Author Archives: Peter David

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 – …

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.