'If Boris dropped dead tomorrow, I'd run.'

'Has Johnson any politics? No. We thought he did, and that was based on a collection of crazed neocon rubbish he wrote for the Telegraph.' The truth, according to Ken Livingstone, is far worse.

'What's apparent now is that Boris only believes that people like Boris should run the earth. There's no political position he's not prepared to surrender in order to stay powerful. And that makes him very dangerous. In a situation where the far right, for example, could deliver him power, he'd have no hesitation in pandering to them.'

I meet Ken Livingstone in his new office - a window table in a Hampstead branch of Costa Coffee - and he is more than keen to chat. And not just about Boris. We talk about economics, about China and India and the organisation of gender-roles before metalworking developed. Ken talks and talks and his kind blue eyes twinkle and I feel faintly like I'm about to be invited to attend wizard school. And speaking of school -

'I'm writing my autobiography at present, and I've just got to the part where I'm about seventeen. It's horrendous stuff. I remember always being the weedy kid at school, always coming in on the mile run second last, just in front of the fat one. My sports teachers all seemed to be rehabilitated Nazi war criminals who believed that humiliation was a good way to make us improve. It wasn't.'

Ken may be writing his memoirs, but the constant calls from his PA and pile of complex charts balanced on the tiny table doesn't look very much like retirement to me. For more on Livingstone's comeback plans and projects for the activist left, read the full interview in Red Pepper very shortly.


******

As I write, stock markets are falling all over themselves like City boys outside Spearmint Rhinos at 3 am, and the USA seems to have fucked us all over quite royally by a 23-vote margin. Let me express my sincerest hope that you and I still have jobs in the morning.

Election feverdreams....

London on election night. You could knife the air, and not just because I live with drug fiends. The BBC have no exit polls. Sky have no exit polls. 'Neutral' news sites are sensationalising with vox pop polls and rabid speculation. Selective members of the insomniac left are fretting and snarking at one another, having devoured all online content and gone shocking like the little robot in the Short Circuit films.

Input....? Input....?Input.....?

It's the eye of the storm, and I don't like it; my Jewish half longs to shrug and toss it all in, my Catholic half is waiting for a stained-glass miracle, and my lizard brain just wants to get under its rock. At least, it seems, the votes are being counted under the supervision of nice, normal people who sleep nice, normal hours. They're starting after breakfast at 9, reckoning that the count will take nine hours; including breaks for elevenses and afternoon tea, we should know in time to douse ourselves in valedictory booze before the pubs shut. I'm going to a party in Hackney with pagans, bisexuals and the variously depraved, and if Johnson wins I may not come back.

Which is a lie, of course. I love this city and would love it even mismanaged by a racist Tory clown; I'm here to stay, and if the GLA lurches to the right I'll be there among the hundreds standing in its way. Let's get a good night's sleep. We might need it.