Between Ken Livingstone and a clown, it's no contest (The Times)

I have a piece in today's Times on the London mayoral election. This is the gist of it: 

Four years ago I committed the only political act of which I am thoroughly ashamed. I shudder with self-loathing when I look back at how blinkered and wrongheaded I was. I voted for Ken Livingstone to remain Mayor of London.

...So when I read David Aaronovitch in The Times last week, the full horror of my actions came flooding back. “Ken,” he wrote, “wrong on all the things that don’t matter in a London mayor, has been right on almost all the things that do.” The mayor, he concluded, should be re-elected on May 1.

...Four years ago I decided that there was one overriding issue in the election: the congestion charge. Steve Norris opposed it. Ken Livingstone had introduced it. QED, as a supporter of the charge and of the mayor’s emphasis on renewing public transport, I should vote for Ken.

How could I have been so blinkered? It’s obvious to me now, after four more years of Ken Livingstone, that such a calculation is positively idiotic. The things that you say don’t matter in a London mayor – such as the invitations to the Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who supports suicide bombing and the stoning of homosexuals; the hero-worshipping of tyrants such as Fidel Castro; the shady deals with Hugo Chávez; the smear campaigns against opponents such as Trevor Phillips; and the City Hall fiefdom of incompetents and leeches on the taxpayer – do matter. A lot. They go to the heart of what it means to be mayor of a cosmopolitan, vibrant city.

...A vote for Ken is not simply a vote for better transport. It is, and can only be, an endorsement of Ken Livingstone in all his guises.

In choosing a buffoon such as Boris Johnson as its candidate, the Conservative Party has revealed its own contempt for the electorate. But like it or not, the next mayor will be one of these two. And the idea of re-electing a man who defends clerics who want to stone homosexuals surely means that there is only one option.