Is Siân Berry, perhaps, having second thoughts?  Two weeks ago, Siân and Ken exchanged vows. There was not a dry eye in the house.

The honeymoon however lasted less than 24 hours with Ken declaring his true love for Gordon Brown on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war (so much for his anti-war credentials).  Since then, Siân has been doing her best to pretend it was all just a one night stand.  In the Evening Standard last night, the most flattering thing she could manage about Ken was that he would be the “least worst” option  claiming - incredibly - that “we’re not expressing massive endorsement of Ken or Labour in any way.”  Huh?  What’s more, despite his lack of anything resembling an environmental policy, she can even be found fluttering her eyelashes at Boris.

Joking aside, why this sudden change of plan?  A quick glance at the opinion polls show you why: most of them show Berry hovering around the 2 per cent mark.  That suggests that roughly a third of Green voters who supported Darren Johnson in 2004 have walked away from the party.  If a similar drop in support is repeated in the Assembly elections, the Greens will struggle to get over the 5% minimum threshold.  Johnson himself – second on the list – will almost certainly lose his seat.

This follows a similar pattern to the one which developed in Scotland last year where the mini-parties were all but wiped out (the Scottish Greens went from 7 MSPs to just 2 despite not self destructing in anything like the spectacular way the Scottish Socialists did).

But it has to be said that the Labour-Green deal can only have exacerbated the situation. While the stitch up has helped to promote Ken’s green credentials, it has reinforced notions that this election is just between the top two candidates. By giving the media and general public the clear impression that she is merely a cheerleader for Livingstone, Berry has effectively shut herself – and environmental issues – out of the debate.  If she had not done that deal for instance, she would have had real cause to complain about Newsnight not inviting her onto their hustings last week. 

As it is, she only has herself to blame.  It isn’t even clear where vote swapping like this actually stands in election law; if the BBC is required to have a balanced debate would it not be unfair to have two candidates putting on a united front to present a shared agenda? It all sounds a bit too much like the worst kind of NUS politics, with candidates only standing so they can endorse their own preferred candidate from the floor.

Berry has stated that she would be prepared to work with Johnson if he was elected. However, one thing you can be assured of is that if Johnson is elected the Tories will get more than a third of the seats in the Assembly. Under the current mayoral system this means that the Tories will be able to ensure that everything they want gets through with minimal scrutiny.  Even if the Greens managed to keep hold of an AM or two they will be out of the debate.

This is a bit of a first for London politics: in 2004-2008, Labour was two members short of the magic one third while in 2000-2004 Livingstone was an independent with a (relatively) hostile Labour party keen to bring him into line. With Labour unlikely to make gains in the Assembly and the Green vote collapsing, a Paddick or Livingstone mayoralty with a strong Liberal Democrat contingent on the Assembly is the best way to ensure that political balance and plurality is retained. Denying any party (even the Liberal Democrats) total control of the Greater London Authority can only be good for democracy. It might even do a better job at holding the Mayor to account than the Greens have managed holding the balance over the past four years.

Those disaffected Green voters should reflect on this.  A Green vote of 4.95% would be a complete waste.  By contrast, if those voters were to switch to the Lib Dems, they could lead to real Assembly members, and assure a balanced and competitive Assembly.  Surely the only honourable thing should be for Siân Berry to admit her fatal error, throw in the towel and call her remaining supporters to vote Lib Dem to ensure this happens?

I’ve got a confession to make. On 1st May, I will be giving my second preference vote to … Ken Livingstone.

I won’t be doing this with a song in my heart or anything resembling enthusiasm. Livingstone is a divisive and lonely figure who is incapable of taking criticism or listening to anyone outside of his inner circle of cronies. He is profoundly anti-civil liberties, being both an ardent supporter of ID cards and a supporter of execution-style shootings on the streets of London. He surrounds himself with extremists like Yusuf al Qaradawi and negotiates totemic deals with South American demagogues seemingly out of pure contrariness.

Finally, he is proposing to throw away all the good achieved by his single greatest achievement – the congestion charge – by allowing thousands of low-ish emission cars to drive through the capital without paying the charge, in doing so belching out millions of tons of extra CO2 emissions and increasing congestion. All so he can wage some misguided class war on “Chelsea Tractors”.

Make no mistake, Livingstone is neither a liberal nor a progressive. No, my reason for giving him my second choice is purely down to the fact that Boris Johnson would be ten times worse. I’d already decided this months ago, but Johnson’s appearance on Newsnight on Tuesday confirmed this. Having been assured by Tories a few months ago that the buffoon on Have I Got News For You is not the “real” Boris I have patiently waited for this real deal to emerge. I don’t accept the Labour charge that Johnson is a racist on the simple grounds that for it to be true Johnson would have had to have given the matter some thought rather than simply blathering out the first thing that came into his head.

If the shambles that we witnessed on Tuesday is Boris on his best, election winning, behaviour, God alone knows what he would be like running London in a genuine crisis. It is an idea that genuinely chills me to the bone.

So that’s who I will be giving my second preference to; I’m just glad that my first preference for Brian Paddick is a positive choice. But I’m starting to despair at the number of Labour supporters wagging their fingers in my face and lecturing me at how it is in some way my moral duty to vote – even campaign – for their candidate. A perfect example of this is Michael Calderbank over on the Progress website, who can’t resist the low blow of talking about the Lib Dems having a “straight choice” (yes Michael, we know what by-election you’re referring to – aren’t you clever? Just because your candidate hangs out with homophobes, it doesn’t mean you have to stoop to his level).

What really gets under my skin about such posturing is that the selfsame Labour activists are not prepared to reciprocate. Labour has done a deal with the Green Party to steer people towards giving Sian Berry their second preference votes. This means that if Livingstone’s campaign does come unstuck (and it may yet), the official policy of the Labour Party will be to hand victory over to Boris Johnson. Not a single Labour activist I have encountered has told me they are prepared to break the party whip and give Paddick their second choice just in case. There is no website, or Facebook group, advocating some kind of vote swap – merely po-faced hectoring.

None of this should be any surprise to people who have followed the anti-consensual nature of Labour in power across the country. It’s always one sided. It’s always parasitical. They demand partnership like spoiled children while not even bothering to look up the meaning of the word.

I’ll be giving Ken Livingstone my second preference not because I believe in some kind of progressive alliance but because I’m not insane enough to put a shock haired clown in one of the most powerful elected offices in the land. It isn’t a favour I expect to be returned by any Labour activist. Until it is, spare me the lectures.

Ken Livingstone was a busy beaver last week. On Wednesday 19 March he held a joint press conference with Sian Berry to announce the formation of a Labour-Green coalition. The next day, on the anniversary of the Iraq invasion, he stood shoulder to shoulder with the man who signed all the cheques, Gordon Brown. So many gigs, so many faces…

Livingstone himself has always made great political capital out of the fact that he personally opposed the war. What seems to have been forgotten is that he decided to rejoin the Labour Party when he didn’t need to when Tony Blair was at his most triumphalist. It is a confusion over foreign policy that has brought us things like his trysts with misogynist homophobic cleric Yusuf al Qaradawi and his shameful defence of the Metropolitan Police over their execution of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Many Green Party voters will no doubt be appalled at this turn of events. Vote Green, Get Brown is now the party’s unofficial slogan.

Livingstone is a mere figleaf of respectability, something which he tacitly admitted to in his revealing interview with Thom Yorke over the weekend in which he revealed he was powerless to stand up against the Brown government’s relentless hostility to anything even resembling a legitimate environmental policy.

Livingstone may well pay lip service to his opposition to expanding Heathrow airport for example, but every vote in the London elections this year will be taken by the Labour government as an endorsement for pro-airport policy. It will be treated as a vote of confidence in their opposition to tighten planning regulations over the building of environmentally friendly homes and their support of nuclear power. Now, thanks for Berry’s blunder, every vote for the Green Party will effectively be an endorsement of these policies.

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