That it should come to this: one can barely turn on the television without seeing Ken Livingstone vociferously defending Gordon Brown against what he describes, wrongly, as an “uber-Blairite plot.” Ken – of all people – says that this disunity really will not do, and that Labour has a duty to rally behind the Prime Minister and his high-spending, interventionist policies.
The two men once nursed one of the great hatreds in British politics. In 1998, for example, Livingstone wrote that “Gordon is not up to his job… The end result… is that Britain is now heading towards a recession entirely of Gordon’s making.” Two years later, Brown wrote a ferocious attack in the Evening Standard on Ken’s candidacy to be London Mayor, arguing that “every Labour Party member knows the last thing London or Labour needs is a return to the barren divisive fights over economic policy of the Eighties”.
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