Opinion of Ken Livingstone

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

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[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Controversial and probably unwise to stand again; but as a Londoner, I feel he was a very, very good Mayor (and this is from a non-radical, technocratic standpoint).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A curiosity: 50% competent administrator and canny politician, and 50% brainless posturing gadfly. For better or worse he dominated London Labour to a greater extent than anyone since Herbert Morrison - London Labour in the intervening decades tended to be dominated by dull machine politicians - and did so even when temporarily expelled from the Party. When assessing his general record it's hard to overlook his reckless decision to try to win his post back in 2012 even though he knew as well as anyone else that by that point his negative personal vote was larger than his positive one: vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I think he genuinely lost perspective and thought he was the manifestation of London, or that the City Hall couldn't survive without him or something.

My favourite nutty Ken idea was his redrawing of the London boroughs. Not that I opppse such a move to end the current mess of units which are both too large and too small (and stuffed with anonymous mandarins) , but his map. I can't find it online, but it basically divided the whole of London into vertical strips, which would have put Enfield in the same borough as Westminster. Mad.

[SATW]

Massive HP.