Pint of bitter for Ken

In today's London Paper, London's old mayor Ken (The Red) Livingstone uses his monthly column to throw some mud at Boris Johnson. Nothing new there. After all Bozza stole Ken's job. To be more precise, it was Ken that lost it to Bozza, considering that London is traditionally Labour (well done, Ken, that's no mean feat) but anyway I won't digress.
As I was saying, Ken is perfectly entitled to throw some mud at his political opponent. Alas today, using the G20 chaos as an excuse, he does it rather gratuitously.
I quote: "The G20 summit should never have been held in London. On top of the £10 policing bill, the scale of disruption and inconvenience to millions of Londoners(....) meant the G20 cost the capital well over £100m. As Mayor I always urged the Government to avoid bringing the G8 or the WTO to London because, as you draw police in from the suburbs to cope with the demonstrations, you get a sharp spike in the crime rate in outer London".
Ken, let me tell you a few things:
1) where was the Government mean to hold this summit? Birmingham?? Manchester??? Glasgow???? Don't make me laugh. For a start, anti-globalisation demonstrators would turn up anyway and anywhere and you just can't unload your problem onto some other city. What makes you think that the mayor of Manchester can't lobby the Government better than you??
2) if you refuse to hold a summit of such importance because of a few soap-dodging treehuggers, then I don't think that you were ever eligible to be Mayor of London in the first place. If these troublemakers threaten to smash the City to pieces, what do you do? Give in to them?!? Are you for real?
3) as a capital city, London has to have the privilege as well as the duty to host these summits.
Last but not least, as Brown is desperately trying to save his political future by arranging a top-notch summit in London, do you seriously think that he would listen to a political opponent (Bozza) saying "Look, Gordon, we may have a problem with this Leftie demonstrators. Would you mind buggering off to Birmingham / Manchester / Glasgow instead??".
Planet Earth to Ken.... Planet Earth to Ken....