Quango - Is Ken Livingstone a Dead Whale?

Every Ahab needs his Great White Whale, and so it is with journalist Andrew Gilligan. If he didn't have Ken Livingstone, it'd be necessary to invent a Ken-like humanoid into whose personal accounts Gilligan could dig, whose digital bins he could rummage through, about whom he could write his poison pen articles. Above all, someone through whom he could stoke his singular capacity for obsession.

The Sunday Telegraph's London Editor has always gone way beyond simple journalistic dilligence in his reports on the ex-Mayor. He's probably written more about Livingstone than anyone now living. A quick Google pulls up 15 pieces just in the past month. None of them has been headed: “Ken Just A Decent Bloke Doing Really Swell Job”. Some were about Ken having links to supposed Islamo-fascists. Others catalogued how Ken has been offending gays. One was about how Ken's team had put out a leaflet in Sutton that had only four points on its 'five-point plan'. Nothing is too petty when politics is this personal.

That same, intense drive has lead Gilligan to go too far on some occassions: in 2008, he was caught "sock-puppeting" quotes from his own articles on Ken-supporting blogs, posing as a commenter named "kennite" to praise and defend his own, already-published opinions. No one would be too surprised if the police knocked down Gilligan's door one day and found a Ken Room, with hundreds of photos of the former Mayor meeting minor dignitaries scrawled over with obscenities in green felt-tip, papier-mache masks of the newt-fancier's pinched grin dangling from arrayed nooses.

Gilligan thought he'd finally ended Ken's career in 2008. He was working for the London Evening Standard at the time, and wrote a series of articles about how Ken had been making dodgy payments to anti-racist organisations that his aide, Lee Jasper, had ties to. Ken was still ahead in the mayoral polls at that point, and might have nosed home had the revelations all come out in one go. But Gilligan was already playing for tactics, keeping his powder dry. He deliberately sliced the story into parts, and drip-fed them into the public one at a time, perfectly spaced to leverage maximum impact on Ken's election hopes.

For his part, Ken has repeatedly called for Gilligan to be sacked, and takes every opportunity to remind the former Today reporter of his role in the death of Dr David Kelly. Gilligan was the journalist who accused Alastair Campbell of "sexing-up" his dossier about Iraq's military potency, so as to provide a better excuse for going in there and taking out Saddam Hussein. But Gilligan subsequently found himself accused of sexing-up his own journalism; losing his job in the Hutton Report whitewash. Incredibly, Livingstone was interviewed by Gilligan on his Press TV show in 2010: a screamingly awkward encounter that was like Frost-Nixon if both Frost and Nixon had been for major dental surgery earlier in the day.

Ken lost in '08. And by rights that should've been the end of his career, but like all good horror yarns, the creature came back from the dead. And sure enough, in time Gilligan found another silver bullet. This time, it's revelations that Ken has put all of his salary through a limited company – entitling him to pay 21 percent corporation tax, rather than the 40 percent income tax he would pay if he were, y'know, a real person and not a company. Which he is not. He's a company.

Legal it may be, but it's a breathtaking act of hypocrisy for a man slightly to the left of Karl Marx to tax dodge, and hypocrisy is what always does for politicians in the end. You shagged an underage rentboy behind your dying wife's back? Fine. Whatever. You did it while voting for Section 28? Game over. So it will be with Ken.

The power to tip the balance of two successive elections is a testament not only to Gilligan's low cunning, but also to his reputed high capacity for journalistic legwork: to the doggedness of a man who confesses he spends many nights trawling through grey blotches of data on the Companies House website, grazing through PDFs of London Mayoral policy documents, a pizza on dial-out and no life in sight. Were it not for Gilligan, there's every chance Ken would be well on his way to his fourth straight term, and BoJo would be languishing as Junior Secretary Of State for Paperclips.

Gilligan will no doubt dance on his grave, but if Ken is now finally harpooned, what next for his favourite enemy? After all, what's an Ahab with no Moby Dick? It's just a man opening a can of tuna for dinner instead.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

Illustration by Joss Frank

Previously: Quango - David Cameron's Brain Has Gone Bye Bye