Ken Livingstone: mine won’t be a grassroots funded campaign

It was Ken Livingstone’s poor taste joke about Boris Johnson, Hitler and people who don’t vote for him being sent to burn and flayed for all eternity that got the most attention following his interview in Total Politics.*

Taking a look at the printed version of the interview (and forcing my eyes to move past the awful shirt and dreadful trousers) there was one other comment from Ken Livingstone that stood out: “80 per cent of my funding will come from the trade unions”.

Livingstone made the comment in the context of having a go at the sources of Conservative Party funding but it is a striking comment nonetheless, especially given how his campaign has been talking up his plans for a grassroots-driven effort.

I suspect that will not be the last time we hear those words, though in the future they will be directed at him rather than uttered by him.

* Aside from the poor taste, what also struck me about the joke is that just as both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have both done on previous occasions, it involved reaching for the Nazis as a frame of reference. It is as if between them they are so bereft of knowledge of the past that all they can do is reach for references you can glean from a watching a couple of episodes of ‘Allo ‘Allo. Have their educations and their lives really been so wasted, and is their ability to weave political stories from words so withered, that all they can do is fall back on the Nazis? Come on the pair of you, I bet you can manage at least one different historical reference next time.