The Dark Newt Rises

By Conor Pope / @conorpope

It’s the early hours of Friday, October 22nd 2010 and the announcement has just come through from Tower Hamlets that Lutfur Rahman is the newly-elected Independent mayor of the borough. Ed Miliband looks out onto the Thames from a rooftop in central London, his brow furrowed. There is the distant sound of a police siren.

“I want to be clear on this,” Ed intones, turning to face a corner of the roof that is dark, blocked from the streetlamps below, where a lonely hunched figure stands. “In our… zeal… to bring Johnson to justice…” The figure looks down, the tails of his unmistakable beige linen costume flapping behind him in the cold night breeze, “I’ll let you bend the rules, but we cannot break them.”

The figure stands silently in the shadows, looking away.

“Ken, I have to have your word.”

The figure turns from the darkness, his face finally, if only slightly, illuminated. Ken Livingstone unenthusiastically nods: “Agreed.”

Now, before anyone accuses me of going off on a Hari, I’ll make it clear that that isn’t true. These words were not spoken to me, nor were they spoken by Ed Miliband and Ken Livingstone. It actually happened in a scene from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s seminal graphic novel, Batman: The Long Hallowe’en. I chose to recreate this scene to help prove a point: that, despite what many see as his faults (and God knows I’m no fan), Ken Livingstone is the Batman.

Batman is a great figure for the left. Bruce Wayne, the man behind the batty mask, was born into wealth but suffered tragedy at an early age. He decided then to use this wealth to help the less fortunate. Since the political, judicial and policing powers in his home of Gotham city were corrupt, he turned himself into a symbol of hope for the disenfranchised; changing the broken system without making compromises to it.

Despite his parents being murdered as a result of petty street crime, he was able to see the bigger picture. Wayne was able to see that the petty street crime was not the main problem, but a cause of a much larger problem.

Before his time was fully occupied by insane costumed supervillains, he made it clear who his real enemies were. In Year One, just two months after first deciding to become Batman, he breaks into a dinner party of Gotham’s self-serving political elite, telling them only:

“You have eaten Gotham’s wealth. It’s spirit. Your feast is nearly over.”

Red Ken and the Caped Crusader were both at their true apex in the 1980s. It was the decade that Livingstone was leader of the GLC and that all of the best Batman graphic novels were made. Forget Mayor of London or Hollywood blockbusters, the ’80s gave these men success in the roles they were really made for.

Following the abolition of the GLC, Livingstone began a 14 year stint as a backbench MP, a role he is less-suited to and was surely never really happy in. By the end of this period, Ken had been expelled from the Labour Party. At the same time, Batman suffered from a string of terrible films that did great damage to the superhero’s reputation. These movies were developed with the specific purpose of being mainstream; a role Batman is not suited to and will never be happy in. By the end of this period, Empire magazine’s number one worst film of all time, Batman & Robin, had been made. The Batsuit had Batnipples and the Dark Knight had been taken from his fans.

Now, before we can get onto the real nitty-gritty of this article, the stuff that’ll really make you sit back and wonder what Ken Livingstone does at night, I’ll throw a few more easy similarities at you. There’s the tongue-in-cheek, campy names for things: I’m sure the modern day equivalent of Robin hanging upside down from the Batcopter to hand Batman his Shark Repellent Batspray is Tom Copley manning the phones on a Kensday Kenvassing. Then there’s the iconic associated modes of transport: the Batmobile and the bendy bus (a Kendy bus?). There’s even their biggest foes: the Joker and, er, Batman’s nemesis, whatever he’s called. The Joker’s anarchist tendencies surely have more in common with Boris Johnson’s supposed libertarian streak than Obama’s strain of timid social democracy.

You could even go so far as to look at Batman’s tendency to be suspicious and even pick fights with other members of the Justice League. Although, having said that, Batman does end up fighting Superman at the climax of The Dark Knight Returns in 1986. Now, I like Neil Kinnock as much as the next Labour Party member, but him being Superman is a tenuous link too far, even for me.

Neither made their true return to the fold until the mid-part of the last decade. Firstly, Livingstone was readmitted to the Party and won his second term as London Mayor in 2004, a year before the Batman film franchise was rebooted with the excellent Batman Begins. This allowed fans to forget previous crimes and flock back rather than hide their copies of Arkham Asylum behind a more socially acceptable X-Men DVD or retrieve their Ken stickers from a drawer underneath spare Labour Rose leaflets.

During the 2008 film The Dark Knight, Batman becomes increasingly unpopular with the public, eventually shouldering the blame for something he didn’t do and disappearing. Next summer, in the third installment, The Dark Knight Rises, he will inevitably return to Gotham in a wave of public approval to put right what has gone wrong over the past four years.

Livingstone became increasingly unpopular with Londoners in the run-up to the mayoral election in 2008 and had to shoulder some of the blame for the 10p tax fiasco, despite that having nothing to do with him.

Will next summer be his third installment?

It is May 2012 and a woman walks along a lonely Chelsea street. She looks up to the night sky and sees something bright, shimmering against the thick city cloud. It is a sign. It means he is back. It means the Dark Newt has risen.

It is a red circle, with a white ‘C’.