Ken Livingstone MP

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 40:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Costaway this week is a politician. Born and brought up in South London, he started his career as a Lambeth councillor, where for a while one of his fellow representatives was John Major. There, however, the similarities end. He's always supported left wing causes vigorously, so much so that as leader of the GLC in the early eighties he was known by the tabloid press as Red Ken.

Presenter0:51

But far from being a strident revolutionary, he argues for change with an almost unnerving affability. Consequently, although he may not have as many political supporters as he'd like, he has plenty of fans. He is the Labour MP for Brent East, Ken Livingston.

Presenter1:07

How much did that ability, Ken, to to be popular take you by surprise when it first happened, back in the early eighties, when you began to be invited onto all the television programmes and the talk shows?

Ken Livingstone MP1:18

It took a little time to get the popular side of it. I remember the odious side much more clearly at the beginning. But see, I think I perfectly trained for this. I grew up watching television. I'm this f the first generation of people that grew up stuck in front of a box. I mean, I'm used to sound bites. I mean, I can remember the days when a documentary like This Week would have five or six items. If you couldn't get it down to five minutes. So, I mean.

Presenter1:44

So you taught yourself to speak in Zan by

Ken Livingstone MP1:44

Yeah.

Ken Livingstone MP1:46

By short.

Ken Livingstone MP1:47

I learned in soundbox, you know, I it was all self-taught. I never went to university, so I was never sort of trained to develop a long case or balance arguments. And therefore I I I think it's much easier for people in my generation and and younger to actually adapt to television than for people who grew up in a different world. And therefore you go on and I just behave like I'd seen people behaving.

Presenter2:09

But humour had a lot to do with it as well, didn't it with the success of it.

Ken Livingstone MP2:12

I was the smallest boy in my school. I mean there's two thousand one hundred boys and I was the smallest. This is a disaster. I mean I I'd had gastroenteritis when I was about three and I didn't really grow until I I I started work. And the only way I could survive was I could either I could have learnt to sort of kill with one blow to the throat. I didn't really fancy that. Or I could learn humour. And there was always a lot of humour in our house. My f my father and mother laughed a lot. Also I suppose my father died about twenty years ago, but he was an incredibly calming person. I mean he was always diffusing other people's rows. People always turned him.

Presenter2:50

So that's where you get the the unflappability from.

Ken Livingstone MP2:52

Yeah, so it's a combination. My mother is very highly strung, easily upset. My father's incredibly placid. I mean my father had been a merchant sailor and he was sort of the boatswain on the the ship, handling men, often difficult, um avoiding fights and all of that. And I've got both strands there, so I can sort of occasionally get quite ratty under pressure. But usually, I mean it it's the calmness that comes over.

Presenter3:17

How will you fare on a desert island? I mean, do you think you might um well, I suppose wither from lack of attention?

Ken Livingstone MP3:23

I've real doubts about being on a desert island because I'm totally social. When I'm away for a conference or something like that, my partner, she's delighted, it's a nice quiet weekend, she can read and so on. And when she goes away, I just fill the house with friends. It's never empty, never quiet. And so I'm horrendously social. I should imagine being on a desert island is going to be s just short of a prison term really. I mean, I would hate it.

Presenter3:46

What's the first piece of music you'll play?

Ken Livingstone MP3:47

The first is quite recent. It's Tina Turner. I mean, I couldn't go without Tina Turner track because not only is she wonderful, but it also gives hope to people of my age that you can get fit again one day, you know, if you really apply yourself. But there's a track called Paradise is Here where she's basically saying I think it's so true for politicians that I mean don't seek power and fame in the future. The real pleasure in your life is here with the people around you. And sadly I think a lot of politicians never realize this and they go through life looking for something that's there at home.

Speaker 34:21

Yeah.

Speaker 34:24

Paradise is here.

Speaker 34:29

Can't stop your cry

Speaker 34:33

The future is this

Speaker 34:38

And the back song was away.

Speaker 34:42

John Marijuana.

Presenter4:44

Uh

Presenter4:46

Tina Turner, and Paradise is here. Paradise for you, Ken Livingston, you say, is there at home. Where is home? Can you describe it to me?

Speaker 34:47

Uh

Ken Livingstone MP4:54

Oh, it's just uh an ordinary Victorian terraced house in Cricklewood. I suppose the nicest feature is the south facing garden. I've never lived in a house in my life with a south facing garden before. They're all north facing. And you can do so much more with the south facing garden. And people don't expect a left wing politician to be into gardening, and expect to be out selling pamphlets or stirring up trouble.

Ken Livingstone MP5:16

I find I mean, before I go into the House of Commons in in spring and summer and autumn, I will walk around them all in ju just spend ten minutes walking around the garden, it's just so relaxing, see what's sort of opened up overnight.

Ken Livingstone MP5:29

fruit bushes scattered around, so as you wander around you can actually just pick something and eat it as you go.

Presenter5:34

And you you share this house and garden with your partner, Kate Allen, and you've been together for twelve

Ken Livingstone MP5:37

Um

Ken Livingstone MP5:39

Yeah.

Ken Livingstone MP5:40

Twelve years?

Presenter5:40

Twelve years. And uh you met her on Camden Council, is that right?

Ken Livingstone MP5:44

Oh yes, and we we lived in the same area, um and and we worked at the same place, so we saw a lot of each other.

Presenter5:51

And you got a mortgage?

Ken Livingstone MP5:52

Oh, yes, tell me, tell me, that's horrendous.

Presenter5:55

It's quite a an un unexpectedly capitalist way of going on, that getting used and owning his own house.

Ken Livingstone MP5:58

Well these

Ken Livingstone MP6:00

Well, I mean, I I'll own it in about twenty years. At the moment it belongs still belongs to the capitalist system, I'm afraid.

Presenter6:06

And your mother comes and stays your mother Ethel.

Ken Livingstone MP6:09

Um

Presenter6:10

for long periods.

Ken Livingstone MP6:11

Well, particularly over winter because I mean she can't get out, so she tends to come down to London.

Presenter6:17

Who cooks in your house?

Ken Livingstone MP6:18

My partner, Kate.

Presenter6:20

You don't cook.

Ken Livingstone MP6:21

No, we're not. Oh, I love to eat. We have a very traditional sort of split of functions here, right, between cooking and gardening.

Presenter6:21

But you like wheat.

Presenter6:26

Yeah.

Presenter6:27

The life the domestic life that you describe sounds, you know, very comfortable, very normal, perhaps really quite tame for for Red Kern.

Ken Livingstone MP6:34

Mm-hmm.

Ken Livingstone MP6:36

Well if you've got my sort of politics the last thing you need is sort of some dramatic home life, frankly, you know.

Presenter6:42

But have your priorities changed? I mean, you said just now that uh

Presenter6:46

that a lot of politicians, you know, would have all sorts of ideas of paradise, and in fact it's there at home. I mean, uh do you think you've changed? Are you less ambitious than you were?

Ken Livingstone MP6:51

They have a t

Ken Livingstone MP6:55

Oh no, I I still want to change the whole world. I just recognise it's most probably not going to happen or it won't happen in my lifetime. So you've mellowed? Well not mellowed. I mean if you think about it, I became leader of the GLC I was only thirty-five. Most politicians in Britain sweat away and and in their mid-fifties may get some position uh that gives them some real influence or power.

Presenter7:17

John Major became Prime Minister at the age of forty-eight.

Ken Livingstone MP7:18

Right now

Ken Livingstone MP7:19

Also quite young. But it happened to me quite early and I I went to all that binge of egotism and and publicity and things like that.

Presenter7:26

And idealism, perhaps, which

Ken Livingstone MP7:28

That yeah.

Presenter7:28

you know, maybe now has has mellowed away.

Ken Livingstone MP7:31

No, no, not the idealism. No, g give me the power, and I'll change every aspect of your life to morrow, promise.

Presenter7:36

So if the call came you'd still be there?

Ken Livingstone MP7:38

I mean, but what what I've recognised is that it isn't change isn't created by individuals. I mean, these changes are going to happen, whether we like them or not. They can happen quicker or slower. And statecraft is about finding the way in which you moderate those changes and and make them more mellow for people so there's less pain.

Presenter7:59

Record number two.

Ken Livingstone MP8:00

I grew up in a household where the only music came out, the radio, like Night Millions, and I didn't get a great education about music at school. And I remember when we just got television for the first time, they had on a woman singing uh something from opera and it moved me to tears. The first time I've ever cried listening to music. And I remember my grandmother was I looked round and she was p patting the tears away from her eyes and then she said you go don't be ridiculous, boys, don't cry over things like this And it wasn't until years later I realised it was actually one fine day from Madame Butterfly. I can't even remember who it was singing of course. But I do regret that I wasn't given a proper musical education. I I rediscovered these things only long after I'd left school.

Speaker 38:52

Remarks we are free before.

Speaker 39:00

God pursed the mail, God made them all.

Speaker 39:11

Yeah.

Presenter9:41

Maria Callas singing one fine day from the first act of Puccini's Madam Butterfly, with the orchestra of La Scala Milan conducted by Herbert von Carrian.

Presenter9:49

So you heard that um watching the telly with your gran in Streatham.

Ken Livingstone MP9:53

Uh

Presenter9:53

Apparently she was a bit of an old tyrant.

Ken Livingstone MP9:55

Oh, ever so slightly. I mean

Ken Livingstone MP9:58

She was almost housebound because she had a knee joint removed and in those days I don't think they had the the the surgery to put in a new one. And I my mother was out of work. So for the first five years of my life it was a one to one relationship with this adult and talking all the time. There was no garden, it was just a flat.

Ken Livingstone MP10:14

and looking down on Streatham I Road you didn't dare go out to play, you'd been crashed to death by the cars. And so it was a quite unusual background for show. There were no other children until my sister came along three years later.

Presenter10:26

And she was your mother's mother, and by all accounts, she didn't like your daughter. Oh, no, she didn't.

Ken Livingstone MP10:29

Oh no, she didn't. I mean my my grandmother, her husband had died in the war and she built this incredibly protective unit of her son, her daughter and herself and she really resented all their boyfriends, all their girlfriends and resisted them all bitterly and continued to complain about my father right the way through his life. You know he was incredibly tolerant and put up with this. And you say, well you've got to understand that she had a really difficult life and so on.

Presenter10:54

What effect do you think that's had on you long term, anyway?

Ken Livingstone MP10:56

Um

Ken Livingstone MP10:58

Not really, but I mean, she was a very manipulative person. I should imagine some of my political skills came from her, you know. I mean, and she was difficult. I mean, she really was. I mean, for for myself as a child, it was blissfully happily, of course, but I mean, I know it caused my father a lot of pain until we we we found our own place to live, you know.

Presenter11:16

And it was during that time as well that you decided you wanted to be, when you grew up, David Attenborough, is that right?

Ken Livingstone MP11:22

Well, f I mean, first of all I wanted I I wanted to to to be a spaceman based on that wonderful B B C series, the the Journey into Space, but then David Attenborough series started and I this was what I wanted to be David Attenborough too, but I mean you had to wait for the first one to die and I mean

Ken Livingstone MP11:37

Wasn't gonna happen quickly.

Presenter11:37

Wasn't going to happen quickly.

Ken Livingstone MP11:40

How is it?

Ken Livingstone MP11:42

I remember the first tadpoles being there, but I said what really intrigued me, my my grandmother used to read to me to get me to sleep at night, she used to read me the Tarzan stories, um their garage barrows and so on. And I can remember my concept of the jungle, because we've been to Hampton Court, I I had a vision of the jungle as one huge privet maze with lions and tigers and elephants coming round the corner. That's how I visualised the jungle as a child. I can remember that, you know, you'd be in Hampton Court maze and there'd be an elephant at the end or something like that. And I really I waited years, I was twenty before I eventually got to an African jungle. By then I realised it wasn't going to be a privet maze, of course.

Presenter12:20

And you kept these things in your bedroom.

Ken Livingstone MP12:22

Alright, well, yes.

Presenter12:23

Not not elephants, but frogs and

Ken Livingstone MP12:24

And other boys collected stamps, I collected reptiles and amphibians, and I I had a bed in the middle of the bedroom and all the walls had aquariums around three deep and it was a subtropical temperature, just about. And things were always escaping, so you you'd come home and there'd be blue bottles buzzing round the light bulb and a lizard would have escaped and everyone'd be so you've got to find it before it attacks someone and so on.

Ken Livingstone MP12:54

I mean and they get rid of the

Presenter12:56

And they get real elegant.

Ken Livingstone MP12:57

A small alligator, yes. And then things would start breeding and often they have very loud calls and the neighbours would say, Have you got geese? or something like that.

Presenter13:04

And were they smelly?

Ken Livingstone MP13:05

Oh yes, it got quite bad sometimes. I mean if say that the terrapins relieved themselves in the morning and then I went off to school before I had time to do anything about it. Th this would gently bubble away at eighty five degrees till you got home. You'd walk in and the whole house would smell of terrapin fleeces, you know. I mean, I wasn't always popular, I have to say. My my mother's I mean, I I learned to clean my own bedroom'cause my mother wasn't ever going to go in it.

Presenter13:26

Uh

Presenter13:30

Let's have some more music.

Ken Livingstone MP13:32

Paul Robeson singing Joe Hill, because if if there's one thing which is a genuine hymn of the Labour movement, I think this captures it more than anything else and it's international.

Speaker 313:42

It's more than guns to kill a man, says Joe, I didn't die, says Joe, I didn't

Speaker 313:55

And standing there as big as life, And smiling with his eyes, Says Joe, What they can never kill

Ken Livingstone MP13:59

I mean with his eye.

Ken Livingstone MP14:02

So

Speaker 314:05

Went on to organize Went on to organize

Presenter14:11

Paul Robeson singing Joe Hill. So you left school, Ken Livingston, at seventeen with four O levels, and you got a job as a window cleaner and then at the Royal Marsden Hospital. What did you do there?

Ken Livingstone MP14:22

Well, I I was what was called an animal technician, which sounds grand, but basically meant you swept the floors and cleaned out the animal cages and I was there with a break for eight years.

Presenter14:31

Am I right in in saying that that was the only proper job in the old fashioned sense of the word that you've ever had?

Ken Livingstone MP14:36

To sense the word.

Ken Livingstone MP14:37

Oh yes, I mean most people have forgotten about this. I mean many of my opponents, Horace Catler is the the toy leader used to say, Ken Emerson's never had a proper job in his life. Oh excuse me, it's eight years in Royal Marsden here. Um and it was fairly hard work. I mean it's the point where I suddenly filled out and shot up because a lot of it was quite physically demanding, you know so I mean two ton of rat cake would arrive out the back and had to be hauled from the lorry up onto great mounds and so on.

Presenter15:01

But after that, um after those eight years, I mean through the seventies once you became a councillor and so on, you began to live off your allowances as a councillor and and now obviously as your sal off your salary as an MP. That's how it's always worked for you, has it?

Ken Livingstone MP15:14

I got elected to Lambeth in nineteen seventy one and I I fell in love with the immediate decide I wanted to find a way in which I could just carry on being a councillor forever. So if I was on a borough council and the GLC, I could just about financially survive.

Presenter15:27

Could you must have been pre pretty tough going

Ken Livingstone MP15:29

I mean, uh while I was leader of the GLC so in the early eighties, the most I ever earned, I mean, I I got up to about five thousand a year.

Ken Livingstone MP15:38

But it was what I wanted to do.

Presenter15:40

So now on thirty three thousand pounds, which is I think what an MP gets, I mean you're a rich man.

Ken Livingstone MP15:44

It's gonna be a

Ken Livingstone MP15:46

Well I'm a certain now instead of renting I got a mortgage which can use it. I mean it's that classic thing, you spend what you earn, basically. I mean if if I lost my seat to management I go back to s you know, surviving on whatever it was I got in.

Presenter15:54

Mm-hmm.

Presenter15:59

But it's not that you don't like money. I mean, there was a time recently when you were earning something like seven hundred and fifty a week off The Sun, writing a column for the Sun newspaper.

Ken Livingstone MP16:05

The Sun

Ken Livingstone MP16:06

I've never been one of those socialists who's worried about money. Working class people are not embarrassed by money, they're embarrassed by the lack of it. I if you decide to leave me in your will or your earnings, I'll put them to very good use. I'll have a nice holiday and I'll use the rest to help overthrow capital.

Presenter16:21

And are you not embarrassed about where you get it from? I would have thought taking money from the sun was against your principles. No.

Ken Livingstone MP16:26

No, not really. It it was used to fund my social economic bulletin.

Presenter16:26

Yeah.

Presenter16:30

So you didn't use it on yourself? That that's the

Ken Livingstone MP16:32

That's the defence for taking it. I have a separate account. I mean, I live entirely on my parliamentary salary, which is actually quite easy to do, one has to say.

Presenter16:33

That's the defence for taking it.

Presenter16:36

Yeah.

Ken Livingstone MP16:41

And everything else and whether it's the cheese commercial or or the s the Sun columns goes into a company and that funds political campaigns, research, whatever.

Presenter16:51

So you haven't sold your soul?

Ken Livingstone MP16:52

Oh no no no. They have enough of me now.

Presenter16:56

Nineteen seventy one, you went on to Lambeth Council. Was John Major already there?

Ken Livingstone MP17:00

No, he he'd done three years and and he he lost as I came on.

Presenter17:04

But you liked him.

Ken Livingstone MP17:06

Oh, it impossible not to like him. I watched him for three years from the gallery, and I mean you never saw him have a tantrum or an eco trip. I mean, he just dutifully got on and and did the job he was given, and did it remarkably well, actually. It was in certainly a much better housing chair than his Labour predecessors had been.

Presenter17:24

Did he like you?

Ken Livingstone MP17:24

Did he like

Ken Livingstone MP17:26

We didn't have any any personal relationship in that stage. I was there monitoring to make sure he wasn't going to do something wicked.

Presenter17:31

But has he acknowledged you since you're not going to be able to do it?

Ken Livingstone MP17:32

Oh yeah, so after I just got elected to Parliament six years ago, I bumped into him while waiting for taxing. I said, Given how left wing you were on Lambeth, how do you put up with all this right-wing nonsense from Thatcher? And he said, That you well, you know me, Ken, I haven't changed. One day I'll be able to do what I want. And I could never understand how when the leadership struggle came, all the Thatcherites lined up behind John Major, because any examination of his record showed him to be a strongly left of centatorian. And if I knew that, how come they didn't? I think Mrs Thatcher

Ken Livingstone MP18:04

mistook the fact that John Major is polite and diligent. As agreement, she mistook politeness for agreement.

Presenter18:11

More music, record number four.

Ken Livingstone MP18:13

Well one of the records which I think captures a key point of change is Marvin Gay singing Abraham Martin and John which is his song that follows the assassination of Robert Kennedy and I think it it brings the 60s to an end. I mean for all of us who went through the 60s it was a time of hope. You genuinely believe things would continue to get better and really with all that range of assassinations and the upheavals in 1968 it was a turning point, we didn't realise it at the time, from which things just consistently got worse. People don't have that hope and optimism that I mean that period I think epitomised. And this in a sense is a hymn to the passing of that.

Speaker 318:52

Will you tell me where he's gone?

Speaker 319:02

We freed a lot of people.

Speaker 319:06

But it seems the good die away.

Speaker 319:11

I just look around.

Speaker 319:16

Uh

Presenter19:16

Uh

Speaker 319:16

Uh

Presenter19:16

Uh

Speaker 319:16

Oh

Presenter19:19

MARVIN GAY, singing Abraham, Martin and John. You failed to get into Parliament in'seventy nine, Ken, and you set your sights on the GLC leadership instead, and in nineteen eighty one

Ken Livingstone MP19:27

The

Presenter19:31

When Labour won control, within twenty-four hours you'd become leader, you'd organise a left-wing takeover and ousted the incumbent leader, Andrew McIntosh.

Presenter19:40

Was that a delicious victory? Is that the kind of political manoeuvring that you enjoy?

Ken Livingstone MP19:44

No, I I knew there was a price to pay for doing that. It had been obvious to everybody for months that I had the votes to to become leader. Um

Ken Livingstone MP19:54

I remember going and seeing Andrew McIntosh a couple of months before the ocean saying, I am bound to win. I mean, it would be better if you stood down now and he just thought I was completely mad'cause of course nobody ever tells you if you're losing. Everybody else knew. No one told him. And people were saying to him, Oh, you'll be all right, Andrew, whilst making it quite clear they're going to vote for me.

Presenter20:11

But you could have left it for twelve months, couldn't you?

Ken Livingstone MP20:13

Well we debated that. I mean we in in the left caucus I mean this issue came out it looked very bad getting rid of him just after he's run the election. I just never had any doubts about this. I said in a year's time people will have settled down. They'll be more cautious. Things will be going wrong. I will never win it in a year's time. You have to take it immediately while it's there. You'll never get a second chance.

Presenter20:33

That was of course when you became, as we've said, a a public bogeyman and mothers were said to to warn their children that if they didn't do as they were told they'd send for Red Kenneth. You never minded about any of the things that I've been doing.

Ken Livingstone MP20:41

Oh, it was very painful at first. Oh, that first six months was horrendous because everything it you see also hurt friends and family. And at the end of the first six months of of my leadership, I thought I was finished. I was going into work each day, keeping everyone enthusiastic, saying, Yes, we got to do this, next, that, you know, and overcome this, that problem. But in my heart, believing I had been so damaged by that campaign that I could never be re-elected to anything.

Presenter20:43

Was it?

Ken Livingstone MP21:07

And it was only as we got into the second six months and well, it was radio and television that turned it, it was going on programmes where people could see you for themselves or hear you for themselves and make up their own mind. Once you could get over the press, I gradually started to claw it all back and then

Ken Livingstone MP21:22

At the end of six months my poll rating was 18%. That's about 4%, I mean below I think it's about what John Major is now, but it it was abysmally low. And then just slowly it crept up, painfully slowly, you know, half a per cent a month or something like that. So but by the end uh of the five years it was back to a healthy sort of fifty five, sixty percent.

Speaker 321:26

Yeah.

Presenter21:44

By the end of the first year you were elected uh second in the Man of the Year competition on the Radio Force Today programme. Second to the Pope.

Ken Livingstone MP21:52

Second to the Pope, yes. I and it it prompted some uh amazing story in in in in the Daily Mail that I'd announced I was going to run for Pope or something like that. I mean, people got very confused.

Presenter22:03

Let's have some more music.

Ken Livingstone MP22:05

Number five is really the the end of the GLC, the very last minutes as the flag came down. I mean and this wasn't my choice to tell me it was it's Tony Banks. He he decided as the last chair of the GLC that as the flag came down, literally the last music heard on that day at that weekend of celebrations really, was going to be Nimrod from Elga's Enigma Variations. And this is moving at the best of time. But there were just tens of thousands of people in Jubilee Park, on the bridge. I mean, almost all of them in tears as that flag came down, played to this. It's a music that unleashes your emotion. I mean, we all stood on the stage and you could hardly see through your tears on that night.

Presenter23:45

Nimrod, one of Elgar's Enigma variations, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli, and The Flag Came Down on the thirty first of march, nineteen eighty six, at midnight on County Hor, misses Thatcher had abolished you. Did you cry too?

Ken Livingstone MP24:00

Oh yes, I mean it was in the in the year we knew we were bound to lose. My my view was that you could save quite a lot. We c managed to get the pensioners bus pass preserved, we managed to find jobs for most of the people. It was a credible pressure the last year and I never really had time to stop and examine my own emotions until that last weekend. And it had been the most exhilarating five years. I mean

Ken Livingstone MP24:24

A gr something almost never happens in British politics. A group of radicals, still fairly young, getting some degree of power. I mean, there is no precedent for this in British politics. I mean, it's quite clear that both the Labour and Tory leaderships were fairly determined there wasn't going to be another example of this as well.

Presenter24:41

Are there tears in your eyes now as you talk about?

Ken Livingstone MP24:42

Oh, I mean it's impossible to think back on that period without feeling emotional. It it still moves me. I should imagine it always will.

Presenter24:48

Was it in any way a similar experience when you were dropped from the NEC, the National Executive of the Labour Party?

Ken Livingstone MP24:57

Now that was a shock.

Presenter24:58

But it's a very public humiliation.

Ken Livingstone MP24:58

But it's a

Ken Livingstone MP25:00

Because it's almost like a a guillotine up there. You're up then the trap door opens and you're gone, you know. It really is sudden death, you know, in a way that the GLC was a long build up.

Presenter25:07

Yeah.

Ken Livingstone MP25:10

And what hurt about that it definitely did hurt was you wouldn't have minded being sort of eliminated by Neil Kinnock or Gerald Corfin or something like that. This is straightforward politics. What it brought home was that the the rank and file of the Labour movement were losing their confidence. They'd begun to move away from the left.

Presenter25:26

Tell me about when you went to the House of Commons in'eighty seven for the first time. You were pretty much left out in the cold then, weren't you, by the Parliamentary Labour Party? They they wouldn't even give you an office for a very long time

Ken Livingstone MP25:34

They they wouldn't

Ken Livingstone MP25:36

18 months, yeah.

Presenter25:37

That that's an unusually long period of time.

Ken Livingstone MP25:40

It's a unusually long period of time, yes. They they put me on the Coipu Control Order Committee and I went to the first meeting and they announced that the Coipue was now extinct and they wouldn't be meeting again. Um it was difficult to get on anything that's going to be high profile.

Presenter25:54

So what was that like in human terms now? I mean the politics, but having had this huge power base, you suddenly arrive somewhere, you've got very few friends, you haven't even got a desk. I mean, complete impotence, having been a very big fish.

Ken Livingstone MP25:57

Hi, this

Ken Livingstone MP26:01

Frederick.

Ken Livingstone MP26:03

Clicking.

Ken Livingstone MP26:06

And in exactly that's exactly what it was like when I first arrived at the GLC eight years previously. I remember being greeted by the deputy whip who said, We've been warned about you. You're a horrible little monster. Ain't you causing any trouble here? I mean at the end of the day, the only thing that can sustain you in politics is your own self-respect. Do you believe what you have done is right? If you've got that.

Ken Livingstone MP26:29

You can cope with years of being vilified and isolated and marginalised because you actually sleep with self-respect.

Presenter26:35

More music.

Ken Livingstone MP26:37

Going back to happier times when when everything seemed possible, there's so many things you could choose from the sixties. And one which is I mean a band which has disappeared completely off the scene was called Love and led by Arthur Lee. And he did one album which I think is on everybody's list as one of the ten best albums from the sixties. And one of the tracks, you could have almost any of them, one of them is You Set the Scene.

Speaker 327:03

Where are you walking? I've seen you walking. Have you been there before?

Speaker 327:13

Walk down your doorsteps, you'll take some more steps. What did you take them for?

Speaker 327:30

We won't play until

Presenter27:32

You set the scene with Arthur Lee. You and Neil Kinnock hadn't or or hadn't spoken to each other for years, have you?

Ken Livingstone MP27:39

Neil Kinnocks said so I had a nice little chat on the last day of the GLC. I know you always say hello as you pass in callers, but

Ken Livingstone MP27:45

W with Neil, once you're out, you're out.

Presenter27:47

But your fundamental objection, obviously, to Neil Kinnock, that was that in an attempt to make the Labour Party electable, he'd he'd sanitised it.

Ken Livingstone MP27:56

Well, you took it to the right to make it electable and it didn't work. I mean, at least if it had worked, you could say, well, it was a pain worth living through. But it.

Presenter28:05

But isn't your alternative, I mean, good old-fashioned socialism, massive state intervention and incomes policies. I mean, is that.

Ken Livingstone MP28:12

Oh,

Presenter28:12

Isn't that old hat now?

Ken Livingstone MP28:13

No, I am not in favour of incomes policy, nor am I in favour of the sort of massive bureaucratic sort of regimes you had in Eastern Europe. Mine is a much more sort of devolved, decentralised form of socialism, which is very much the English tradition. I mean there is a radicalism in English socialism. And if you get a Labour Government elected, I think it will end up being a lot better than it initially seems it might be. The pressure of events, our economic mess, is going to propel it to be more radical than it might initially seem to be.

Presenter28:43

Yes, but it's not having been elected going to move over to the left to where you want it to be.

Ken Livingstone MP28:47

No, but then it would carry out many of the things I want to see. We would get devolution, we would get a modern constitution, we would start to get the rebuilding of our industrial base, and it would take us a big step forward, and perhaps the government beyond that would go farther.

Presenter29:01

And in the meantime, you sit at home at your large and expensive computer working out how to save the British economy. Ha have you got the answer?

Ken Livingstone MP29:09

Oh, I mean, it's relatively simple, um and that is that you've got to have a major reduction of spending on the military and use that to start to rebuild our infrastructure. And you've got to say to the City of London, you can't just export billions and billions of wealth from this country year after year after year. The first call on that wealth has to be the reconstruction of Britain.

Ken Livingstone MP29:29

Now that sadly means you challenged two massively powerful parts of the British establishment, the City of London, the military, but then they never voted Labour anyhow.

Presenter29:34

They never voted labour anyhow. But you've worked all this out. You've got all the figures that prove that this guy is.

Ken Livingstone MP29:38

I would that's why you see I think the Labour Party often fails. It relies on Treasury advice. They take Treasury statistics as the base of their policy. I mean I got my own computer so that I had an alternative source of advice. I get the raw data and I program it in a different way. So it tends to come up with much more interesting solutions than the Treasury's advice.

Presenter29:57

It must take hours and hours of your time.

Ken Livingstone MP29:58

But I I I have somebody who actually feeds all the stuff in, otherwise I I I'd never be able to do it. But it is the main thing I do politically after my constituency casework.

Presenter30:08

Record number seven.

Ken Livingstone MP30:09

I'm a sentimental old thing really. And one of my favourite uh albums of all time was Joan Armour Trading, Show Some Emotion. And you're always torn. Um it could be Willow, but I think my favourite is Warm Love. And in one funny way, remember that that line of Bambergascoigne, the old quiz master, about I'll give you um she's turned one of his lines into something quite erotic, I'll give you kisses in the morning, your starter for the night. I mean, to be able to do that to a line of Bambergascoins take some, I mean

Speaker 330:39

Oh no.

Speaker 330:44

I'll give you kisses in the world

Speaker 330:49

Or star up for the night.

Speaker 330:54

I wanna sit right down beside you.

Speaker 330:58

With one thought inside my head

Speaker 331:01

Longing for love, ooh little darling.

Presenter31:06

Love that won't give up

Presenter31:09

Joan Armour Trading and Warm Love. Um you've said, Ken Livingston, and it's cropped up in a couple of interviews, I'm the shallowest person I know. What do you mean by that? Well, I think.

Ken Livingstone MP31:19

People always assume of politicians that I mean they have some hidden plan. And when you actually tell them the truth, they just assume that it can't possibly be the truth. There must be some hidden agenda or plan. And I've always been completely open. I mean, I n I never hid the fact I wanted to take over the leadership of the GLC.

Presenter31:34

But then what you're really saying about yourself is not that you're shallow, that you're open and honest. Is that what you mean?

Ken Livingstone MP31:38

Yes, certainly I'm shallow. I mean I uh if you are starting saying I'm open and honest because I think you're egotistical, it's better to have to say you're shallow so they have a chuckle as well.

Presenter31:45

But what it also seems to imply is that that

Presenter31:48

You know, you've got no depth, that you wouldn't be any good on your own on a desert island, for example.

Ken Livingstone MP31:53

Yes, it's a real problem maybe on Desert Island. I I reactive with other people.

Ken Livingstone MP31:58

I'd I'd may probably end up talking to the coconut.

Presenter31:58

But it's

Presenter32:00

But it is it is worrying i i if you genuinely are shallow. I mean if anybody's shallow, it means you've got nowhere to go inside yourself. It means you've got no depth of thought, no ability to philosophize.

Ken Livingstone MP32:09

That isn't what I mean. It's just the fact that there isn't a hidden agenda. This is what I believe. It's taken a long time to work it out, but I'm happy with it.

Presenter32:18

You're forty eight this year. Do you believe that that that your time, the good times, as it were, are are still to come, or or do you think you've had them with your reign at the GRC?

Ken Livingstone MP32:28

I would have thought that the best times of socialism are still to come because we no longer have the incubus of the old state regimes. I think out of the next five or ten years, socialism will be modified to take on board a much stronger commitment to democracy and to the environment. And when you look at the impact of the world economy on the environment and all that means, there has to be planning in the future, there has to be sharing, there has to be coordination. Nothing would be worse than that those of us that still believe in socialism should now give up and say, oh, it's all over, defeated, go away, because the world will still need it, desperately so, at the end of this century.

Speaker 433:06

Yeah.

Presenter33:06

Last record.

Ken Livingstone MP33:07

Well, my final choice is from a film back in the 60s. Everything Mrs. Thatcher and Norman Tebbit would loathe. It's called If. It's a film about a public school, boys' school, where they all suddenly become revolutionaries and challenge. It's fantasy. But tremendously uplifted the soul of all of us, dreadful lefties in the 60s. And one of the tracks from that film is from a Congolese choir singing the sanctus. And I should imagine, I mean, late 1950s, I mean, with all the upheavals of the Congo and then Zaire, very few of these people would still be alive today, which gives it sort of added sort of pain.

Speaker 333:58

Uh

Speaker 334:01

Hallelujah.

Speaker 334:03

Sarah

Speaker 334:10

Sao

Presenter34:47

The Sanctus from the Missaluba, sung by Les Troubadour Duroy Baudouin, conducted by Pere Guido Hazan.

Presenter34:55

So, Ken Livingston, if you could only take one of those eight records, which would it be?

Ken Livingstone MP35:00

I suppose I only decided in the last few minutes it would be Robeson, because that song epitomises the fact that wherever there are people, however bad depression, they always struggle for change.

Presenter35:12

The ballad of Joe Hill.

Ken Livingstone MP35:13

Bose

Presenter35:13

What about your book?

Ken Livingstone MP35:15

Oh, that that's easy. I mean the book I I've loved for years. It's a feminist perspective on King Arthur's Court by Marian Bradley. It's called The Mists of Avalon. I mean, it's a thousand pages long, so it's worth taking, but it is just such a different perspective on that period of history, about the struggle between the Druids and the Christians for control of Arthur's Court. I learnt a lot from that.

Presenter35:37

And your luxury.

Ken Livingstone MP35:38

Well, because I am so social, I'd go mad if I could only talk to the the palm trees. I I'd like to take a a radio that can get the world service, so I continue to be angry with my colleagues if they lose elections.

Presenter35:50

Ken Livingston, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Ken Livingstone MP35:53

Great pleasure.

Speaker 436:01

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.