Tut, Tut, Evening Standard

Here's a nice photo of the mayor I took this morning. I've posted it in the interests of balance. Heading home, I bought a copy of the Evening Standard and saw that even by its impressive, ah, standards it had been astonishingly nasty to Livingstone. It wasn't what was written about this morning's launch in Vauxhall of the anti-BNP poster but the way it was packaged and presented. The main photo shows Johnson and Livingstone standing together. Johnson looks fine, but Livingstone is captured at a moment when he's making a very unflattering face. Why choose that one for publication? No doubt photographer Jeremy Selwyn took loads of others in which both men looked as dignified as they behaved (after all, I managed it.) Surely, just for once, on an occasion such as this, the paper could have brought itself to treat the Labour candidate it so dislikes with a degree of fairness and civility.

Apparently not. On the very same page of the newspaper is a smaller picture showing Livingstone in Peckham with Harriet Harman. This is used as an opportunity to remind readers of the Mail's and Standard's nasty little stitch up of Harman over her recent wearing of a stab vest - it all helps Boris press those crime buttons, see. Finally, there's a sneering review by Anne McElvoy of Livingstone's party election broadcast shown last night. That's how the only paid-for London-wide newspaper chose to document a day on which the political rivalries of the mayoral contenders were set aside in the name of the greater cause of preventing fascist involvement in the governance of the capital. You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that "London's Quality Newspaper" could have managed to do the same?