Citizen Kane - Olivia O Leary talks to Ken Livingstone

"THANKS," SAID THE WOMAN HANDING KEN Livingstone a copy of his new biography to sign. "Thanks for everything you're doing for us." She was neat, spinsterish, and timid. Livingstone handed her the signed book. "I hope we can keep on doing it," he said gently.
They queued up in W.H. Smith's in Streathem to buy "Citizen Ken" by John Carvel of the Guardian, and 'to have a word with Livingstone. He's London's folk hero, came second only to Pope John Paul II in the BBC's Man of the Year Poll, and he's easy to talk to. There are no sharp edges to Livingstone, no defensiveness, no quick glances at his watch to remind one he is a busy man. "N'yeah sure" he said in his nasal South London drawl when pounced on for a Magill interview that his press office said was totally out of the question. "Sure, why not?" Insults and compliments he meets with the same selffdeprecatory good humour. Ken doesn't believe in hassle. Socialist well-being does not allow for stress.

The British gutter press have called him Red Ken, Loony Ken, This Damn Fool - even the liberal Guardian have suggested he should stick to raising his beloved salamanders and leave the government of London to others. But Livinggstone, the man who said all people are bi-sexual, who suppported the H Blocks hunger strikers and invited Gerry Adams to London, who believes diet is a political stateement, has become a working-class hero - and not just to the working class. As left wing Labour leader of the GLC, he cut fares on London Transport and proposed extra rates on business people and property owners to cover the subbsidy. He queried the GLC support for elitist pursuits like opera, and gave grants to community-based arts groups, creches, ethnic, homosexual and women's groups. He opened the GLC's halls and facilities to striking workers and when the government tried to abolish him and his council, he took them on by appealing directly to Lonndoners.

That morning he'd announced that he was resigning his GLC seat, along with a handful of other Labour councillors, to force a series of by-elections in which Londoners could show their support for his campaign to maintain the GLC. The queue in W H. Smiths were right behind him.

Two beautifully dressed blue-rinsed ladies told him they were on his side because Mrs Thatcher was using the law to conduct a personal witch-hunt. "It's outrageous what's she's doing," they said quivering with indignation "and it's all to get at you - just to get at you!" An adoring girl with a pony tail said she was really delighted to meet him. "Go on, you're not really," drawled Ken with a grin. "Yes she is," said her black friend. "Gawd, she's been talking about it for weeks, and what's more she had to drag me along."

"Do Tories support you, too?" asked a man who had driven his teenage daughter up from Kent that day to meet Livingstone. "Yes, some of 'em do," mused Ken. He's had letters from Tory voters, from retired colonels in the shires backing him to the hilt in his bid to save the GLC. They'd seen him on BBC television's Question Time, he said, and realised he wasn't an ogre. .

The response to Ken's campaign has startled not only Mrs Thatcher, but more significantly, his own Labour colleagues in Parliament who have too easily dismissed Ken as a Looney London Leftie.

From the terrace of the House of Commons, MPs can look diagonally across the river to the elegant curve of G LC Headquarters at City Hall. There, in giant letters along the parapet is the week's message from Citizen Ken. This week, it's a thank you to the Lords for throwing out the bill to abolish the GLC: "Peers, thank you for saving London's democracy." Other weeks, it will be another battle-cry in the fight against abolition: "Vote us in to vote us out"; or it will revert to the regular tally of the total unemployed under Mrs Thatcher's administration. Ken was never a man to waste prime adyertising space.

MPs watch the massive message board with varying degrees of fascination, fury and pure envy. To the Tories, it's impudence beyond all bearing. To the Labour Opposiition, it is a brazen and stylish assault on government which makes their own performance, hampered by the traditions and etiquette of parliament, look tame and stuffy. Ken, to the London man in the street, is fast looking like the real leader of the opposition.

Livingstone knows his London, and he knows his Eng. land. A winsome eccentric of which a modern P.G. Wodeehouse would have been proud, he has milked the English sense of fairness and the popular hostility to Whitehall civil servants. Pointing out that the refusal to hold next year's local elections is a reduction of London democracy, that the abolition of the GLC leaves London effectively in the centralised hands of Whitehall, he has dotted the city with mad posters:

"This" declares one large hoarding bound in masses of fluttering red tape, "is how London will look run by Whiteehall"; ''This'' announces another above a giant crawling snail "is how London will feel run by Whitehall". The Thatcher government, taunted at every London crossroads by an inspired poster campaign which is costing £3 million of London taxpayers money, has turned every legislative gun in the armoury on Mr Livingstone's council, and ended up with a House of Lords mutiny allover its face. The noble Lords, whom egalitarian Ken has been eager to abolish, accepted reluctantly that Livingstone was right. The democratic way to get rid of Ken was to fight him fairly in a local election - not to abolish his council. The battle has turned into a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with Mrs Thatcher as the snarling thwarted cat, and Livingstone as the cheeky mouse. The nation is enjoying it hugely.

LIVINGSTONE' A 38 YEAR OLD SOUTH Londoner and former teacher, reluctantly L accepts the Trotskyist label, at least he would prefer it to being called a Social Democrat or indeed a Stalinist. What he's never been vague about is his commitment to the left and his determination that the

Labour Party whatever its leader, shall be the voice of the left. "Hugh Gaitskell" he explained to a young CND actiivist who complained that the Labour party had failed the left "was about as far part from me as is possible in politics but still people did better under him than under any Tory government." She must join the Labour Party, he insisted over twenty persuasive minutes. If everybody who felt like her joined the party, they could change the party, the country overnight. She was hooked.

Livingstone believes in evangelisation, imaginative perrsuasion. That's what's gone wrong, he complains, with the main bulk of the party establishment. Everything he's done could have been done by the MPs who look so enviously across at Ken's campaign from their Commons terrace on the river. "The Labour Party when in government could have done something, but they never had the imagination ... the Fare's Fair policy, the development of the National Health Service. From the 1950s up to now, the Labour Party has lost sight of the fact that people are not naturally socialist - they've got to be persuaded. There's a grey bureauucracy, and Neil Kinnock has caught the public eye simply because he hasn't been absorbed by that awful bureaucracy of Westminster."

For a leftwinger Livingstone places a startling belief in the power of personality. Denis Healy, from whom he is worlds apart politically, would still have been his choice for leader over leftwinger Michael Foot.

"Healy's a larger than life figure - one warms to him.

Had he been less arrogant as Chancellor he might have been leader of the party. When Jim Callaghan resigned, I made it clear that I thought Healy should have been made leader. Healy's a bully, and at the time you needed a bully. The left always get on with Healy in opposition. It's when he's in power we have trouble with him."

Livingstone who grew up in Streathem looked around the bookshop and then he confided pleasantly to a respecttful manager: "You know, I stole a book here when I was ten. It was a German phrase-book. I stole it, at least I think I did." The manager laughed as though shoplifting was his favourite past-time, too. "C'mon Ken" said his girl-friend Kate. "Stop wallowing in guilt and sign some more books." He'd changed his mind about W.H. Smith, confided Ken, signing away. Years ago, he demonstrated against them when they refused to stock "Private Eye". "Now I don't care who does or doesn't stock "Private Eye", they write such nasty things about me."

Over the last year, Livingstone has taken on and routed those who write such nasty things about him. Sought after by television because of his very notoriety, Livingstone perrformed superbly, shattering the bogeyman image of souless, implacable Red Ken. "At first, people depicted me as a puritan, who hated food or nice clothes or any sort of joy - a sort of automaton who went to meetings. Then when they saw you on TV, they realised that you were like them and the image didn't stick. Papers, after all, have a declining readership as sources of news or comment. Television is taking up more and more of that audience. You can reach over the heads of the press."

Mind you, nasty as the British gutter press was, they were reacting to some of Livingstone's own beliefs, not all of which would meet with widespread acceptance. Before we get to his views on the Northern Ireland question, which even his own press handlers realise could damage his harddwon popularity, there is Ken's belief in vegetarianism for a better, fairer world. The replacement of red meat with vegetable protein, he says, would lead to a fairer distribution of the world's resources. "People are sold red meat and dairy products because the farming industry benefits from that. If we eat these things rather than consume vegetable protein we condemn the Third World to live at subsistence level.

Ken took the questions on Northern Ireland though his press office were keen they be avoided - Ireland, just now, shouldn't distract from the fight to save London's demoocracy, Even as we moved 'out of the shop to talk further, two bystanders were calling "Bloody Irish, get 'em all out of here, we say." It may have been a bad joke but one didn't wait to find out.

The British army, says Livingstone, were accepted in Northern Ireland until 1972 and Operation Motorman. Interrunent proved them to be on the side of the Unionist regime and therefore unacceptable to Catholics as an indeependent force. So now they should get out, he says. It's a new held by most British people, he claims, if not by their politicians. London Radio's most recent poll showed over eighty per cent of people in favour of withdrawal. The commitment to union was fast becoming an empty shell maintained by politicians, he said.

But wouldn't withdrawal have to be a gradual process, even if one agreed it was desirable? Something which happpened over ten or fifteen years?

"I'd do it in ten days," says Ken evenly. And would he, one ventured, like to be living as a besieged Catholic in West Belfast during and after those ten days? "Yes, I would," says Ken. "I walked around Andersonstown with Gerry 'Adams and I felt perfectly safe.

"The Protestant terrorists wouldn't get involved in a civil war," he claims, "they would know that international forces would stop them. The very balance of terror between the two sides would stop such a war, and the Irish could all get down to working out a constitution, a new deal which Protestants would be quick to have a major say in."

He sounded reasonable and persuasive about it all, as kind and concerned as he was about bus passes for old people, and proper housing and giving the GLC's unused building ground over to caravan-dwellers to live on.

But he sensed he hadn't quite persuaded the questioner and Livingstone always likes to persuade the questioner. "])0 I gather from your attitude that you wouldn't like to be in Andersonstown during that ten days?"

Not on your life, I told him - not even for a free vegeetarian dinner. I'd rather be in London, on a subsidised bus, where comment is free and diet is a political statement, and peace is not maintained by a balance of terror, and where Mr Livingstone, I presume, will be as persuasive and as popular as ever. •