Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Listen: Ken carries on digging after Labour’s anti-Semitism row

Ken Livingstone’s doggedness has kept him in politics for 40 years. Yet the same tenacity was also on display this morning in this refusal to say sorry and finally help his party out by burying this row. Instead of using his interview with Michael Crick on LBC today to bring an end to this week’s anti-Semitism row, his time on the airwaves served instead to reinforce the deep issue at the heart of the Labour party. The former London mayor parroted the same lines which ran him into trouble earlier this week. He spoke about quoting history; he also told of wanting to return to his garden and his beloved newts. But where he could have just said sorry and apologised for bringing up Hitler, he found a new source of blame for this week’s row. It wasn’t him, Ken insisted, who was at fault, but the likes of Wes Streeting and the ’embittered old Blairites’ causing mischief.

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