working class party, but one that was also strongly middle class, and reduced it to a shell. They closed down all the channels by which working class people could express themselves, through their unions and their local parties. If they hadn’t closed down the Labour party in that way, they might not have made the catastrophic mistake in carrying on Thatcher’s ban on council house building, And they’re now surprised that working class people are angry? What fuels the anger of those working class voters is that their kids have got nowhere to live.

You’ve said as well that Gordon Brown has made “economic misjudgements”, and been “subservient to the City”…
I think the initial economic strategy was wholly wrong, and that was a problem for both Blair and Brown. But I think over the last 18 months, Brown’s response to the economic crisis guarantees him a place in history. You can argue about exact details but it was Brown who put together the package that prevented the worst recession since the 30s becoming as bad or worse than the one in the 30s, when governments turned a recession into a depression because they got the response wrong. What is clear is that this time we’ve broadly got the response right. Yes, you’ve got to restore some balance in our spending, but if you do it before we are out of the recession, you could prolong it. That’s what Thatcher did: her first two budgets were catastrophic. She came into government just when we were slipping into a mild recession, and her massive public spending cuts made it worse.

In the context of what’s happened this year with MPs’ expenses…
Ah, it reminds me of how wise it was to say there shouldn’t be any expenses at City Hall! The original plan when I got elected was to have a mayor’s apartment at City Hall and all sorts of other things. I said there should be nothing except a travel card.

But you did have a credit card and you were able to take people out for the purposes of government. And you spent £16,000 in four years.
Look, I’ve never had any interest in the paraphernalia that goes with power; I just want to do the job and then spend time with the kids or in the garden. The £16,000 I spent on that card breaks down to £300 a month – that’s for the Mayor of a great world city to cater for guests. Compare that with the equivalents abroad. The mayor of Paris has a permanent Michelin starred chef to prepare the banquets. We had a staff canteen, and when we had visiting mayors we went to restaurants. If you compared those expenses with New York or Paris or Moscow or even the Lord Mayor of the City Corporation, I suspect our expenses would be 1 or 2% of theirs.

You should get a blog – I think it would make interesting reading.
By the end of the year, when my biography is finished, I will blog. I might even have a Twitter!