Both BJ and KL have strong “brands” and both can, if required, dissociate themselves from their parties.

The damage to KL from his anti-semitic / Al-Q antics is probably enough to keep him out (I hope) but he also has his tube union associations to worry about as well, potentially a much bigger problem for obvious reasons.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100052458/tube-strikes-guess-whose-side-kens-on/

“However, only two thirds of people who say they would vote Labour in a general election say they would vote for Mr Livingstone.”

Haha – Londoners know him all too well by now!

Think a lot of it hangs on how well Boris distances himself from the absolute carnage the coalition’s cuts are going to cause in the capital. He’s a canny operator, so I reckon he has a good chance.

The key lesson, which I would like to see made more of, is that Labour has to make sure in future that it doesn’t get bounced into choosing a mayoral candidate too early. Ken appears to have gotten the gig (with my vote too, incidentally) because his people successfully pushed for an early selection, rather than waiting for a more established, credible challenger than Oona to come forward. Labour needs a regular timetable for mayoral selections, so that there is time for a field of suitable candidates to come forward.

So did you vote Ken in the members ballot? (I blame Sunny!)

what actual policies has/will Boris introduce that Ken would do otherwise? instead of worrying about finding the “right line to define him” why can’t Ken say: “Boris is doing this [bad thing] I would do this [good thing]“?

If there aren’t any meaningful policy differences, perhaps it doesn’t much matter who is mayor

We are more than 18 months away from the actual election and given that all sides admit that that period is going to be extremely difficult for the government these sort of polls are of limited use. Mike Smithson & co over at Political Betting always get very excited by the latest poll, and to be fair they can be used to make money on the various betting markets, but their actual relevance to what might or might not happen is not necessarily high (much like current national opinion polls have little relevance to an election in 2015).

Yes Boris is (very) popular in certain areas of outer London and that would apply whoever was the Labour candidate. Ken comes with both positives (his appeal to certain parts of the electorate) and negatives (he has been around a long time so has lots of baggage). However he has a long time to work on this and has proved himself to be a very difficult person to beat (ask Maggie or Tony Blair) so keeping calm and carrying on seems to be called for. Boris wont be helped either by the type of foot shooting that the tories have indulged in in the past few days.

“what actual policies has/will Boris introduce that Ken would do otherwise? instead of worrying about finding the “right line to define him” why can’t Ken say: “Boris is doing this [bad thing] I would do this [good thing]“?”

Good point. Here’s 3 to start with:

1. Ken would extend the Congestion Charge zone and use the funds to lower transport fares, so people would pay less to travel on public transport if Ken were Mayor.

2. Boris spends his time lobbying central government to consider the needs of City bankers, Ken would spend his time lobbying government to consider the needs of low and middle income earners in London.

3. Boris supports the savage cuts to public spending which have already hit London’s schools and put people out of work. Ken opposes these. If Boris is re-elected, the government will see it as an endorsement of their cuts and will carry on cutting, if Ken is elected, then they will have to reconsider and reduce their cuts.

thanks Don.

is 1. a vote winner? (I don’t know) 2. and 3. need making more concrete, but I get your drift

This is exactly why people should have voted Oona.
I don’t know whether the leadership campaign just distracted people too much to give the matter proper consideration, but so many people seemed to just “go with the establishment candidate”.
This situation was always painfully obvious.

The question we had to answer was, “who’s going to vote for Ken next time, who didn’t want to vote for him last time?”.
Depressingly, I can’t think of an answer. Especially as Boris is distancing himself from government cuts, which seemed to be Ken’s one and only line of attack.

I’ll support Ken of course. Just frustrated about how many members completely ignored the obvious on this.

@7 (donpaskini)

Point 1 – congestion charge – will sound like another 2008 re-run, though it is a strong criticism.

Points 2 & 3 on cuts and lobbying will fail because Boris has very wisely made a huge song and dance in the media about lobbying on housing and in particular the benefits changes, transport investment, policing, etc. In the eyes of any non-partisan reading the Evening Standard he will be an effective advocate for London. Ken on the other hand risks sounding like a re-run of the 1980s.

The electoral doughnut that did for ken last time is actually a stranger phenomenon than many assume. Old notions of the rough inner city and the middle class suburbs no longer hold true. These days you have to be pretty rich to live in zone 1 and 2 while many of the suburbs are extremely depriived. Much of outer London is also extremely ethnically mixed- places like Edmonton and enfieild in the north and sutton in the south.

What this all suggests is that pattern that emerged at the lay election really is capable of being challenged. Part of this will mean promising to redistribute municipal services. When I go up to north circular land, I see that its bus services are akin to pre ken days. Generally the speaking the areas of deprivation in outer London don’t seen to get the same spending or attention as the trendier areas if deprivation (think hackney and the east end). In this sense it is not surprising if these communities don’t feel they have a stake in progressive municipal politics.

I think that don’s point about many localized campaigns is also important. Ken should be able to court on far more activists than Boris given his support inside and outside labour. Let’s turn this to our advantage.

Sunder was that directed at me? For my sins, yes I voted ken. He ran a much stronger campaign than Oona did. But I keep saying that just hoping the cuts will turn sentiment around is too optimistic.

I also forgot to point out that this is a lone poll and there aren’t many. So it’s difficult to say where exactly their actual numbers lie with more accuracy. Within tue margin of error, that 9pt lead could be slashed in half. It’s perfectly plausible that Ken is just abt 5pts behind.

Or indeed 13 !!

Listening to Ken’s saturday morning LBC show tells you everything about the man.
He is a nice enough guy. Boris has more fluff, but nothing will ever change IMO.
It’s only of interest to blogs like LC and the Evening Standard.

@Sunny

I think the problem is that Boris won in 2008 not so much because he was the better candidate but because more people than not were tired of Ken. Ken had simply ran out of steam. Whilst he was far superior to Oona King (not like that’s saying much), I don’t see how he is going to make himself look new, exciting and fresh when he has already been Mayor for 8 years (and was head of the GLC prior to that) and lost precisely because he was the opposite of new, exciting and fresh.

The same way Labour cannot expect to simply ascend to government because the Tory/LD cuts will prove unpopular, Ken can’t bank on a simple anti-cuts message to put him back in City Hall.

In 2008 people had a reason to vote for Boris: he wasn’t Ken. I don’t see those people who didn’t vote for Ken in 2008, voting for him in 2012. Boris would have to be caught sleeping with his sister, whilst secretly embezzling GLA funds to Al-Qaeda, to seem less favourable than Ken, sadly….

The role of London Mayor, whilst holding considerable power in reality, comes across as largely ceremonial to most Londoners – a figurehead – especially when it comes to someone like Boris. Very few policies that both KL and BJ implemented will stick in the minds of voters – the Congestion Charge for Ken, and the cycle hire for Boris (and yes – I know it was Ken’s idea to do it, but sadly he didn’t get it done whilst still in power, so Boris will claim credit for implementing it) – so all they’ll have to go on is personality and perception.

Ken Livinstone is yesterday’s man and his anti-semitic baggage and dubious alliances make him unelectable. A Pavlovian spasm combined with a fixation that KL is some kind of rebel against the establishment is phoney-baloney, but got him selected. Only another candidate can stop Boris, whose “foxes and lions” style is more Berlusconi than Norman Wisdom. KL’s “street-cred-London-chappy” persona has worn thin as he has embraced reactionary Islamist clerics and dished out public funds to other dubious causes. Could KL be persuaded to put his vanity to one side and for the sake of London, step down “to spend more time with his various wives, thier children and grandchildren” ?

I expected someone to comment on a rather important fact that in the run-up to the 2008 Mayor election many polls put Ken Livingstone in the lead (including some just a week or so before the date of the election). If you just take a look at polling in the year before election day, and compare it to the result, you’ll see that it might be rather early to suggest that Ken Livingstone has mountains to climb (or whatever the latest cliche might be). The London Mayor election is difficult to call because large numbers of people who do not, in the event, turn out tell you that they will definitely be voting. An election which gets out only between 33 and 45 per cent of the electorate in spite of nightly (if rather dull and uninspiring) media coverage for almost two months is difficult to predict – actually.maybe the low turnout is ‘because of’ and not ‘in spite of’ the acres of (dire) media coverage…