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Nightmare!: The Race to Become London's Mayor
From the commitment in the Labour manifesto for the 1997 general election to Ken Livingstone's victory speech on 5 May 2000, the process of choosing the first directly elected mayor of London provided the most compelling political soap opera of the age. Nightmare! tells the whole convoluted story in all its gory detail.
279 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2000
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July 16, 2023
I read this 23 years after it was written and the events it details, but this book is as readable, relevant and entertaining now as it was in 2000. It is full of characters, plotting and laugh out loud moments of farce and absurdity. An engaging history lesson for those who don’t remember it and a head-shaking, chuckle-along trip down memory lane for those who do.
At the start of the race there is a parallel between Jeffery Archer and Ken Livingstone, poles apart politically but they had a few things in common. They were both big characters and both considered to be high risk/damaging to the reputation of their parties. Jeffrey is out of the race early on which left Ken as the main point of attention for the hacks, and boy was he media savvy, a phenomenally useful characteristic for this competition but with a flip side as his runaway mouth could deliver a killer quip, highly quotable copy or a wince-inducing foot-in-mouth gaffe.
And Steven Norris is good fun too, sensible enough to realise that he had to put as much distance between him and the Tory Party and their spinners if he had any chance at all.
The book has cartoon villains in the shape of the stop-Ken fixers at Millbank. Their sabotaging of Livingstone’s Labour candidacy tainted their ‘poodle’, poor Frank Dobson, leaving Ken with stick-it-to-the-man appeal. It is the back-firing of the Labour Party plotting which is the most page-turning element of the book and topical too; Labour’s current purging of any prospective candidate on the left shows that control freakery is alive and well in Labour HQ.
There is food for thought too about the nature of democracy and devolution.
Recommended.
At the start of the race there is a parallel between Jeffery Archer and Ken Livingstone, poles apart politically but they had a few things in common. They were both big characters and both considered to be high risk/damaging to the reputation of their parties. Jeffrey is out of the race early on which left Ken as the main point of attention for the hacks, and boy was he media savvy, a phenomenally useful characteristic for this competition but with a flip side as his runaway mouth could deliver a killer quip, highly quotable copy or a wince-inducing foot-in-mouth gaffe.
And Steven Norris is good fun too, sensible enough to realise that he had to put as much distance between him and the Tory Party and their spinners if he had any chance at all.
The book has cartoon villains in the shape of the stop-Ken fixers at Millbank. Their sabotaging of Livingstone’s Labour candidacy tainted their ‘poodle’, poor Frank Dobson, leaving Ken with stick-it-to-the-man appeal. It is the back-firing of the Labour Party plotting which is the most page-turning element of the book and topical too; Labour’s current purging of any prospective candidate on the left shows that control freakery is alive and well in Labour HQ.
There is food for thought too about the nature of democracy and devolution.
Recommended.
Displaying 1 of 1 review