Mira Bar-Hillel

Clown to the Left, Joker to the Right

Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity
By Sonia Purnell (Aurum Press 450pp £20)
You Can't Say That: Memoirs
By Ken Livingstone (Faber & Faber 710pp £25)

During the Tory Party Conference in October Boris Johnson encountered his unauthorised biographer, Sonia Purnell. 'I spotted Boris at around midnight,' says Purnell, who used to work with him in the Daily Telegraph office in Brussels.

He was talking to Nick Robinson of the BBC who ... discreetly stepped aside. Boris said, 'Have you written anything nice about me?' and I said there's lots of nice stuff. He said he had only seen the extracts in the papers and he said he must read it, he had only heard what some people had been saying about it. He then said he knew he should have bought me lunch, but I knew he never would. He only buys lunch when he really needs to get out of a hole and keep people onside.

This incident reminded me of my own encounters with Boris, following a cover story I wrote about him for The Spectator two years into his mayoralty. It was written more in sorrow than in anger, but it pulled no punches in comparing Boris's pre-election persona and promises with his rather disappointing performance as London's elected leader. I expected Boris to either rage against me or ask me to come and talk to him about my criticisms. After all, I had discussed planning and housing with him a few times during the election campaign, and was even put forward for the position of Deputy Mayor for Housing (a job that was subsequently mysteriously abolished). But all Boris wanted to know was whether I had offered the piece to The Spectator or whether they had asked for it. When I said it was very much the latter, he put on his best hangdog expression - nobody does it better, although Prince Charles comes close - and shuffled off, promising to be in touch. I knew he wouldn't be and I was right.

Nothing in Purnell's thoroughly researched and well-crafted page-turner - not to say 'bodice ripper' - came as a surprise to me, although I was struck by her insights. 'In spite of his quick-fire wit he does not laugh,' she notes, explaining that this is because 'to laugh - as to cry - involves a loss of control ... and that is something he is unwilling to allow.' How true: in spite of all those familiar shambolic features, Boris is an intensely calculating man with a sharp, albeit lazy mind. What I was not expecting was her detailed account of his four-year affair with Petronella Wyatt, and especially the searingly painful description of events leading up to her aborting the second baby she conceived by him. At one point, Purnell writes, he suggested that 'she should have an affair with someone else and say it was their child' - so he could avoid paying child support. According to Lady Wyatt, Petronella's mother, Boris had refused to pay the £1,500 medical costs of the abortion. His description of his £250,000 a year for his Daily Telegraph column as 'chickenfeed' makes Purnell's revelations of Boris's common meanness particularly unattractive.

Andrew Gilligan once quipped that Boris was a serious man pretending to be a buffoon, while Ken Livingstone was a buffoon pretending to be a serious man. The front cover of his memoirs shows Ken - who for years was paid handsomely by the Evening Standard to review some of London's top restaurants - relaxing in a greasy spoon caff. He claims his childhood dream was to work in London Zoo, and in many ways it appears to have come true. I first saw Ken in County Hall in 1974, when I was having a cuppa with the veteran housing chair Gladys Dimson, a mild yet effective Old Labour politician. Suddenly she whispered: 'Don't look now - but here comes the snake in the grass.' Nothing has happened since to make me think she was wrong in her assessment.

Everything in Livingstone's life and times has always been of Ken and for Ken. Now we finally also have the 'by Ken'. Reading You Can't Say That is a weary trawl through over 670 pages of self-serving tedium. The author is clearly as obsessed with the media as with himself, appearing to have read - and kept - every single newspaper reference to him, for better or worse. He is also the kind of bully who accuses others of thuggery while always presenting himself as the victim. The result is whinge rather than wit.

I have chosen two incidents of which I have considerable personal knowledge to give Ken's account a reality check. The first is the infamous party attended by Ken, his then pregnant girlfriend, Emma Beal, and Emma's best friend, my Evening Standard colleague Robin Hedges. It involved a row between Ken (who had been drinking) and Emma (who had been smoking). Robin came to her defence and ended up severely injured at the bottom of a stairwell. There followed an ambulance trip to A&E. Ken claims that Robin 'lost his balance'. Robin clearly remembers being helped to lose his balance after a tussle with Ken. Ken then says that Robin 'asked us to issue a statement' insisting it was just an accident. Robin tells me he was put under enormous pressure by Emma, first not to call the police and then to agree to a statement drafted by Ken and herself. Robin had - and has - no reason to lie, while for Ken it would have been a career killer. You do the maths.

The second incident involves another colleague, Oliver Finegold. What happened was that, after a City Hall reception to which the Evening Standard had not been invited, Oliver asked Ken politely how the party had gone. Ken replied by asking if he was a 'German war criminal'. After being told by Finegold that he was Jewish and offended by the remark, Ken said, 'Oh, you're just like a concentration camp guard - you're just doing it because you're paid to.' When the story broke Ken first tried to claim that Oliver had sworn at him. He had to abandon this vicious lie when a tape recording emerged. In his book, he dismisses the entire exchange as light-hearted banter, and claims that 'I was exonerated' by the High Court. He got off on a technicality, but Mr Justice Collins emphasised: 'This decision is not an indication that, in my view, the appellant's actions were appropriate. I'm quite clear they were not.' No apology has ever been forthcoming (has Ken ever apologised for anything?) and - irony of ironies - he is happy to quote the support he got from Boris Johnson in refusing to apologise. Which brings us full circle.

If you want to know who and what Boris is, read Sonia Purnell's book. If you want to know who and what Ken is - read Andrew Hosken's admirably fair, accurate and lively 2008 biography, which is also 200 pages shorter than these memoirs. If you want to know who to vote for in May, read both. You may then reach the sad conclusion that the choice is between a man who listens to no one and one who listens to too many; between one who airbrushes history and one who writes about it; between a control freak and an out-of-control freak. And that London deserves better - much better - than either.

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Mira Bar-Hillel is a writer on property and planning. She tweets as @mirabarhillel