Monday Book: I'm a bogeyman and I'm OK

WRITING A review of your own biography is - to put it mildly - a fraught and slightly odd experience. If your conclusions are too critical, the impression given would be of a thin-skinned politician who can't take a bit of criticism. Anything too glowing would kill the book - and the author's credibility - stone dead. In fact, John Carvel has already written one biography of me (Citizen Ken, 1984 updated in 1987), and I have always regarded him as critical - but fair.

Carvel has taken the risk of writing a new biography about a politician whose latest battle is still in the early skirmishes. The Labour Party has not even decided on the selection procedure for choosing our candidate for Mayor of London, and will not do so until after the European elections. A historian might well have decided to have waited to see the outcome. John, however, is a journalist, and his journalist's instinct is to get to grips with the story and comment on it as it happens, not wait until the furore is already history. Consequently, he has written the first really accessible account of the tortured process by which the Millbank Tendency has sought to undermine the democratic rights of party members in London, which is in itself likely to be returned to again and again as the story unfolds.

John has exposed what I have thought all along - that Tony Blair has yet to make up his mind about the mayoral issue, while most of the ghastly Millbank Tendency clones have been running around confident that they are acting on his behalf. According to John's Downing Street source, I am not at all the hate figure in Number 10 that many have thought me to be: "Tony likes Ken. They can have an amiable chat... He feels it is a terrible waste. He is rather depressed about it."

As John points out, this mood of sorrow, rather than anger, does "not reflect the loathing of Livingstone among the Blairites on the Greater London Labour Party board who thought they were doing their leader's bidding" [when they proposed a vetting panel to weed out undesirable mayoral hopefuls]. I have always considered that one of the problems in the modern Labour Party is that the increased centralisation has led to a culture of toadying and subservience which is not in Tony's interests, and is not actually sanctioned by him.

The book argues that if I had kept my nose clean following the general election, I would probably have been have been offered a job in Tony Blair's government. But in fact it was Millbank who polarised the post-election euphoria. The first shots were fired after the election with the announcement of rule changes to the party's decision-making procedures intended to gut Labour's conference of any real power. This was combined with the political mistake of standing Peter Mandelson for the National Executive Committee elections in what became a head-to-head battle with me. It was Peter who got it going: "Unlike Ken Livingstone, who is also reported to be standing, I am a strong supporter and ally of Gordon Brown," he said, little realising the irony that comment would acquire only a couple of years later. Peter and I were then thrown into the maelstrom of an NEC election which became a referendum on the membership's commitment to "New" Labour. In short, the Millbank Tendency misjudged the party and made me into their favourite new bogeyman along the way.

There is an underlying argument in Turn Again Livingstone that my career has been saved by my opponents' own mistakes time and again, which I don't fully subscribe to. Certainly I was well placed to give expression to the re-alignment of the party after the election, as a whole chunk of the Hattersleyite centre-ground lined up the traditional left and the soft left readers of Tribune to defend party democracy. By working with those to my right, I was able to reach out far beyond my core base into the centre-ground of the party. John is my biographer, not a chronicler of the left's fortunes, but I think that that he has underestimated this event's broader implications.

Carvel is also interested in why I have not "done a Blunkett". He raises the question of whether this was personal animosity towards me from Neil Kinnock, but he also outlines the real reason: at this crucial period I was arguing that the soft left should create a progressive majority in the party with the hard left. John reveals how this plan was scuppered at a meeting of the Tribune group: "The proposal collapsed after impassioned speeches by three of Tribune's rising stars. They were (in order of seniority at the time), Jack Straw, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair." I think that fateful decision is the real reason for my exclusion from office - my politics are at their most effective in that meeting point between the soft left and the hard left. The departure of the soft left to the right has meant that I would have had to abandon too much of what I believe in order to have been acceptable in this new climate.