Livingstone: Brown should call snap election
Ken Livingstone has come out in favour of Gordon Brown as the next prime minister – and urged him to call a general election as soon as Tony Blair steps down.
The controversial mayor of London has never been a friend of the chancellor, with the pair clashing in particular over plans for a public-private partnership deal for regenerating the London underground.
But as he has repaired relations with Mr Blair, Mr Livingstone appears to be building bridges with the man he said was by “overwhelming consensus” set to lead the Labour party into the next election.
In an interview with GMTV’s Sunday< /i> due to be broadcast this weekend, the outspoken former Labour MP says Mr Brown should call a snap election to ensure he had an electoral mandate as soon as possible.
“My advice to Gordon would be – go for the immediate general election, renew our mandate, because the media is so negative and so destructive that there would be about a 48-hour honeymoon,” he said.
“Then it would be an unrelenting: ‘Tony wouldn’t have done this, Tony would have done this differently, you haven’t got a mandate for that.’
“So I think people will take the view, unless it’s right up against the end of the term, though I don’t think it will be, they want to endorse that change.”
The prime minister has been enjoying a brief lull in speculation about his departure, although there has been continuing debate about the future of his deputy, John Prescott.
Education secretary Alan Johnson and leader of the Commons Jack Straw have said they would be interested in the job, but only when Mr Prescott stepped down, while constitutional affairs minister Harriet Harman has also hinted she would run in a contest.
Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain is another name being suggested for the job, and yesterday, a member of the Labour party’s left wing proposed a wild card candidate in the form of former environment minister Michael Meacher.
Alan Simpson, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group and MP for Nottingham South, said he was looking for “a vertebrate rather than an invertebrate candidate”, someone who could name one key issue on which they would make a stand on.
“I don’t mind where the candidates begin from, as long as it brings an end to the supine and infinitely malleable qualities that ministerial promotion have come to represent,” he wrote in an article for Labour Left Briefing.
He added: “The choice for the left is whether, inside a leadership election contest or not, we can define a different agenda of the issues that have to be debated and whether, in an imperfect succession race, there is a credible candidate we can get behind?”
However, Mr Livingstone called for the job of deputy Labour leader to be scrapped, saying it was “virtually worthless”.
