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“... leader, Andrew McIntosh, was kicked out and replaced by the candidate of the left wing, Ken Livingstone. The times were bad for the Thatcher Government – one of the few really bad periods it has had. The economy was going through its deepest slump since the Thirties. The Falklands War was not even imagined. Labour was riding high in the ...”

“... idle luxury – music, dancing, relating to each other, the constant flow of conversation’. So Ken Livingstone might imagine the first inhabitants of the GLC area. They call him a Trot, but there is much more in him of a far older generation of palaeo-socialists. For Livingstone believes in a social version of the ...”

“... life of the Council Chamber to the histrionics of the House of Commons proved hard to make. Ken Livingstone is in lineal descent from Herbert Morrison. Until it was abolished from under him by Mrs Thatcher, he led the GLC which had replaced the London County Council in the Sixties. But there the parallel ends. At its best, the LCC was an ...”

“... Of the two leading rivals for the London mayoralty, Ken Livingstone is much the more difficult to imagine as a child. Nobody, surely, can have that problem with Boris Johnson. The mind’s eye sees Boris as one of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, a bouncy fellow demanding his tea and laying plans ‘to be/the next Prime Minister but three ...”

“... per cent wins the election outright. (This doesn’t seem likely: the best performance so far was Ken Livingstone’s 39 per cent in 2000.) If no one has 50 per cent, the top two candidates have their second-choice votes added to their first-choice, and the one with the most votes is the winner. At the start of the campaign, opinion polls were showing ...”

“... at Kinnock’s failure to vote for Tony Benn for the Deputy Leadership, and his part in blocking Ken Livingstone’s claims to Brent East on the NEC, may attract more votes – in all three sections – from the Kinnock camp than is at present estimated. Peter Shore, the other candidate who appeared to be speaking to the electorate, will, I’d ...”

“... The GLA will also have less power to offer financial and political support to external projects: Ken Livingstone’s controversial support for minority groups in the early 1980s could not be repeated.Another qualification: the GLA – made up of the mayor and 25 elected members – is not an example of devolved government in the same sense as the ...”

“... attempts to pin the blame for the Madrid bombings on the Basque separatists. The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, did a lot better than the prime minister. Instead of coming out with airy and pious abstractions about ‘the British way of life’, or about our ‘civilisation’ and their ‘barbarism’, he spoke specifically and concretely of ...”

“... list of Labour opponents to the plans was a roll-call of the old guard, headed by Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone. The curatorial staff, feeling that their union, Unison, was similarly reluctant to get into a dispute with the Labour council, accepted redundancy. With the keeper Peter Cormack went thirty years’ knowledge of the collections as well as ...”

“... it is not just Benn himself who is drawn to the flame. Eric Heffer, Audrey Wise, Michael Meacher, Ken Livingstone and others feature in earnest discussions about whether the time is right for another attempt to capture the flag and how the forces are assembled. The votes of the unions and the membership seem to allow the possibility that the ...”

“... and all is lost,’ epitomised the sage Lord Liverpool. We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and ...”

“... east of the South Bank Centre began to organise to defend their homes. In 1984, with support from Ken Livingstone and the GLC, they fought off the property developers, founded housing co-operatives and opened up the area around what are now Bernie Spain Gardens and the converted Oxo Tower Wharf, thus lengthening the Thames Path, so that eventually there ...”

“... memories of Derek Hatton and the Militant refusal to set a rate in Liverpool and Lambeth; by Ken Livingstone’s courting of Sinn Fein during his time as a young political activist in London; by Margaret Hodge’s defiance of rate-capping in Islington (her purpose, she said, was ‘to support all our comrades who are in the frontline’ and ...”

“... played since 1904, for a new stadium in Stratford, and no one in the office of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, imagined they were constructing an Olympic stadium that a football club could inherit when the games were over. In 2013 the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) and West Ham, under the majority ownership of David Gold and David ...”

“... of the railway system. That seemed an act of madness but was probably just an act of spite against Ken Livingstone. To give Gordon Brown his due, however, he stopped short of reviving the poll tax. As soon as it became clear – to bring Milton up to date – that in many respects, at least in its first term, New Labour was but old Thatcherism writ ...”