Has Nick Cohen Got A Bit Carried Away?

Last week the Observer and Evening Standard columnist used his space in the latter to explain how Brian Paddick can win. The trick is to bring about "a mass defection of voters from Ken to the Lib-Dems in the first round." Were this to occur, he writes, Paddick would reach the second round of voting, eliminating Livingstone, and then secure the mayoralty on second preferences.

Could it happen? According to Cohen it could if, a) he is right that last week's poll shows that...

"As it stands, Livingstone can't be re-elected because Johnson is almost home."

...if, b) there are enough people caught in "a Left-wing dilemma" of hating Ken but hating Boris too to make that "mass defection," and if, c) Johnson makes "a spectacular blunder," before polling day. But that's three pretty big "ifs". And you have to wonder why he's bothering with advancing this case given that even those Standard readers entitled to vote in London seem unlikely to be troubled by that "Left-wing dilemma" in the first place. The answer, I suppose, is that his contempt for Livingstone is so intense that to him - and his employer - it seems worth it.

But has he got a bit carried away? Towards the end of the column he writes:

"It's a sign of how malicious and incompetent the Mayor's campaign has been that he has smeared his rival as a 'racist,' which Johnson isn't, instead of a buffoon, which is how he often seems to many."

Has Livingstone called Johnson "a 'racist'"? I don't remember him doing that. I do remember him saying during the ITV London debate in January that he thought Boris a nice chap who'd have round for a drink if he lived next door. True, his campaign has drawn attention to the "watermelon smiles" and "piccaninnies" stuff, but wasn't it Compass that made the biggest noise about it? Let's dwell, though, on those words "malicious and incompetent" while looking back at a column Cohen wrote for the Standard last month about Lee Jasper and his connection with Operation Black Vote:

"Unfortunately, Lee Jasper is its chair and the destruction of high purposes and public trust follows with a wearisome inevitability. The campaign has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle for Ken Livingstone. If you doubt me, listen to Jasper in a recent interview with the Voice.

'I am going to be working hard with Operation Black Vote and a host of other organisations to register as many of our people to vote,' he told the black paper. Fair enough - the organisation exists to increase turnout. But, he continued, black voters should vote for only one man. 'I think people see that the other candidates don't have substantive policy positions on any of the major issues. Ken, standing on his record and his manifesto, will be declared the candidate of choice.'

Readers of the Voice - or of the attacks on critics of Jasper on the Operation Black Vote website - can't doubt that this supposedly nonpartisan campaign is endorsing Livingstone, and that everything about its turn into party politics is wrong."

Does Cohen's evidence support his case? Looking at OBV's website it's not obvious that it's a vehicle for re-electing Livingstone. Well, maybe I've missed something or stuff has been taken down. But let's look at Cohen's account of Jasper's interview with the Voice and compare that with the interview itself. Both Jasper quotes are reproduced accurately by Cohen. However, their relationship to each other in the Voice interview is very different from the one Cohen reports. The second did not continue from the first as he says it did. In fact, in the Voice interview the two Jasper quotes appear in the reverse order, in entirely different places and are wholly unrelated to each other.

The second quote Cohen cites - the one about "Ken" being "declared the candidate of choice" - was part of the answer to the eighth question Jasper was asked in the Voice interview and was a prediction of the election result. It was not made in answer to a question about OBV or even about black voters in general. Indeed, OBV hadn't been mentioned in the interview at that point. And the first quote Cohen drew our attention to? That was part of Jasper's answer to a question about how he would be spending his time while suspended from his job - as he was at the time - and appeared right at the end of the fourteenth and final question put to him by the Voice's interviewer. The full answer to that question contains no reference to any political party or politician.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, Cohen has completely misrepresented what Jasper told the Voice in order to sustain his accusation that Operation Black Vote has been "hijacked and turned into a vehicle for Ken Livingstone." Malicious? Incompetent? Or am I being terribly unfair?