Why Labour supporters should shun Ken

The single funniest thing about the London mayoral election has been watching the Left trying to excuse tax avoidance. After I revealed that his idol, Ken Livingstone, had saved a fortune by channelling six-figure earnings through a personal company, the Guardian’s Dave Hill pleaded that Ken’s previous condemnations of tax-dodgers ‘had been aimed at extremely rich people — which he isn’t,’ so that’s all right, then. The Independent’s Owen Jones frothed that ‘the 1 per cent have an interest in demonising Ken Livingstone.’ But, Owen, Ken is the 1 per cent!

What’s been just as notable, though, in the last three months is quite how few of Labour’s finest have been willing to join Dave, Owen and the other cannon-fry in the Livingstone Mechanised Suicide battalion. As Ken’s character scores sink below even his tax rate — according to one recent poll, he is regarded as trustworthy by just 12 per cent of voters — the story of the campaign may come to be how Livingstone was destroyed, not by the evil Tories, nor by the wicked media, but by his own side.