Ken Livingstone & Tony Benn

Together on Islington Green during an anti-war walkabout this lunchtime.

Also present: Emily Thornberry MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP and Jennette Arnold AM.

This was a nostalgic event for me. Islington was the first borough I got to know after moving to London in 1979. Though I first lived in a tiny bedsit in Portobello Road, my friends in the smoke lived off Blackstock Road. I later lived in short-life housing in the borough and in the early 1980s worked at City Limits magazine whose office was on Upper Street a few hundred yards from where this gathering took place. I remember Livingstone, then leader of the GLC, dropping in one day. Upper Street was core Ken territory back then: scruffy and bohemian, dotted with left-wing and feminist bookshops, heaving with punks and peaceniks, vegetarians and gays. Those were the days.

As you'll gather from THIS SHORT INTERVIEW with him, I'd assumed he was there to scare up his old core vote although he didn't see it quite that way:

"London never stops changing, that's what's amazing. When I was a kid you worried about coming over to Islington because it was a bit rough...now you worry about coming over because you can't afford a cup of coffee in a restaurant."

Even so, he pressed the old "Islington trendy" buttons without apology. In the first bit of the interview file you'll me and my daughter Dolores eavesdropped on him talking to (I think) BBC London, claiming 7/7 was a "direct result" of the war in Iraq and saying, "I don't want Britain caught up in any more American adventures," and that "a world in which we just stagger from war to war isn't one in which London will prosper." No wonder Gordon's keeping his distance these days.

As for Tony Benn, he greatly endeared himself to me. First, he chatted to Dolores without a trace of condescension, telling her all about meeting Ghandi when he was six years old and how her generation will be the one to change the world. Then, as Livingstone gladhanded his way through Camden Passage antique market, he told the day's best joke. One shop window showcased a ship in a bottle. As we peered it at, Benn said, "I once met a man who made those. He said the hardest part of the job was getting out of the bottle again after he'd finished."

P.S. The Tory Troll was there too.