If anyone had any doubts about just how personal the 2012 London mayoral campaign is going to be, they should have been dispelled by Ken Livingstone’s speech to Labour conference today. Ken claimed that the Mayor had ‘got what he wished for’ in above average unemployment and accused him of standing for a ‘privileged minority’. He then went on to draw an equivalence between Boris’s student antics and those of the rioters:
“What is the difference between the rioters, and a gang of over-privileged arrogant students vandalising restaurants and throwing chairs through windows in Oxford?
Come on Boris – what’s the moral difference between your Bullingdon vandalism as a student and the criminality of the rioters?” But I’ll suspect that the line which will worry City Hall most is this one:
Those close to Boris are acutely concerned about the idea that he’s only interested in the London job for what he can get out of it.‘And I will take only one salary – no moonlighting.’
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