When Livingstone and his Trotskyist cronies were given a multi-million pound payoff from city hall I wondered how much they would be giving away to good causes. As it happens it’s Livingstone and his aide John Ross who have been reviving charity – from the Chinese government.
As Andrew Gilligan reports in today’s Evening Standard these champions of the working person stayed at a £1,100 a night hotel in Beijing and were given VIP seats for the opening ceremony. No wonder he told the Today programme that the Chinese regime was not a police state and was going in the right direction on human rights. Tell that to HIV Aids campiagner Hu Jia.
Apparently, the Chinese invited Livingstone because they saw him as someone “who might have some influence in the future”. Senior Labour figures closely involved with the ill-fated Livingstone campaign are now tearing out their hair out at the former mayor’s increasingly unpredictable behaviour since he lost the election. The sooner the Labour Party finds a decent candidate for 2012 the better.