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“... the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an astute chronicler of his subjects’ fortunes over the decades, and a fair-minded referee of their battles with Labour’s centrists. His story begins with ...”

“... almost alone. Norton and Aughey’s Conservatives and Conservatism is well beyond Honderich’s ken. Even Lord Coleraine’s right-wing For Conservatives Only is for him virgin territory. With Hailsham and the moderate Conservative tradition thus largely eliminated, Honderich confines his attention to British and American luminaries of the New Right. This ...”

“... Bow Creek, the point of access to the Lower Lea, he was ridiculed by the man who succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick’. A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. By 2008, in a frank admission during the run-up to the mayoral election, Livingstone boasted that he had feigned enthusiasm for the 2012 Olympics as a ...”

“... worth, in cash terms. Lord Emsworth didn’t worry what his pig was worth. Gussie Fink-Nottle and Ken Livingstone love their newts for themselves, not for their market value. P.G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration, 1881-1981 is also lumbered with a bibliography, which takes up half the pages. Still, there are some handsome pictures on first-class ...”

“... education. So far as Mandelson and Liddle are concerned, the Left (represented by Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone) was disposed of in the Eighties and the time has now come to settle accounts with the political heirs of Crosland and Gaitskell. Since Hattersley is prominent among their number, his rage at Mandelson, who supported his leadership campaign ...”

“... low stakes, endlessly and tirelessly working the percentages to build up his political reserves. Ken Livingstone, by contrast, is a politician who seems genuinely happy to take big risks, and to gamble everything on uncertain ventures that offer the prospect of spectacular rewards. Blair has frequently been frustrated by what he sees as Brown’s ...”

“... know that the magazine was collapsing. It had only been kept afloat, really, by a grant from Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell’s GLC, which had been abolished three years before we’d even got to the magazine, and by paying everybody the same, but badly – enough to get by, maybe, if you had a council flat or another income, impossible if ...”

“... Only this can explain the appeal of the shambolic Rhodri Morgan, the provenly disastrous Ken Livingstone and such characters as Ann Widdecombe and Mo Mowlam. By any ordinary standards both these women should have been political disasters: the touchy-feely Mowlam, stealing other people’s drinks, talking obsessively about sex, insisting on ...”

“... Welsh or Scottish devolution would be, or that he anticipated his humiliation at the hands of Ken Livingstone over the mayoralty of London. His reform of the House of Lords is stalled, after long vacillation, in a worst of all worlds: a minority of persons of genuine distinction in a sea of chosen cronies, placemen (and women), a rump of self-elected ...”

“... local councils, in this case Wandsworth and Lambeth. Mayoral action and inaction play a role too. Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson were both pro-skyscraper; Johnson came up with a great phrase about not wanting to create ‘Dubai-on-Thames’, and then did everything in his power to do exactly that. In 2007, the mayor acquired the power to override ...”

“... of the Labour Party is that we seem to stand for nothing positive and clear whatsoever,’ Ken Livingstone said in a speech Chris Patten repeated with approval when he was the Conservative Party Chairman. Brian Sedgemore, a left-wing Labour MP, has said that the hatred of Mandelson ‘is consistent throughout every geographical area and cuts ...”

“... defence. Evil men are crawling forward, determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken Livingstone, even the pathetic Peter Tatchell, are harassed and hounded with a venom and persistence which have no justification and no precedent. Well, perhaps one precedent. When the right-wing press launched the New Bullying some ten years ago by ...”

“... no longer cope with looking after him.) He was not addicted to gesture politics in the way that Ken Livingstone was in London, but he was still a standard-bearer of the municipal loony left. In those days the power in the Labour Party was with the Bennites, who had largely taken it over at the constituency level; so Blunkett was, faute de mieux, a ...”

“... they strengthened Labour’s hold on intellectuals between the wars. Morgan’s suggestion that Ken Livingstone could ‘provide an updated, modern version of Morrison’s civic idea’ is surely a joke. Morgan clarifies both the need here, and the remedy. Time and again he exposes the weakness of the Party’s leaders ...”

“... shadow-scurf of committee rooms and late night arguments that left crumbs in the grizzled thatch. Ken Livingstone razor-swiped his upper lip and found a loose-fitting beige suit to announce visually (for those who know that public language no longer registers) his readiness to appease, to become a mayor substitute, the political equivalent of ...”