The next City Hall elections may be three years away but Labour figures are already casting their eye around for a credible candidate in the hope of finally winning a second Mayoral contest.
In recent weeks the possibility of former Minister Dame Tessa Jowell has been mentioned to me. One Labour insider predicted that if she put her name forward, the party would bite her hand off and that other oft-touted runners would find themselves on the backfoot.
A different Labour voice says Jowell has no intention of running and lacks the machinery to do so and that we should read nothing into pictures of her walking around town with the cream of Hollywood.
In my digging around on this I’ve not just been busy gossiping, I’ve also been keeping an eye on Ladbrokes’ odds for potential runners.
Jowell entered the list a month ago at 25/1, a week or so later and those odds had been cut to 16/1, better but still behind Alan Johnson, David Lammy and Sadiq Khan. However in recent days she’s joined the trio on 12/1.
Could there be something to the rumours after all?
Moving on from future City Hall occupants to past tenants, it’s been suggested that Ken Livingstone is looking to return to Parliament via Brent Central.
Possible? Ken famously used his 2012 concession speech – the bits he didn’t use to bash the Standard – to declare that he’d fought his last election.
And discussing the prospect of a return at a recent LSE event he said: “I’ll be just off 70 at that stage, and my wife’s gone off to Uni because she wants to be a teacher so I’m a house husband, I’m quite enjoying it.”
Yet what Ken says and what Ken does are often not the same thing so we should probably not discount the prospect out of hand.
Perhaps he’s missing Boris and their spats more than expected and is hoping for a reunion on the green benches of Westminster?
