London's mayoral election has me interested. I can't help thinking that the defeat of Labour's Ken Livingstone back in 2008 by the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson owed a great deal to the unpopularity of the British Labour Government. With Tony Blair and George Brown now consigned to the lucrative public speaking sidelines and Prime Minister David Cameron suffering from dismal economic prospects I would expect things to be different this time.
I admit that so far there is no evidence from the opinion polls that there will be a Livingstone revival. Johnson had a winning margin of nearly six percentage points and the latest polls back in November had him doing slightly better than that. But I did find this piece from The Guardian suggesting that my hunch might prove correct and that Livingstone's price of $3.85 on Betfair is over the odds.
Ken Livingstone has a vision for a capitalist metropolis. And Boris? | Politics | guardian.co.uk: "It's still early days, of course, and official campaigning has yet to begin. Yet any clear sense of what a second Boris Johnson mayoral term would seek to achieve remains striking by its absence. Ken Livingstone's camp might claim that this reflects the success of its Fare Deal campaign in putting the Boris operation on the back foot, but the dearth of all but the faintest outlines of policy proposals for four more years of Tory mayoralty, let alone a driving central theme, raises once again the question of what Mayor Johnson is actually for."
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