Who is Ken Livingstone’s hero?
There is a Radio Four programme, Great Lives, in which prominent people nominate their “hero” and then discuss the hero with an “expert” — usually the hero’s biographer — with the one-time Tory MP Matthew Parris chairing the discussion. Last week Ken Livingstone — former Mayor and future Lord Red Ken — nominated his hero. Guess who? Livingstone once contributed an introduction to a hagiography of Gerry Healy, the “Trotskyist” who sold himself and the organisation he controlled, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, to Arab governments. Here was a chance to bring the good sides and the good memories of the late, not much lamented, and still much-execrated Healy to a wide audience. But no. Livingstone’s “hero” is not, after all, the unprincipled little scumbag Healy. His hero is… Robert Kennedy! Kennedy was the younger brother and hatchet-man for US president John F Kennedy, who was assassinated in November 1963. With the Kennedys it was always a triumph of style over substance. Kennedy wa
