KEY POINTS:
"My name is Ken Livingstone," the Mayor of London declared last week during a rail journey across the British capital to inject new energy into his campaign for re-election, "and I'm running against pure evil."
He was joking, sort of.
Even Livingstone seems to have difficulty summoning up his trademark venom towards opponents when it comes to his mop-haired Conservative challenger, Boris Johnson.
More important, as Labour's own focus groups have been telling him, he knows that even voters who do not like the Conservatives, or may not trust Johnson to run the capital, somehow cannot help liking him.
Many observers now say that the outcome of the mayoral election could help determine the fate of the beleaguered Government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown as it struggles to combat falling poll ratings and division.
Livingstone won his first term, eight years ago, at a canter - Livingstone the populist against Tony Blair's New Labour machine.
In 2004 the Tory Stephen Norris gave him a bit more of a fight, but never really threatened to unseat him. Yet with the May 1 local elections drawing closer, Livingstone has no doubt that this time around will be very different. "Every vote will count."
Last week was the week when the race took off in earnest. Parliament was in recess. BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman hosted a televised candidates' debate. The three strikingly different contenders - Livingstone, Johnson and the Liberal Democrat challenger Brian Paddick, a former London Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner - used TV and radio, meet-and-greet events with voters and newspaper interviews to begin cranking their campaigns into high gear.
In the Livingstone camp, the BBC television debate seemed to have marked a turning point. Not even Livingstone's supporters were claiming a slam-dunk victory. But most neutrals felt Livingstone came over as the most assured of the three candidates and that Johnson suffered by his rambling reply to Paxman's persistent calls for him to name the price of his intended replacement for Livingstone's unloved bendy buses.
By the time the mayor turned up at West Hampstead overground station to begin his cross-London campaign swing the next morning, a new Mori poll, commissioned by the trade union Unison, showed Livingstone holding a narrow lead over Johnson.
As the train headed eastward, with walkabout stops in Islington and Hackney and on the edge of the 2012 Olympic site in Stratford, east London, Livingstone visibly warmed to the prospect of his three-week sprint to the election finishing line. This was the kind of front-line political battle he had always relished, and he seemed to take energy from each new pavement encounter with a would-be voter.
A few did voice real concerns - the congestion charge and Livingstone's pledge to slap a £25 ($63) charge on "gas-guzzling" 4WDs, rail and Tube transport, knife crime on the streets.
But Livingstone had answers at the ready. The overground line that we were riding, he proclaimed, had been taken under the mayor's wing and, with a funding boost from the Olympics, was being modernised. He had put more police on the streets. There were more buses and more people using them. He was now poised to direct billions of pounds into transport improvements, more affordable housing, and schemes to wean knife-toting youths away from gang life.
Buoyed by the response on the streets, he was none the less frank about the challenge he faced. He would have to accept, for the first time in his career, the cheeky, popular outsider in the contest would be his opponent.
"I mean 60 per cent of Londoners know who Boris is without prompting," Livingstone reflected. "Everyone thinks he's hilariously funny ... What's, I think, important is getting across to people that this isn't a comedy show. This is a huge job. Dear old Boris might sound lovely, but a mayor needs to get all the major decisions right, at the right time, not put them off. If you don't get 90 per cent of the decisions right, the city will start to fail."
Hours later, at a hustings before a largely friendly audience at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, Livingstone drove that message home further, while Johnson was initially nearly drowned out by a chorus of boos and jeers.
But the Tory challenger won a steadily warmer reception as the two-hour event progressed. And the sting came in the tail - for a long period at the end of the event, he was mobbed by people wanting to shake his hand, take his picture and get his autograph.
With the backroom support of Australian election strategist Lynton Crosby, the campaign seemed to be drawing optimism, and growing energy, from a sense that many voters have reservations about giving Livingstone another term.
As Johnson criss-crossed the city, he seemed to exude an almost rock-star magnetism of the sort Livingstone himself revelled in a decade ago. The relentless emphasis was on quality-of-life issues and on pressing the argument that, despite all the high-profile Livingstone initiatives, day-to-day living for many in the capital has left voters hankering for change. Outside a number of Tube stations last week, young volunteers with "Back Boris" badges were handing out campaign newspapers highlighting street crime, transport and the tripling of council-tax payments for the mayor's office in the past decade.
The warmest welcome for Johnson, predictably, came in more well-to-do areas, as he pledged to trim heavy-handed and "anti-democratic" planning policies, save gardens and green space, fight to open a "national debate" on killing expansion plans for Heathrow in favour of a new airport in the Thames estuary, and save £6 million by shutting down the mayor's "propaganda" news sheet.
But he also zeroed in on crime in the inner city and unveiled a plan to encourage both private developers and local councils to do up more than 80,000 currently empty properties for "social rented accommodation".
As he made his way on foot from a campaign appearance in a small East Sheen street with a lawn area destined for a new block of flats, three hard-hatted construction site workers approached him beaming. "Boris! How you doing, mate?" one of them asked, to which the candidate replied: "Nice to see you. Can I count on your vote on May 1?" The unhesitating reply was: "Yes, mate, I'm already registered."
Predicting an outcome is difficult. Barely a third of Londoners bothered to go to the polls in the last mayoral election. And London election rules stipulate that "second preference" votes will come into play in the likely event that neither Livingstone nor Johnson win a majority outright. Green candidate Sian Berry and Livingstone have both been urging supporters to give each other their second votes.
Paddick has been creeping up in the opinion polls. The former policeman is openly gay, which he feels might well resonate with the "tolerant" and "liberal" spirit of the capital. But Paddick is stressing his experience on an issue polls show to be much higher among voters' concerns than environmental issues - crime, particularly the stabbings and gunshots which have increasingly claimed the lives of teenagers in city-centre areas.
- OBSERVER
