Ken Livingstone - Mayor of London

Full transcript: Ken Livingstone on London Real

4:11 London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ken Livingstone, the English politician and former mayor of London from 2000 to 2008. You’ve been in politics for nearly 50 years, originally joining the Labour Party in 1968. Ken, welcome to London Real. Great to have you here.

5:33 You know, there’s so much to talk about today. It’s probably been one of the most exciting seven-day periods in British politics. We were talking about that earlier. Of course, we’ll get to Brexit, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Future of the Labour Party, Tories. We’ll talk about your recent suspension.

5:47 But before that, I would love to talk a little bit about your history. You know, you’ve been in politics for nearly 50 years. You’ve seen Vietnam War protests, Troubles in Ireland, Thatcher, Blair. You were the mayor of London for eight years. You’ve seen the formation of the European Union, now the Brexit.

6:03 I was wondering if you could maybe just briefly walk us through, maybe just kind of each decade. And maybe one thing you remember, and more importantly, how you see it affecting kind of where we are today. Because I think a lot of people don’t understand that, you know, today’s status quo is because of many things that happened in the past. I think it’s going because I was born in 1945. I grew up in a fairly austere, post-war world.

6:27 But I mean, I wasn’t interested in politics at all. I fell in love with science. By the time I was 11, I was interested in astronomy. Then by the time I was 12, it was collecting newts and frogs and toads. When I left school, because only about one kid in 20 went to a union those days, I applied for a job at London Zoo.

6:47 They didn’t have any vacancies. And I just had no interest in politics. I mean, it was only, I mean, I was 18, coming home on a Friday night, plonked down in front of the television with me dinner, and the news comes on that President Kennedy’s been assassinated. And for my generation, watch, I mean, we spent the whole weekend glued. I mean, we were all having our Sunday dinner when we actually saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot live on television.

7:15 I mean, wow. And so suddenly I started reading about American politics. And of course, American politics is much more glamorous than ours and so on. And I got more and more interested in it. But I didn’t join the Labour Party until, you know, about another five years.

7:32 Because I have to say, like the generation that feel betrayed by Tony Blair, I was 19 when Harold Wilson became Prime Minister. I remember thinking, well, I don’t need to join the Labour Party. Who would have sorted out all the problems of poverty within the next five years and so on? And of course, you get let down. I suppose if I look at those decades, once I joined, I fell in love with it.

7:55 I was on the local council. And in those days, a council was free to do anything that wasn’t illegal. Now it’s all run from Whitehall. But we got elected in 1971, Lambeth, with a promise to give free contraception away. And that was just depicted as, you know, you were trying to undermine Christian civilisation and so on.

8:19 And we introduced free travel for pensions on the underground. Now, local government, you know, everything’s regulated and controlled in the centre. And I had no intention of being MP. I thought, I want to spend the rest of my life in local government. Because I could, you know, you could get a wonderful adventure playground built on the estate I grew up on and things like that.

8:38 And then along came the oil crisis in 1973. Government started cutting back. I got caught up in being pushed forward as a candidate. I remember it was the first election I lost standing in Hampstead the year Mrs. Thatcher got in.

8:59 And then I ended up, of course, coming to the leader of the GLC. That I was overwhelmed by because the Greater London Council, no one paid much attention to it. And most certainly only about one person in 20 could even have told you the leader of it was. And suddenly I get elected with my politics. There’s this wall of media hysteria like Jeremy Corbyn.

9:21 Your politics are liberal politics. Well, I mean, well to the left of liberal. I’m a genuine socialist. So I’m elected saying we must stop discriminating against homosexuals. We must have equal rights for women.

9:32 We should negotiate with the IRA. And the world just went mad. And you were always feeling that way? Were you brought up in a household that encouraged that thinking? Well, I was lucky.

9:41 I mean, I was the first person in his working class household. My dad was a window cleaner. My mum was shop worker. She had been a dancer on the stage in the 30s. So she had grown up in a world where she knew homosexuals was no problem.

9:56 My dad had been in the merchant navy for about 15 years, met people from all the way around. So he wasn’t racist. So I grew up in a household without any sex. I mean, they were an equal couple as well, which wasn’t usual in the 50s. So I grew up without any of the bias of racism or homophobia or anything like that.

10:15 And so I thought these were issues you should take up. Because back in the early 80s, if someone was exposed as homosexual, he had to retire from public life. And even, I mean, I can think of something like Dusty Springfield. She had to live her whole life keeping her sexuality totally private because it’d been the end of her career. Now, of course, you’ve got a Tory Prime Minister allowing gay marriage inconceivable 30 years ago.

10:43 So the whole world has been transformed. The only real regret I have is that I grew up in that world where things always got better. I mean, I left school with every boy who got a job. I didn’t know an unemployed person until I was about 28 or 29. And you look at my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s, things are getting worse.

11:03 I mean, things just don’t get better anymore. I grew up just assuming, you know, life would always be comfortable and easy. Now, we’ve had 35 years really where things have got much tougher. You mentioned the 80s. That you’re coming in.

11:17 What happened to you then? You went into the GLC then. Yeah. And that was the Greater Wellington Council. So you controlled as large?

11:25 Oh, yeah. I mean, it was the largest local authority, I think, in Western Europe. Not quite as much power as the mayor of New York’s got and so on. But, I mean, we were elected to tackle bigotry in different countries, but to cut the fares, to get people out of their cars and into public transport, to build more council homes, just focus on doing things. I was never expected to become a nationally known figure.

11:53 And the wave of the Daily Mail depicted me as a sort of pro-Irae terrorist Soviet agent. Red Ken. Yes, Red Ken. Is that when that came out? I was attacked on the streets about three times.

12:07 Physically? Physically. My poll rating went down to just 18% in three months. But slowly, people would see me on interviews like this and things like that. And it turned round, and after about two or three years, I was runner-up to the Pope in the BBC’s Man of the Year poll.

12:26 I mean, it’s a transformation. Because why do you think people change their mind about you? Well, I would say I’m depicted as some sort of anti-British monster. And when people could see me on TV, they’d say, no, I mean, it’s actually just a normal guy. I remember the very first national thing I did was the radio program.

12:46 Any questions in early 82? And that’s the first time I’d been a nationwide audience rather than just London. And the following week, I mean, the guy who presented it, David Jacobs, read out all the letters. And all the letters came and said, we’re surprised. He was such a reasonable guy.

13:05 We didn’t have a single hostile letter. And so from then on, I just focused on trying to get onto national radio and TV because the Daily Mail was never going to be nice about me, whatever I did. And I mean, we only discovered it years later, but the Daily Mail and the Telegraph met with Thatcher’s campaign team in about early 82 or mid-82 after the Falklands War and there was a general election coming up. And the strategy, they decided, was that Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, and myself should be depicted as the enemy within the threat to British democracy.

13:43 And Tory central office were going around telling journalists that I’d been at a gay party where I’d been sodomized by six men in succession. The following year, no paper took that out. I could have made a fortune in the libel courts. But the following year, they’re going around saying, Special Branch has got a fire on his activities with schoolgirls. So it’s a really dirty old…

14:03 It’s a really dirty old conspiracy. People see what’s happening now and think, hasn’t policy got nasty? It’s always been nasty. And the Daily Mail and the other paper, why would they conspire with the Tories? Was that in their interest? Were they funded by them?

14:16 Yeah, I mean, the Daily Mail has always worked for the right. I mean, 1906, the Daily Mail headline was, Jews bring crime and disease to Britain. Then it was the Irish, then it was the Caribbeans, currently it’s the Muslims and so on. The Daily Mail and a lot of the other papers have always stoked that fear that migrants are going to ruin our way of life. If you think of the contribution Jews made to Britain and the dynamism they brought to our economy, I mean, exactly the same as today.

14:49 I mean, two-thirds of the immigrants who come here come with a degree. Which is twice the number of the people in Britain. It’s a staggering statistic. Well, Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. But he was wrong. History always repeats itself.

15:04 When I was the leader of the GLC, we only had a majority of four out of 92. And there was at least eight members of the Labour group wanting to be dead, so there was always rebellions and things. And the Tories would demand a special meeting to discuss something I was vulnerable on. And I realised we’d have the meeting on Friday afternoon because about four members of the Tory group would go back to their country state, so I’d always win. And then a couple of years later, I’m reading Satonius’ History of the Twelve Caesars, which he wrote about 2,000 years ago.

15:35 And I said, Julius Caesar did exactly the same thing when the Conservatives in the Senate wanted a special meeting. He called it on Friday afternoon. Well, the really rich ones had gone back to their country estates. And I think if Thatcher and Reagan had really studied the history of the Great Depression, they would have never have made the mistakes that led to the banking crisis in 2008. Really? And those seeds were planted in the 80s, is what you’re saying.

16:00 Well, after the banking crisis, America had the Glass-Steagall Act, which really introduced tight regulation of banks. They couldn’t take all these dodgy risks again. And then we hit the 1980s, and Reagan’s under pressure to reduce the regulation. When Bill Clinton came in, he finally repealed Glass-Steagall. What did the banks do? He started taking lots of dodgy risks again.

16:27 And what’s worrying is we haven’t, both in Britain and America, we haven’t brought back that tight regulation. So you could get another banking crisis. You mentioned this kind of cyclical demonisation of immigrants. And it was what was it, the Irish and then the West Indians. And you see this continuing to repeat itself.

16:48 Well, since the vote to leave the EU last week, we’ve had a real upsurge of people screaming at Poles or Muslims and so on. But compared with a lot of the rest of the Western world, I mean, it’s not as bad here in London as it is in a lot of other places. I remember, I think we’ve done better at integrating people. I mean, if I had come home with a black girlfriend 50 years ago, the whole street would have talked about it. My granddaughter is mixed race. No one registers it here in this city.

17:20 And so there’s so many people, mixed marriages between races and religions. I think we’re a fairly good example for the rest of the world. Let me walk you through a few decades here and then we can talk about current events. Thatcher, did you watch the movie about her, by the way? It came out a few years ago and kind of covered some of her dementia.

17:41 No, I didn’t. I must have missed it. I didn’t even know there had been one. When you remember the Thatcher years, how do you feel about it? When she died, there were certain people that celebrated, there were certain people that did not.

17:52 Well, how do you remember? I mean, she abolished the Greater London Council while I was running, so I thought that was profoundly under… The people in London elect an administration you don’t like, you abolish their right to have that. That was pretty horrendous. And I think almost all of her policies, in hindsight, turned out to be wrong.

18:13 But the thing I respected about her was she believed in things, and pushed them through. She didn’t care whether people hated her. She was really… I mean, a friend of mine who was a Tory minister in her government, David Mellor, says actually, dealing with Saddam Hussein was nicer than having to deal with him, since Thatcher. She was brutal and rude.

18:34 But she believed in things and drove it through. And so many politicians today, they just seem to want to be there. They don’t really have an agenda. She thought she could change Britain for the best. She drove it through.

18:45 I think she failed in that. But at least she believed in something. She didn’t care about lining her own pockets or being a celebrity or something. Right. And we see a lot of that today.

18:56 Oh, God. But we’ll get into some of the celebrity politicians shortly. The 90s. I believe, I think I arrived here in this country July 5th, 1997, which I think was Mr. Blair came in.

19:09 How do you remember the new Labour government, the Blair, everything? Well, see, in that election, I mean, a lot of people now say, only Tony Blair could have won. The truth was, we’d had 18 years of the toys. It’d become a real mess. And people were going to throw out the toys.

19:26 Whether we’d had previous leaders like Neil Kinnock or Johnson, or even the proverbial pig’s bladder on a stick, we would have won that election. And Tony Blair was a nice guy. I had a chat with him about 10 weeks before the election, sounding out at each other, would he give me a job, and so on. I came away thinking, oh, my God, you’re so not ready for this, you know? And he’d never chaired a council committee.

19:50 He’d never run anything in his life. A bit like Obama. Obama had been a social worker. He’d been a lawyer. So the first thing you get to run is the whole country.

19:59 This is a steep learning curve. But the other thing about that, he’d moved the party to the right. But I didn’t believe he actually believed all this rubbish he was coming out with. I assumed he’d get in and then be a good bit more radical. But no, he did seem to believe it.

20:16 Basically, I look back on that 13 years of the Blair Brown administration as they did some good little things. He finally brought peace to Northern Ireland. They allowed gay partnerships and so on. But he didn’t tackle the big problems about getting better jobs for people. Manufacturing continued to be wiped out.

20:36 He didn’t build council houses that people could afford to rent. And that’s why there’s so much anger. I mean, the sort of anger that’s helped Donald Trump get the Republican nomination and helped Jeremy Corbyn get the Labour seat here. There’s an awful lot of people just saying they know what life their parents had and it was better than they’ve got now. And they’re right to be angry.

20:59 Mayor of London, did you ever foresee yourself having that role in the 80s? I know the job didn’t exist. When you started hearing the talk about this role happening, was that an obvious fit for you? Well, I mean, I was opposed to having a mayor for London. I was saying, we should have a council.

21:14 Don’t put all the power in one person’s hands. But Tony Blair was in love with everything American, so he brought the American mayoral system in. And I always say, well, at any one time, there’s always at least 50 ex-mares in America in prison for fraud and corruption. And you just have to think about this. If all the power rests with the mayor, when the developer who wanted to build the shard came to see me to ask for planning permission, I could have said, of course, I just want half a million in this numbered Swiss bank account.

21:44 Can you care to do that these days? You can do that. And eventually we’ll have a mayor that does. We don’t have one that just did, do we? No, Boris was so keen to be prime minister, he never did anything corrupt.

21:56 But one day we’ll get one that does do that. It happens all the time in America. Just because too much power in one person. You could call the post the mayor of London, but if you had a council and they could remove the mayor if they were doing wrong or being a bit dodgy or something like that, but you could get away with murder. Does the mayor of London have more unchecked power than the prime minister?

22:18 The prime minister, as we’ve just seen, can be removed. You’re elected for four years. It was the guy in Toronto who got dodgy problems with drugs and all that kind of his name. But unless it’s something spectacular like that, the most mediocre and dodgy mayor will carry on to the end of their term. One of my friends and next door neighbors is Max Kaiser of the Kaiser Report and he overlooks the mayor’s office and he said, Brian, he’s in the same building as London and Partners, and he said, Brian, there’s just a line of people that line up in front of that office and they all go in looking for influence.

22:54 And he’s just, I watch it every day and I sometimes take it with a grain of salt, but the other thing is, when I was the leader of the JLC, there were 92 people there. They all brought different ideas. I mean, if it’s all just the mayor, you’ve got a little coach of advisers that come up with things. It’s not as open to new ideas and thinking as a council or a parliament is. I mean, I think the weakness of the American system is, it looks like the president has all those powers, but then the Congress usually ends up being run by a rival party.

23:28 Nothing much happens. It’s almost as though the people that created the American Constitution wanted to create a government that wouldn’t do anything. They wanted a small government. They got one that just doesn’t work. Now, to become mayor of London, you had to leave the Labour Party to do that.

23:42 Why did that happen? Well, I wanted to stay as an MP and focus on the government’s economic policy because I didn’t think it was working. But there was this huge public pressure sort of suddenly built up and I became the people’s choice. And I couldn’t walk down the street without people saying, you’ve got to run, you’ve got to run. And then Tony Blair, originally he was being told by people, I said, well, just don’t let him stand.

24:09 But there was huge, it was all in the front pages of the papers, they’re trying to rig this in the election. And so they came up with a system in which the membership had a third of the vote, the unions had a third of the vote, and the London MPs had a third of the vote. Now, that was, you know, there was about 50 London MPs, but, you know, 80,000 Labour Party members in London, they’re equal. So when you added up all the individual votes cast, I’d got 74,000, Blair’s candidate got 24,000, but he was the winner because the votes of the MPs were worth a thousand times, the votes were an ordinary member.

24:47 So I thought, well, bugger that, you know, this is just wrong. And people were so put out by it as well, that we wouldn’t have won, and Labour would have lost, the toys would have won. And so I had to stand. Did you have a working relationship with Tony Blair at this point? Well, no, because I suppose it’s my fault.

25:10 After you’ve been Prime Minister for about three months, he asked to see me, and he was clearly sounding me out for a job again. And I just said, well, I don’t see any point in being in your government because no one’s allowed to do anything. It’s all run by you and Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell at the centre. We had a harsh exchange and all of that, and he didn’t give me a job. I’m sure he wouldn’t have took it.

25:36 But then we hit this point where I’d won, and he gave me a nice phone call the next morning. But they kept me at arm’s length because they did generally believe that when I introduced the congestion charge to charge cars coming into city, it would be a disaster, it wouldn’t work. And so, I mean, for two and a half years, they kept me out of the party. And then it came in, it worked perfectly, and a couple of months later, Tony Blair said, would you come back and be our candidate, please?

26:04 I said, yes, that’s exactly the exchange, one sentence and a one-word answer. So in 2004, when you were reelected, you were reelected as the Labour candidate? The Labour candidate, okay. I remember the congestion charge. I came back to London in 2002, and I remember it kind of happening.

26:18 I didn’t have a car, but my friends did. When you look back on both of your terms as mayor, what are the things you remember most of accomplishing? Is the congestion charge one? The congestion charge, I mean, people saw it as a mega thing, but it was just trying to reduce, I mean, traffic speed was down to about nine miles an hour in central London. And even with the congestion charge, it only went up to about 12 and a half.

26:41 I mean, it’s back down to about nine now, because it’s got a lot more people in London. But the big thing was actually, as well as trying to discourage people driving, was to get people into public transport. When I became mayor, we had five and a half thousand clapped out old buses. We got 8,000 new ones, new routes. I mean, we froze the bus fares.

27:00 And I think it’s about twice as many people use the buses now as did then. My successor carried on that policy. And then we started building extensions on the underground, tram extensions. We took over the worst railway in London, what you should call the North London Line. Now it’s the London Overground.

27:21 We spent one and a half billion doing it out, new trains, I mean, much more regular service. So there’s been a huge shift from inter-public transport. And given, you know, the impact of cars on air pollution and the number of people killed by that, thank God we did. Why are you always such a proponent for public transport? Well, that’s when I’ve lived all my life in London.

27:43 I mean, I’ve never learned to drive. What is the point, you know? If I get a cab after doing this interview to go home, it’ll take twice as long as if I just walk to the old street tube and get the tube. Congestion charge, one of them. Other crowning achievements when you think about your mayoral terms.

28:02 We were talking about the Olympics earlier. Well, the Olympics was great fun. And the legacy, because what I’ve learned about economics is that the biggest single factor in a country’s success is investment. And there’s the investment that the state should do, like, you know, good transport system, build houses, boot and afford to live in. We should now be actually having a good broadband system.

28:25 I mean, when I’m in the Far East, I can access the internet in about tenth the time it takes here. We need a good fibre optic cable system. All of that. If the state does that, then private businesses will come, see a city or region that’s working, and they will invest. And it’s that relationship between public and private investment.

28:44 And so, I mean, when I got elected, we started to get lots of investment to transform our transport system. But virtually in the first few weeks, the British Olympic Association came and said, we want to bid for the Olympics. We can only do it with your support. And I said, well, I’ve been to one sporting event in my life, Cricket Match, at the over and I fell asleep. I have no interest in sport.

29:10 But if we say the site will be in the east end on that most polluted and run-down area, we’ll throw everything into winning this. And everyone can pay away. It cost eight billion, but it transformed. I mean, the area is so polluted that we had to remove about 12 feet of soil that was so contaminated. I mean, all that was going on there was dodgy.

29:31 You know, cars were stolen and broken up and things like that. Prostitution. No one wandered around that area at night. Stratford. Now it’s transformed.

29:41 And I mean, that barrier is growing more strongly than the other. And when I look at, you know, the way so many people in the north of England and the regions that have been left behind voted to leave Europe, I have to say it’s not because we’re in Europe, it’s because you haven’t got the sort of investment I was able to get for London. And we need to, I mean, I’m really proud of the investment we got for London. I just regret, I was never prime minister. I wanted an investment all over the country, not just in London.

30:07 That’s why so many people outside come to hate London. They just, it gets everything. But they haven’t got the politicians there making the case for, you know, we want a high-speed routing from Liverpool through Manchester over to Hull. Areas have been really left behind, able to get around quickly. Do you think high-speed travel, would be maybe the most intelligent investment for this country to make, to just bring it all together?

30:32 It’s travel, but also a good broadband system. I mean, back in 1983, my GLC, we sent a proposal to Thatcher saying, your government, because then BT was a public organisation, British telecoms, your government should create a fibre optic cable system linking every home and business in Britain. We think if you do that, you’ll create 400,000 new jobs. An underestimate now, given as we see it. This is what year you wrote this?

31:03 1983. She didn’t even reply. And then five years later, I was on Labour’s national executive and I was saying, this should be a commitment to do this in our 92 election manifesto. Gordon Brown voted against it. A year later, I was off the NEC and it was just died.

31:21 It never happened. And now we’re so far behind many of our rivals. So it’s good public transport because also, I mean, it sounds a bit geeky, this, but I mean, I used to take about 40 minutes to get to work on the tube or the bus. I could read as opposed to sitting behind a wheel. That’s four working weeks a year.

31:47 It actually is a brilliant idea to actually get out your car and use your time usefully. Looking back at Mayor Olympics, big on your list that that all happened. Were you happy the way everything went down? I remember when you beat Paris to get that bid. It was a big thing.

32:04 It was brilliant because still today you’re getting more construction there. New firms are coming. Homes are being built. There’s still nearly 20 years of development to come as that whole area is transformed. It’s worked even better than I hoped it would actually.

32:20 And you’ve got these amazing venues. They’re still there. People go there just to walk around and see them. They are stunning. Yeah, I would have never gone to Stratford before that.

32:31 Biggest frustration or challenge you had as mayor over those eight years? I wish I could have been able to do X or what was it? Well, I suppose the biggest frustration is, I mean, the mayor had limited powers. And most of what I achieved, I.G. by working with business or the trade unions, not things I could order, but you brought coalition.

32:52 We’ve got a 20-year program for London’s economy that business and the unions all signed up to. But what haunts me is that I persuaded the Labour government under Tony Blair to allow the mayor to start building housing for rent, which we hadn’t done for 30 years. And Gordon Brown became Prime Minister and he said, well, once this power kicks in in 2008, we’ll give you five billion pounds to start building them. And of course, I lost the election, so it never happened.

33:22 And also, we just introduced the low emission zone just before I lost. And Boris didn’t continue doing that. Now we’ve got nine and a half thousand people die every year because our air quality is so bad. And the new mayor, I think, will move on that fairly quickly, but we just wasted eight. So I think every politician who loses an election thinks, I mean, not just how and without they’ve lost, but they can’t do the things that they were planning to do and you just see people continuing to suffer.

33:53 Talking about your relationship with Boris Johnson, did you have a relationship before that 2008 election? And how do you recall it? No, I mean, the only thing is, I was really rude to a journalist once, it was a big campaign demanding I should apologize. And I just remember reading Boris’s thing saying, Mr. Mayor, don’t apologize, don’t give in.

34:13 But that was about the only thing we had been on the same side. And I mean, we had, we never had any social gathering at all except just after the Olympics. And I’d been retired by then. And he defeated me for reelection. He said, I’d like to take you out to dinner at my local Turkish restaurant.

34:34 And I thought that’s brilliant. I’ll spend all evening telling him you’ve got to start building homes for rent, which I did. But all he was interested in me, all evening kept saying to me, why is it you failed to become prime minister? What were the mistakes you made? And when I said to him, we should build homes for rent, he said, homes for rent.

34:54 Like I said, can I sleep with your wife? He was so shocked. And he just realized, this little elite from the Bullingdon Club in Eden, they have no idea how difficult it is to get home. You know, their parents give them one or something. So there couldn’t be any more polar opposites than Boris, the Eden grad rugby player versus you growing up in the home of working class parents.

35:13 Well, I mean, this is what was interesting, that the election where we’ve now had Sadiq Khan elected was exactly the same sort of thing. He was a working class boy from a councilor state in Tuting who’d worked his way up against, you know, a billionaire, Zach Goldsmith, who’d, you know… I mean, fortunately, I mean… Zach is a very nice, pleasant guy. But the campaign was really unpleasant and Islamophobic and all that.

35:41 But, you know, I think it says a lot about London, that they elected a Muslim mayor at the height of all this Islamophobia and fear of terrorism and so on. That sends a very good sign to Muslims. Yeah, I want to talk about the future of London and the mayor shortly. So, O8’s defeated by Boris. You had that Turkish dinner with him four years later in 12.

36:04 That period where Boris was mayor. Good things, bad things. I’ve been told that the Boris Bikes should really be the Livingstone Bikes because you had engineered that. But good and bad things that he did. When he got in, a lot of my projects were underway, like doing up the London Overground and he couldn’t stop them, and so they carried on.

36:24 But of all the projects I had underway, he stopped every single one except the bike scheme, which I’d copied from Paris. But then towards the end of his terms, some of the schemes like the separate cycle lanes, which he spiked when he got in, he realised painting blue lines on the street doesn’t actually make it any safer and the death toll continued, so he reinstated some of those. But I think, and it’s most partly why Boris has stood down from running for Prime Minister, was because he hasn’t got a political agenda.

36:57 He’s seen as this lovable old Tory and he’s the most popular politician in Britain. But he had eight years in office, and the only things which were uniquely his were the cable car to nowhere, which makes a huge loss, and the helter-skelter in the Olympic site, which also makes a big loss. And I think the reason he’s dropped out of the race for Prime Minister is because an awful lot of Tory MPs don’t seriously believe he’d do anything if he was in the job. He couldn’t guarantee to get enough votes to get into the final two places where the membership had the ballot.

37:31 And when you’re complimenting Margaret Thatcher earlier about the fact that she at least had will, that was a slight jab at Boris by saying at least she had the will to push through policies he believed were right. Whereas with Boris, I mean, I think he should have gone to showbiz. He is about celebrity, you know. Whereas Michael Gove, who’s pushed him aside, he has a really scary right-wing agenda. I mean, it makes Mrs. Thatcher look human.

37:56 So maybe in this case you kind of wish Boris would have stayed. No, because I think it would be easier for Jeremy to defeat Michael Gove than it would be to defeat Boris, because Boris would just be like he was in the two elections. I lost to him, you know, loads of jokes, humorous stuff and all that. No serious politics. I had George Galloway in here about three years ago on my first politician, and he said, Brian, politics is show business for ugly people.

38:23 Yes. And then he said cheekily, but what would I know about that? Do you agree with him? Well, when I came into politics back in the 60s, it was not about being good-looking or charming. It was all filled with nerdy people, interesting policies, you know.

38:42 Now we’ve gone down the American route. It’s so much about celebrity and the individual. Did that start with Blair? Yeah, I think it was really Blair. I even brought that.

38:52 He dragged us down to the American level. I take that as a compliment being from America. Big announcement today, Boris, not running for prime minister. Did you see that coming? No, I mean, because, as I say, he took me out for that meal.

39:08 All he talked about was how to become prime minister. I think from the moment he was a teenager, he’s been, in fact, I want to be prime minister. I want that status, that position. And it’s, I think, the fact he knows he’s going to be defeated. And so he stepped back.

39:26 It must be, I mean, I imagine you’re having a really sad evening tonight. Do you think his wife will have to put him on suicide watch? Do you think to be continued? He might come, I mean, he’ll clearly be given a job in the government, whether it’s Theresa May or Gove. And he might come back and have another shot when they stand down or they lose the election.

39:53 I would like to have a chat then tonight, because I suspect he’d be more open and honest about what he really feels he’s ever been before with him. Maybe you can take him to your Turkish local. You can have a real chat. With Boris, it’s probably a good time to jump into Brexit. When you try to take a bird’s eye view of everything that’s happened in the last seven days and even the last six months, and maybe that relates to the last 30 years, and you see Boris and kind of his agenda.

40:22 Did he overplay his hand? Did he go a little bit too far on that power play to make that move as Prime Minister? And then your thoughts in general on the Brexit vote? I think I don’t have the side to say that Boris is in favour of staying in. He’s not an idiot.

40:38 He knows that he’ll be damaging to the economy. But I think he’s putting himself at the front of the exit campaign would line up all the rank and file of the Tory party behind him, guarantee that when… I think his assumption was there’d be a narrow victory for staying in, camera going a year or two, Boris would ease into his place. And that’s, I think, why Gove has pushed him aside. Gove knows Boris won’t really negotiate a good exit deal.

41:10 He doesn’t like the details. He doesn’t like the details. But also, Gove actually wants really out. He doesn’t want to stay in the single market, and he wants us to be a completely separate little nation. And I suspect, in his heart of hearts, he’d like us to be the 51st state of America.

41:28 Before we go back into Brexit, can you talk about this special relationship between the US and the UK, how you feel about it, how it changed in the Blair years, and then the comment you just made? See, I grew up in the Cold War, and I believed what we were being told, that there was this huge Soviet threat. And the first American election I remember is Kennedy winning in 60. And that was all about Kennedy saying that Russians have overtaken us, they’ve got more nuclear weapons, all that.

41:58 What we now know is that when he was being briefed, having become president, he was told that America’s got 400 missiles capable of reaching Russia. They have four capable of reaching America. America has 10 times the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union. It was only 15 years later in the mid-70s that the Soviet Union finally caught up. And basically, I think, I didn’t start out as a conspiracy theorist, I had become one.

42:27 The military-industrial complex, I just wanted the Cold War, it created vast wealth. And oddly enough, Eisenhower, a Republican president, who went along with all of that, half of all federal government spending was on the military. But in his final message to the American people, just before he left office, he warned about the growing power of this military-industrial complex. And it’s still there today. We’re about to spend 40 billion pounds on four nuclear submarines we’ll never use.

43:00 But we’ve got the smallest army since Waterloo and Napoleon. We’ve got two aircraft carriers coming along which haven’t got any planes on. Our military is its weakest it’s ever been. And all the money is going on for nuclear subs we won’t ever use. It’s madness.

43:17 It’s a bit like the plan to build this massive new Hinckley Point nuclear power station, coming at 25 billion. We’d just be better to give everybody enough money to put solar panels on their roof. And what about the relationship with the U.S.? Is it not even more important now if we leave the European Union? Well, if we leave the European Union, I think we’ll end up basically sucked into the American orbit on a grand scale.

43:41 Which is bad. It is bad because all the American interventions, there’s a brilliant series, I don’t think it’s ever been shown on TV in Britain, but you can get it on DVDs, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, that actually just depicts the Cold War was driven by America’s economic interests. The bizarre thing, Vietnam, which is most probably the most horrific war, that America’s been involved in in my lifetime. On the day the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader, approached the American president to say, we’d like your help to create a proper independent Vietnam.

44:23 Because for a thousand years Vietnam had been in conflict with China. The idea that it was just going to be a red Chinese puppet was nonsense. And you have to ask, didn’t state department officials realise these were two nations at loggerheads? No, we had 30 years of war, at least three and a half million Vietnamese killed. Still today the chemical bombing that was done is seeing children being born with horrendous deformities.

44:52 And then you look at all our interventions in the Middle East. Invading, overthrowing the government in Iran back in 1953, invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We would have been better just to let the Arabs sell us their oil at a reasonable price. The cost of these wars has been horrendous. And is the Middle East any better?

45:16 Terrorism’s a growing threat. Britain was all for its empire-ruined nations around the world and America’s unofficial empire has done the same. That country’s run themselves. It’s a great documentary called The Fog of War, where they interview Robert McNamara, which is JFK’s secretary of defence. And he talks about having a conversation with one of the North Vietnamese Army generals after the conflict.

45:44 And they sat down and had a few drinks. And they were both equally convinced that they were both completely opposite in their interests. As in, the Vietnamese said, there’s no way you could have think that we would have been with the Chinese. And McNamara’s like, of course we did. And they were just back and forth.

46:01 People should read history. Yeah, there should be more history. I bet no American politician knew the history of conflicts in Vietnam and China over a thousand years. Probably not. Brexit, when you take a look back, I know you’ve had a week now to kind of digest it.

46:15 What do you see that maybe we’re not talking about in the news? I mean, a lot of people have talked about how it was, you know, these non-city voters that were voting, whether it was Sunderland at 70%. And some say it was an anti-politician, an anti-business, an anti-status quo vote. What do you see? I think it is this anger.

46:35 Because, yeah, London voted to stay and it’s done very well economically. There are still problems, but I mean, it’s boomed. But so much of Britain’s been left behind. Under Thatcher and Blair, we went from 7,000 jobs in manufacturing down to 2 million. Those were good jobs that working class people had.

46:54 It meant they could afford to buy a home or at least rent a good one. All that’s been wiped out. What have we got now? Zero hours contracts. People, you know, doing a little bit of mini-cabbing just to make ends meet and things like that.

47:07 And I think it was that sense of anger. Now, the Brexit campaign turned it all on. Immigrants have come in and taken our jobs and our homes. No, it isn’t. For 35 years, our governments didn’t create a good balanced economy with good jobs or build homes that people can afford to rent.

47:25 And that anger, I mean, people confused it with migration with the European Union. Is that the fault of the Leave campaigners as well? I mean, the Leave campaigners certainly worked that very well. I mean, all those posters about migration and so on. If we’re honest, I mean, migrants most shortly increased the size of the British economy by about 5% every decade.

47:53 I mean, because the people coming in are coming in to go on benefits. They’re coming in to work. And as we said earlier, you know, two-thirds of them have got degrees. I mean, you look at the area around here, what’s happened, the boom in the telecommunications and internet industry and so on. Do we suffer from being in a bit of an echo chamber here in London where we have our own reality?

48:16 We believe, you know, everything that we say. I mean, you’re a Londoner. You served in the London Council, Mayor of London. I mean, do you think that sometimes you’re out of touch or we’re out of touch with what’s really happening and the concerns that are happening? I think this is not just this.

48:29 It’s why Trump’s got the Republican nomination in America and Bernie Sanders came close to getting the Democrat one. They were both running on the anger. I mean, there are sways of America which have been completely gutted. All the industry went, nothing new has come in. You read stories about the level of drug abuse in those areas.

48:47 People got nothing to do. The same is happening, you know, in Spain and in Greece. I mean, and my worry is that anger will start to fuel sort of individual terrorist acts and extreme right groups. I mean, we used to have an extreme left group in Germany back in the 70s. I think it’s a real danger.

49:08 Governments have got to start listening and responding because all over the Western world, and it’s certainly true here in Britain, people think it doesn’t matter who wins the election, they just look after us smallerly and line their own pockets. And is that true to a certain extent? I think that is exactly true because, I mean, if you actually look at Britain, inequality was cut in half in the period from the First World War down to Mrs. Thatcher’s election in 79.

49:33 Now it’s back to what it was in just those 35 years we reversed, you know, all that post-war progress we made. And it’s also left us a weaker economy. The biggest trade deficit we’ve ever had in our lives. Because if you allow your manufacturing to be wiped out, manufacturing is about half your exports. I mean, in Germany, their manufacturing is five times the size of ours.

49:59 They didn’t let it die out, they invested. They sell five times what we do to China. I mean, everything here has gone into the services, a service sector. But you can’t export a haircut or an exclusive Chelsea meal, you know. Where do we go from here?

50:15 Article 50 hasn’t been exercised, Cameron’s putting that off. Is that a political move? In reality, where do you see us in two years? No, this is the interesting thing. No one’s prepared a plan for what happens if we vote to leave.

50:29 There wasn’t a team of civil servants working out or anything. And now we’ve got this most complicated treaty that we’ve got. It will take years. I don’t think there’s any chance of happening in two years. And all the time this is up in the air, foreign firms will be worried about investing here because they don’t know which way it’s going to go.

50:47 And I do think, I mean, once this deal is done, we should have another referendum about whether people think we should take that deal or leave. Because I think by the time the deal is put together, a lot of the people who voted to leave will be furious that that deal is not what they’re expecting. It will be, I mean, if we’re to stay part of the European market, we’ve got to accept the free movement of labor. And that’s the key issue that drove people to vote to leave.

51:16 We see the pound down 14 points. It’s recovered a bit. Stock markets, you know, between 10 and 20% down, they’ve recovered a bit. But when you see things like that, and this is something I was thinking about the last few days, I mean, do not the politicians, the businessmen, everyone who’s working in the best interests of the U.K., don’t they want to engineer some solution to reverse this decision? Well, this is the trade-off.

51:38 I mean, the pound’s been overvalued for so long, and that’s been so damaging to our exports. And so, you know, if the pound is at a lower level and we start to export more, that will help create more jobs. But it will also mean we have to pay more for our imports, the food we import, and all of that. So you could start to see a bit more inflation. And we were just in a real mess.

52:01 No one… I mean, I think it didn’t Greenland leave. Well, it’s only about 8,000 people living in Greenland. I mean, there’s just never been… I can’t think of anything else in history, which is, you know, it’s such a big shift.

52:15 And it’s all got to be worked out by lawyers and accountants. It’s going to be an absolute nightmare. So you’re proposing that we might work on this solution for the next couple of years, and when we get an idea of what it looks like, to then put that to a vote and say, is this really what you want to do? And if not, let’s not do it. And not just carry it through because there was a vote back in this time before we knew what it would look like.

52:34 Because none of the people campaigning for it, except perhaps Michael Gove had in the back of their mind what they really wanted to do. It was a campaign. It wasn’t a serious economic strategy. If we took the vote again today, what do you think the breakdown would be of it? Well, it might have shifted because I think already, people are a bit disillusioned, because remember, we had promised we’d saved £350 million a week.

52:59 Now the people who said that said, oh, it’s not quite there. And we’ve got to spend it on the NHS. Oh, no, we can’t do that. Already they’re rolling back. But who knows?

53:08 I mean, an election, I remember I bumped into Nigel Farage in a bar a couple of months ago, and we were chatting about it. I said, I think, I mean, you’ll most shortly narrowly win because the people who want to leave are absolutely passionate to do so. The people who want to remain have got all the qualifications. Well, it needs a lot of reform. It needs a lot of change.

53:29 It’s too bureaucratic. It’s not working. That doesn’t inspire people to go out and vote. Right, so yeah, a vocal minority there. Let’s talk about the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn.

53:40 I’m curious actually about your long relationship when you met him. You’re suspended now from the Labour Party. Maybe this is a naive question, but what does that mean if you weren’t already holding office to be suspended? Well, I’m on Labour’s… I’ve just resigned today from Labour’s National Executive.

53:57 But I was on Labour’s National Executive, and so I did hold that office. But you’re right, I’ve been a retired pensioner. But basically, I mean, we’ve also had today Shami Chakrabarti’s report on Islamophobia in the Labour Party. And she’s basically come out and said, there isn’t really any. You had a few individuals make over-the-top statements and so on.

54:18 And she’s also proposed some very serious changes that basically would mean I couldn’t be suspended again or somebody like me couldn’t be. Because, I mean, there’s no… You’re not told what you’ve been suspended for. You just get there and say, you’ve been suspended. There’s no due process.

54:34 No due process. No concept of you’re innocent to your proven guilty. And she’s proposing real changes that, instead of having bureaucrats take… Because Jeremy Corbyn was told by the General Secretary, I was being suspended. He came under a lot of pressure from the embittered old Blair MPs.

54:52 Can you tell us what exactly happened in your mind? Well, it’s quite interesting. In… No Labour MP in my political lifetime has ever raised an issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Because if you’re a bigot, you’re not going to join the Labour Party, you know?

55:08 I wouldn’t think so. That’s why when I heard about it, it didn’t seem to make sense. And for the last five years, we had a Jewish leader. I mean, it’s ridiculous. But then about four months ago, there was a very bitter contest for the youth post on Labour’s national executive.

55:22 And the left-wing candidate was smeared as being anti-Semitic, which wasn’t true. And then these MPs that want to get rid of Corbyn started working this out, making it a big issue. And when I was suspended, it was exactly a week before the local elections, the mayoral elections and all that. And Scottish and Welsh assemblies. So a very important election.

55:43 And I think the MPs who were demanding I be suspended knew this would dominate the news for days, push the agenda off and damage us at the election. And if we were… If we hadn’t won the London mayoralty, they would immediately demand Jeremy should resign. In the end, we did quite well. And we had to wait until the euro referendum and all to start now demanding.

56:06 None of this was still going on about anti-Semitism. Now it’s all about Jeremy Corsus to leave the European Union. Yes, and I want to talk about that. But at the same time, you knowing that this is kind of a haze that could potentially hurt new Labour, why then make a comment about Hitler? Well, I was asked the question in an interview.

56:22 I mean, I was asked by a BBC interviewer, is what Hitler did illegal? And I pointed out there were two phases. I mean, throughout the 1930s, you worked with the Zionist movement and then in 1941, you decided no, the thing is to kill all the Jews. No, it’s a simple statement of fact. But then people were told I’d actually said Hitler was a Zionist, people said I was an apologist for Hitler and so on.

56:48 And I’ve been surprised by the number of people that generally believe I said Hitler was a Zionist. I mean, you only have to go on the website of the BBC and hear me saying something rather different. Okay. So you made a statement that is a true fact, which is why you haven’t… Apologise.

57:05 Apologise, yeah. I mean, if I… No one would say I should be suspended from the Labour Party because I said we were invaded by the Normans in 1066. People wouldn’t say that’s offensive to the French. It’s ridiculous.

57:17 So, all right, so you said a statement of fact. It should be taken as that. And then everything else is politics. Everything else is dirty politics. Dirty politics.

57:26 And including in your own party, you don’t have due process. You can’t explain yourself. It just gets decided by a committee and that’s all you can do about it. Well, it’s quite interesting. I questioned for an hour by a couple of party officials and I turned up and they said, okay, we’re not interested in history.

57:44 And I thought, well, this is not a good sign. They wanted to ask about everything else I’d said about anti-Semitism and so on. But, I mean, it would be interesting because literally how can you eventually expel someone for stating the truth? You were on the radio program, LBC, and there was two gentlemen there that were just demanding this apology. It was almost the whole show.

58:04 And at one point you said this. This is, quote, I’m always going to say what I believe to be true. Otherwise, what’s the point in being in politics? And I found that a fascinating statement because I believe probably most politicians aren’t saying what they believe to be true. I mean, the lifestyle of a politician is not wonderful.

58:22 I mean, there’s just no point being there unless you’re achieving something or doing something. All my political career people said to me, why did you say that? And I said, because it’s true. But that’s not the point. I think it is the point, you know?

58:35 I mean, increasingly people are lied to by politicians. It’s now on a grand scale. And I just find that so depressing. So when I left school, I spent eight years as a cancer research technician. I worked with brilliant scientists who one of them found the cure for testicular cancer.

58:51 But everything about your work was, what is the truth? If you had conflicting experimental results, you were sent back to do it again and again and again until you found out which was right. You didn’t say, well, we like this one. Let’s go to this one and dump the other one, you know? And so even though Corbin’s a good friend of yours, you want him to be leading the Labour Party, you still won’t recant a statement.

59:12 No, I’m never going to say something I don’t believe to be true. I mean, and what struck me is that hundreds of people stopped me on the streets in the weeks since I suspended saying, we know what you said is true, don’t give in. And quite a lot of people saying, no, I’m Jewish, I know that’s true. I mean, what’s going on here? Don’t these, one woman said, you know, don’t these politicians read history?

59:33 And sadly they don’t. And so now, what is the future of you in the Labour Party? Well, I mean, all I mean, basically when I lost the last election four years ago to Boris, since then I’ve just been basically a househusband. I mean, retired, getting the kids off to school, doing the shopping, the garling, things like that. I mean, the only thing, two things I had, I was on the board of the London Zoo, which I loved.

59:56 And I was on the Labour’s National Security Committee, which is a lot more boring than being on the board of London Zoo. And I was going to stand down. But Ed Miliband said he wanted me to carry on. And then after we lost the general election, I found that so depressing last year, I was thinking, well, it’s time to stand down. But then Jeremy got elected and, you know, immediately I was back in the interviews and all that.

1:00:20 You know, I went from being, no, I’d hardly had anybody interview me for four years and suddenly all these lovely journalists outside the house. Because you’re good friends with Jeremy, you go way back. 45 years? 45 years. We’ve been involved in so many campaigns together.

1:00:37 I mean, I can think about only one issue, I think, on which we ever voted different ways and that was whether or not we should get involved in Kosovo back in 1978, 79, no, no, 98, 99. Tell me about Jeremy Corbyn. What kind of man is he? What is he really like? Well, a few years ago, me and my wife went to a St Patrick’s Day dinner and Jeremy was on our table.

1:01:04 And on the way home, Emma said, that’s the nicest man I’ve ever met in my life. And that actually is most probably, I’d say, his big weakness. If you’re leading a political party, you need to be quite brutal with your enemies at times. And he’s reached out, he gave more jobs, let them vote against his line on Syria and things like that. But they all still come back and stab you.

1:01:25 Which is happening now. Yeah, absolutely. And you made a statement that now they were stabbing him in the back and now they’re stabbing him in the front and he needs to take some action about it, right? Well, it’s quite interesting because he’s not going to give in. He’s got real strength of character.

1:01:38 I’ve never heard him tell a lie. I’ve never seen him, you know, go along with something you didn’t agree with or anything like that. And that strength of character means he will get through this. And then it’s up to those MPs. And if there is going to be another leadership election, Jeremy will be reelected.

1:01:56 I’m certain of that. They’ve got to decide then. Are you going to stay in the Labour Party or go? It was very interesting in the story in The Guardian today saying that Labour MPs that approach the speaker of the House of Commons say if we split from the Labour Party and we take a majority of Labour MPs with us, can we be the opposition sitting on the opposition front bench? Now, if that debate is going on, it does look like we might be headed to the sort of split we had 35 years ago when about 30 Labour MPs went off and formed the Social Democratic Party.

1:02:29 Have you ever seen a seven days like this in British politics? I mean, a week ago, Cameron was riding strong. Now he’s resigned. A week ago, you were looked at, you know, the nemesis of the party. Now you’re the one guy supporting Corbyn.

1:02:44 Have you ever seen anything like this? No, this is the most dramatic period in British politics in my lifetime. I mean, literally so much has happened so quickly. And it’s interesting because it’s the first time really that it’s been the public had to say about what happened. They voted to leave and that caused everything to unravel.

1:03:05 If Cameron hadn’t made that promise about a referendum, which he only did at the time to get, you know, under my new kit, he’d be sailing on, you know, there’d be none of this upheaval. He’d be able to retire gracefully in about another three years. What do you think of David Cameron? Did he have to resign last Friday? Well, I have to say, I think David Cameron is a rich field to choose from.

1:03:31 He’s the most dishonest Prime Minister of my lifetime. He just says what he thinks can help him get elected or overcome this or that. Worse than Blair. Worse than Blair. Worse than Thatcher.

1:03:42 Yeah. Oh, no, Thatcher was quite honest, you know. She said, I mean, she did what she, she was like me. She said what she believed to be true. Just it turned out to be wrong.

1:03:53 But I mean, I think Cameron’s just, he’s got no understanding. If I think back, and I get involved in politics, Tory leaders had fought side by side in the war with working class people. They understood working class people. If you read Harold Mackman and he was a Tory Prime Minister in the fifties and sixties, he starts, when unemployment goes above two and a half percent, he’s generally worried and concerned. But I think Cameron and Osborne and Boris Johnson, they have no understanding of where he, I mean, they didn’t really meet working class people until they went to Oxford and met their servants, you know.

1:04:30 Is this the British House of Cards that’s happening right now? Oh, it is, yes. I mean, but we don’t expect anyone to be pushed off the top of the building. You watched the House of Cards and you said that a lot of it’s accurate except politicians assassinating people. That doesn’t make sense, right?

1:04:45 Well, I have to say it does. I mean, stuff, we now know that American presidents authorise eight separate assassination attempts on Castro. They all failed. But also, something I’ve discovered recently, that Edward Heath agreed to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, who was the first Prime Minister of the Belgian Congo after its independence. So there is some dirty stuff goes on there occasionally.

1:05:14 It seems like… But you don’t push one of your colleagues off the roof. Right. And you were saying to me before we rolled tape that just politicians aren’t that smart to hold all these conspiracies together. If you watch the Kevin Spacey House of Cards, here’s this brilliant man plotting so many steps ahead.

1:05:32 It doesn’t work like that in politics. Things erupt like the Brexit vote that just changed everything or someone that was on your side suddenly falls out with him. You really can’t have that sort of cynical secret plan strategy. It never stands up. But it is all something out of fiction.

1:05:48 I mean, Cameron, here he is forcing the vote for really his own political interests inside his party or around his party, gets called out on that, has to resign. Now Boris, who looks like he backed the leave for his own political interests, his hand is called and now has to leave. Fascinating things happening here. Oh, it’s… It’s sad.

1:06:11 Literally, it’s like four or five years of events that have been compacted down into ten days. And I doubt if we’ll ever see anything like this again in my lifetime. Michael Gold for the Tories, you mentioned the 51st state. Is that something we should be very concerned about? Absolutely, because if we do leave the European Union, although a lot of the Brexit people are saying we’re the fifth largest economy in the world, yeah, we are.

1:06:38 But China, the European Union and America are about two-thirds of the global economy and we’re about three percent. So if we left, this trade deal being negotiated between Europe and America at the moment, TPIP, whatever it’s called, if that’s agreed, we’ll just be told by America, you sign up to this or we’re not interested. We’re not strong enough to… And the same would be true with China. Just about when I was in primary school, we were a major world player.

1:07:12 But after the fiasco of suicide in 1956, no, we’ve been in a second tier with Germany and France and others. Talk to me about Donald Trump. What would I be surprised to think that Ken Livingstone thinks about Donald Trump? Well, I don’t know about Donald Trump. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he suddenly tried to move towards the centre and start being more reasonable.

1:07:36 I have the horrible feeling he doesn’t really have a political strategy just about him being there. He’s tapped into that anger, the Americans who’ve been left behind feel. I think he could be a catastrophic disastrous president but he might turn out to be not as bad as we feared. Whereas if you read some of Hillary Clinton’s emails about the Middle East, you think, my God, she’d be prepared to go for another war. I think it’s an awful choice.

1:08:03 I wanted Bernie Sanders to win. And you mentioned earlier how the president doesn’t have as much power as people believe. So even if Trump got in, you’re not concerned. Well, this is the thing. I mean, I’ve got a lot of criticisms of Obama but he has at least got the excuse, he’s got a Congress that is in the hands of the Republicans.

1:08:23 And the Republicans have been taken over by the Tea Party. I read somewhere that 40% of Republicans in Congress don’t believe in evolution. They believe God created the Earth 6,000 years ago. Well, on my radio show with David Miller a couple of months, well, three months ago, we had the head of the Overseas Republicans on. And I kept saying to this woman, do you believe in evolution?

1:08:49 She just wouldn’t answer. And you just think, I mean, effectively, it’s almost like the Republicans in America have become the Christian version of the Taliban, you know, they’re completely off the rocker. It’s hard to believe when you’re not there to realize how deep-seated that belief is. Well, I remember, I won’t name him because it damaged his career, but a Republican mayor came to see me when I was mayor. And I was telling him, I had been an atheist since I was 12.

1:09:18 I had five children by three women I wasn’t married to. And he said, oh, my God, I have to be on my knees in church every Sunday with my family. I don’t get elected. And I just thought, thank God I’m a Londoner. I had a guy named Zoltan Istvan who was running for the transhumanist party in America.

1:09:36 And he said, I am the only presidential candidate who’s ever run for office that didn’t believe in God. And I was like, what? He’s like, every other candidate, outwardly said they believed in God. Well, they all have to say they believe. You know, you invoke God all the time, but you assume perhaps not all of them did.

1:09:53 Just finally finishing up with Trump, is this Brexit vote a good indicator for Trump being elected? Well, I don’t know. Oddly enough, I haven’t seen it since he effectively secured the nomination, and Hillary did. I haven’t seen any polls in our papers. They must be doing loads of polls.

1:10:10 And so I have no idea. I mean, I saw some refer to that. He slumped in the polls recently. And I suppose, yes, I would vote for Hillary, but, you know, holding my nose. I think right now, some polls say they’re even.

1:10:27 Some polls say he’s down 5% or 6%. I’m not sure. People have talked about a London city-state a lot like Singapore on the back of this vote. You know, I’m a Londoner, you’re a Londoner. If London became an independent city-state, we’d be in the top 25 world economies.

1:10:46 And we’d be exactly at the midpoint in terms of population. We’d have more people than half the nations and less than the other half. So we would be a viable, independent nation. But I think it’d be difficult to persuade, you know, the bankers that they really want to be run by whoever might get elected in London, given it could be someone like me again. So you think it realistically won’t happen?

1:11:13 I think you could very well have the rest of Britain’s vote to kick us out. You think so? There’s so much resentment of London. There is, right. I mean, is it becoming the walled city, you know, like New York City as a Manhattan, the moment it seems?

1:11:27 I mean, one of my kids’ best friends, his family’s had to go and live in Leicester because they can’t afford to pay the housing costs still here. And you’re starting to see lots of poorer people being pushed out to the margins, or actually out of London. And this is the problem. I mean, when I became mayor, I had seven million Londoners, an hour and eight and a half when I weighed to ten. And the house prices are going through the roof.

1:11:51 I mean, we need to make some very substantial changes. I mean, I’m not in favour of bigotry and pandering, you know, immigrants have taken all their jobs. But if you’re a city and your population’s gone up this dramatically, you need to have a plan for it. You can’t just allow it to carry on. I mean, if you get on the underground at, you know, Victoria or London Bridge in the rush hour, it’s now scary, absolutely congested and crowded.

1:12:19 What’s it going to be like if we do go to ten million people in four or five years’ time, you know? I mean, you can’t have the free movement of labour without having plans in place to deal with it. And the tragedy is, we’ve had the free movement of labour. We’ve had no plan to deal with it. Is Sadiq Khan going to change that?

1:12:40 Can he even change that? What are your thoughts on him for the next four years? Well, he really isn’t too proud, but he’s going to try and stop building homes that people can afford to rent. He will push to try and get some controls to restrain the rents. I mean, basically, I mean, someone who’s renting in the private sector, I think the average is they’re paying half their take-home pay is going in the rent.

1:13:01 And that’s pretty obscene, actually. Other thoughts about Sadiq? Were you surprised that he won? Oh, no. I mean, I campaigned for him to get the labour nomination because I think, like me, he’s a London kid who’s worked his way up.

1:13:16 He loves the city. He will do things to try and tackle the problems. But, you know, he’s going to have a difficult time. I was lucky. I became mayor just as labour was pouring money back into the economy and investment.

1:13:30 He’s going to have to deal with Osborne, you know, who’s talking about more cuts and everything else. So it’d be much more difficult. He’s got a more difficult job than I had. Ken, you’re a polarizing figure. Some people say you’re the only truly successful left-wing British politician at that time.

1:13:46 That was Margaret Atchison, a biographer. Really? A child no idea. A lifelong Tory. Others, especially lately, say you’re anti-Semitic, say you’re associated with Islamic extremists, IRA.

1:13:59 What do you say? Well, I mean, if all you’ve done is read the newspapers, all you know about me is that, you know, I’m a corrupt, anti-Semitic, violent, alcoholic, tax dodger, you know. But, fortunately, I managed to win a couple of elections. It’s interesting. I mean, the smears, as it have, got worse.

1:14:19 But I think the growth of the internet means a lot of people can go online and check things out. Whereas 30 years ago, you were just relying on what you read in the paper or saw on radio and TV. Now, and one of the things that Jeremy Corbyn’s been doing, because we know we’re never going to get the newspapers on that side, is to actually build up that direct link to people so that we can reach them directly. No, he gets up at Prime Minister’s question time and asks all these questions that people have emailed him.

1:14:47 Yeah, and that’s important, right? That’s the only way we’re going to make it. You’ve got to go round the established media. Are you and Jeremy going to be friends again? We’re still friends.

1:14:57 I mean, Jeremy didn’t suspend me from the Labour Party. The bureaucracy did. He was told they were doing it last year. They suspended one of his staff without even telling him. And the good thing about Shami Chakrabarti’s report on anti-Semitism today, she’s got whole series of recommendations.

1:15:13 They say, this sort of nonsense has got to stop. You’ve got to have the basic British principles of, you’re innocent until you’re proved guilty. You can’t just suspend people without even telling them what the charge is, you know? Talking quickly about media, Trump was in Scotland at his golf course I think last week, and he went rolling off in one of his golf buggies with Rupert Murdoch. Now, you mentioned how the mail online and a couple other newspapers really conspired against you in the early 80s.

1:15:40 What role does that media play right now? You know, we spoke a lot about, you know, the phone tapping issue that happened, and now there wasn’t really a lot resolved from that in the long run. What’s your view now on media? And then also, as that really comes into search engine, internet, that kind of piece? Well, this internet goes back in the 1980s, and I was leading the GLC.

1:16:02 We just had land lines in those days. I’d make a phone call, put the phone down, get up to make another one, and I’d hear the previous conversation being played back. So my phone’s been bugged, certainly for at least 35 years. And there was one interesting thing. During the last mail election campaign, there was never a day in that election campaign when there’s a photographer on the doorstep.

1:16:26 Not at all. You went to some thing that had been set up elsewhere. The entire election campaign, no one on the doorstep. But then the day the sun had a picture of me coming out in my garden in clothes, putting a load of rubbish in the bin. Now, there wasn’t a photographer I could see there to take that picture.

1:16:44 They were somewhere hidden in a van or whatever. And that was the only day in that election campaign where my wife and my kids were away, and I was alone at home. Now, I did feel a bit paranoid thinking, are they still bugging my phone or looking at my… Do they know that the wife was going to be away? Did they assume I’d be having some prostitute pop in to see me or something like that?

1:17:08 What on earth? I never had a situation where there’s been a cameraman hidden in a van before. They’d just come right in your face. So I still suspect my phone’s being bugged or my emails are being tapped into. But then I never do anything in private that I don’t also do in public.

1:17:30 Is Rupert Murdoch pulling some strings behind the scenes here and pulling politicians one way or the other? I mean, even more sinister, but in the 2008 or 2012 presidential election, Rupert Murdoch got the head of Fox News to fly to Afghanistan to say to the commander there, I can’t remember his name now, that Rupert Murdoch wants you to run for the Republican nomination or the Republican nomination for president. He will pay for your entire campaign. And the commander turned this down because he got some personal problems and so on that did eventually come out in the open air.

1:18:12 But you just think, is Rupert Murdoch prepared to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to have his person in the White House? And effectively, he’s done that with British elections. And Blair went off and sucked up to him and didn’t introduce any regulations to control what he was doing. Because he had to, right? Before Murdoch took over the times, it was an absolute paper of record.

1:18:41 Every politician, you had to read it, it was really good. And immediately, it just became a vehicle for what he believes and he thinks. I always say, I think Rupert Murdoch’s the most damaging immigrants ever come to this country. What does he gain by screwing around with politics? Is it just to make himself richer or is it a power issue?

1:19:01 I think he wants that power. He can’t spend any more money than he’s already got. I think he likes that real influence. He had it with Thatcher, he had it with Blair. He wasn’t going to get it with Ed Miliband.

1:19:15 He certainly won’t get it with Jeremy Corbyn. I actually think, you know, I’m not certain any foreign person or company should own British newspapers or radio or TV. I don’t think anyone should actually own them. They should all be workers cooperatives, so they didn’t have to have all these lies. That being said, is everything moving to the web now where it’s microblogging and owned and reported on by everyone?

1:19:41 But you do get an awful lot of lies on the web as well. There’s always Guido forks there and putting an unpleasant spin on everything I say. One other question, you know, I was in banking for ten years and a lot of the bankers would have contributed, supported, the Tory party, et cetera, et cetera. When I wake up Friday morning and I see what happens, I don’t even have to read the news. I just look at the stock market.

1:20:03 I’m angry, very angry, and I’m making calls into all the people I’ve spent money with. I’m looking at the market cap of my bank, and it’s down billions. I want it fixed, and I want someone to pay for it. Are these things happening behind the scenes? And we’re seeing the top playing out with this person running and this, but are there all sorts of influence here happening underneath?

1:20:25 Well, I think the world economy has really changed. If I think, I mean, people coming into business will be coming in to run a service or make something. Now, all the best and brightest go into being lawyers or accountants. I mean, they talk about investment, but it’s actually speculation, 99% of it. We’ve got less investment in our, you know, modernizing our economy than we’ve had since the Second World War.

1:20:53 The same, I think, true in America. People now, it’s how quickly can you get a quick return on some shares you buy or something like that. And you actually look, shareholders, I used to get about, in terms of their payments, used to get about 10% of the profits of a company. Now it’s about 60%. And I mean, also the corporate, I mean, when Mrs. Satie was elected, the chief executives of the 100 FTSE 100 companies in Britain earned 18 times the average salary.

1:21:33 Today they earn 183 times. Are we better off? Are they happier? I mean, I’ve met some of the richest people on earth. They’re never happy because there’s always some other person who’s got more money than they have, you know.

1:21:45 What makes, I mean, I’ve not got any great money or assets I only know and that’s about it. What makes me happy is the time I spend with my family and my friends, doing gardening, being involved in various campaigns. I’ve never felt money, I mean, if we’d won the lottery or something, I’d enjoy it, we’d spend it and all that. But I mean, I just think it’s a dead end in your life. Do you enjoy being back in the public eye, being in these interviews?

1:22:10 Some people say that the Hitler comment was a way for you to get back in the eye. No, it wasn’t. It was a disaster because that was my, that day was my wife’s 50th birthday. We were supposed to have a nice, relaxed time. And my wife had to come, I was all these screaming journalists outside.

1:22:24 She was really angry with me for that. And also, I gave, in what I said, although they didn’t repeat what I said, they lied. Those Labour MPs then turned it into a big issue, which, you know, enabled them to help undermine Germany again. If I could go back, I’d mostly say when I was asked that question about, is what Hitler did legally, I’d say, are we on the History Channel here or something? Just avoid answering it.

1:22:50 So you’re not taking it back because you wish you hadn’t said it. Oh, God, yeah. Can you imagine the amount my time has been wasted by all this nonsense? Fair enough. And also, the other thing that I’m worrying, there’s a lot of Jewish people out there who are genuinely worried if they think I’m an Nazi apologist, you know.

1:23:05 And I do think the Jewish community around the world feels pretty beleaguered because, you know, the idea of when the State of Israel was created, it was created a safe haven for the Jews of the world. And how long is it going to be before a terrorist group gets a weapon of mass destruction? I mean, Israel isn’t safe. It’s incredibly vulnerable, and I think people feel nervous. John Mann kind of got up in your face with that interview style, and I was watching it just to prepare for this, and I was amazed how calm you were with a man yelling at you, circling you, that kind of thing.

1:23:38 I’ve had 35 years of this, but also, I was worried, if I was rude back to him, he might punch me in the face, and that would have been the end of his political career, and I don’t hate him. So you’re being kind to him. Oh, yeah. Well, we have our political disagreements, but we’ve always gone well, personally. I mean, he’s always been attracted to older men.

1:23:58 Let me ask you just to finish up with the bankers. So you do believe they just finish up with the bankers? Yeah. All welcome. Just like we talked about Murdoch, the bankers do have political influence in a big way, and on the back of this vote, they will be exercising that influence now.

1:24:13 Well, what’s really interesting, if you actually look at the Blair-Brown years, very often, Brown would come up with some idea like changing the pension structure. Half a dozen big corporations would come in to see Blair-Browns. If you do this, we’re leaving, and they back off immediately. And the simple fact is, actually, they overstate all that. I mean, they make a lot of money out of Britain.

1:24:33 They’re not going to leave. So, yeah, that’s my final question. Will the banks leave? Do you care if they leave? Do you want them to stay?

1:24:39 If we do completely leave Europe, and we don’t stay part of the single market, then I do think a lot will relocate to Paris or to Brussels. But you can’t predict this. I mean, we didn’t know how bad it would be if we left. Would the collapse of the markets tip us back into another recession? No, broadly, they’ve recovered.

1:25:01 And people have got over the shock. I think we’re all waiting to see what actually comes out of this, but they shouldn’t hold their breath because it would be several years. I was just looking at some of the questions coming in live, but someone just asked why you believe the media is so biased towards the Remain camp. Was it really biased? Oh, God, yeah.

1:25:19 I mean, if you actually look, Jeremy Corbyn was campaigning all over Britain throughout the referendum. The Labour Party spent £2 million on our referendum staying campaign. And only 4% of the television coverage was Labour people, like Jeremy speaking. The whole thing became Cameron versus Johnson nigh each other’s testicles. It was a civil war in the Tory party.

1:25:43 And during a general election, there are rules about balance and coverage. But this time, it was just about the exit team and the stay-in team. But all the coverage was on the Tory party. Even when Jeremy Corbyn made one of his most significant speeches about this, most newspapers just reported that when the BBC journalist Laura Koonsberg asked the question, people hissed and booed. That is a bit trivial.

1:26:14 Another question live says, because of Corbyn’s EU sceptic views, will he be the best negotiator for working people? Absolutely. I mean, Jeremy, he’s like me, came into politics to do things for ordinary people. I mean, he’s consistently made the case for a fairer tax system, for investment to create new jobs to build homes. I mean, he won that Labour nomination because he was opposed to continuing austerity.

1:26:41 And he was the only one of the candidates that was standing up for that. And people, I mean, since the banking crisis, things have been pretty grim for people. And they don’t seem to be picking up. I mean, almost all the new jobs created are pretty insecure and no wage. And so Jeremy will be…

1:26:59 And that’s why it’s always the attempt to have any trivial… Is Jeremy going to wear a white poppy? Is he going to bow to the Queen? No, we want to talk about Jeremy’s economic strategy. That’s what people need to know about.

1:27:10 And the media will do everything to avoid that. Next five years, what does the Tory party look like? What does Labour look like? I think there is the possibility, only a possibility that both the Tory party and the Labour party could split. And if whoever becomes Prime Minister doesn’t deliver a real exit deal, and it’s a bit of a sham where we really stay in, but not properly, you could get the exoteers say, right, we’re going to often have a deal with Farage and get you out.

1:27:42 And equally, unless… If Jeremy is reelected as Labour leader, and I think he will be, some of those embittered old Blair MPs might go off and try and create another centrist party. Perhaps even think of linking up with the Lib Dems again. What about Ken? What is he doing in the next five years?

1:27:59 Well, I mean, staying alive would just be good, you know. You seem a good health. Not bad. Arthritis is in the knees. But I take the bad news.

1:28:10 I have the lung capacity of a man five years older because I’ve spent all my working life in central London breathing bad air. So, I mean, I could end up dying of some lung complication. Sorry about that. Cheerful way to end the interview. I always ask all my guests here just a few things that they’ve noted to give them success over their careers.

1:28:32 Is there something you figured out 20, 30, 40 years ago that really changed your own personal game? It could be that you exercised in the morning or you just thought differently about the world. Is this something that flipped the switch for you? These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy. Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more.

1:29:03 Now back to the rest of the show. That’s why I taught at school. Give in to a buddy, they just come back for more. And so I’m often more offensive than many other politicians. I do occasionally blow my stack.

1:29:22 But then you look at the press as I am being undone. 99% of the time I remain calm, but occasionally it just gets under your skin. Do you regret never leading the Labour Party? Oh, God, yeah. I just loved it.

1:29:34 I mean, I think I said earlier, I would love to be now to do for the whole of Britain, what I’d be now to do for London. Because if the rest of Britain had got the investment that London’s got, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Just finishing on that advice question. Best advice you ever received? Maybe it was from a senior member of the party, or maybe from the mayor of Moscow when you visited.

1:29:56 Well, when I got elected to the GLCI, I was the second youngest member. I was only 27. And I hadn’t been to university, I think. But what I did is I gave up. I was about to become a teacher. I decided not to teach.

1:30:12 And I’d just go into that building, and I’d sit down with all the people who’d been there for years. I mean, mainly they were pensioners retired, and I’d just talk to them over lunch, over tea, coffee, breakfast, everything. What did you learn? What did you do? And so I got so much information from so many different people.

1:30:33 But to do that, you couldn’t be going to work every day. Because the GLC was mainly filled with people who retired. Because when I joined, there wasn’t a salary. You just had a small expenses allowance. You couldn’t give up.

1:30:51 But my wife, she supported me while I did all that. And was there anything specific you remember, or just listening? Just basically, I don’t remember any one particular thing. But it’s about getting on top of the detail. You have to know enough to be able to face down a bureaucrat that’s lying to you, and trying to con you to go down the wrong route.

1:31:12 So you need to be on it. And the final part, to that 20-year-old that’s listening to us right now, maybe they were for the Remain campaign, maybe not. Oh, no, no. In my youth, I thought the common market, as it was then called, was going to become a United States of Europe. It’s going to be wonderful.

1:31:32 Not an awful bureaucracy. And so the advice to the 20-year-old listening around the world that doesn’t know what’s next for the future of Britain, doesn’t know if they should get into politics, who maybe one day wants to grow up and be like Ken Linston or Jeremy Corbyn, what advice do you give to them in these times of uncertainty? I’d say go into politics, if you can, and try and change things. But do it to change things. Don’t go in just because you want to be a celebrity.

1:31:55 Good answer. Ken, it’s been very enjoyable speaking with you. It’s funny, the media does bias you in a crazy way. And it’s funny how this is a type of format where people get to know you. And it’s funny how even in the 80s, you were drawn to the live television, live radio format because you knew they couldn’t spin who you are.

1:32:16 People make up, they see you, they make up their mind. But this is the longest interview I’ve done in my life. In your life? Well, it’s an honor. And I think people are going to watch it for a long time.

1:32:26 And again, it’s a great way for them to get to know who you are. And I think it’s easy sometimes to forget your history, what you went through, everything you do. I wrote my autobiography and it’s unfreely, it’s 600 pages. I put in everything there that I discovered that shocked me. And all the funny, silly little things that people did and said.

1:32:46 And loads of people read that. Well, the publisher said, we’re going to call it, you can’t say that. And their libel lawyers sent me a 26-page letter saying, can you prove all of this? And they only made me take out one thing. And that, and I won’t name them, that two of the people who funded Boris Johnson’s mayoral campaigns may have been responsible for five murders.

1:33:10 So you took that out? I had to. And the rest you put in? I think it was their business partner that authorized the murders, not them. They most probably were in the dark about it.

1:33:19 But Boris should have looked into it. So you’ve lived a colorful life with people all over there? I mean, I come close to being murdered once or twice, and I was lucky I got away with it. The Ulster units took a decision to bump me off at one point. But oddly enough, there was an MI5 agent on their army council who talked them out of it, saying, look, it’ll be counterproductive.

1:33:43 You’ll cause so much anger. I can’t remember the name of the guy now. He’s in prison. But he followed me for a bit, and he was going to shoot me in the back of the head as I went down Westminster tube. Coming out there, that’s common.

1:33:55 How do you live like that? Well, I didn’t know about it until 10 years afterwards. Right. But I mean, there are some dicey times happening there. The only time I knew I was at risk was one of my partying activists had had some sort of mental breakdown, and the police warned me that he was telling people he was going to kill him and he’d bought a gun.

1:34:13 And they took about two days to find him. That was a nervous couple of days. Ken, we say here it’s about the journey. I wish you well in your gardening. I’ve got a funny feeling, though, that you’re going to be back in the news.

1:34:25 And maybe back, you know, in the party in some way. I hope so. Well, I hope you do, too. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for your honesty, and I wish you all the best in the future.

1:34:35 Cheers.