The Ken Livingstone Memorial Library

Was it with an eye firmly on his legacy that the former Mayor spent nearly £1,000 on books in the dog days of his tenure at City Hall? Or was it in anticipation of ample leisure time to come? The Standard has been brushing through mayoral expenses with a fine-tooth comb, and discovered that almost a grand's worth of public moolah was spent on books from Amazon in March last year; titles included Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies, The Science Of Influence: How To Get Anyone To Say Yes In 8 Minutes Or Less! (which clearly didn't help in the election), and perhaps most damningly of all, The Frog-Snogger's Guide, which stretches its central metaphor to death, being a guide to how to deal with "the many frogs and toads we need to get on with: the boss, the mother-in-law, customers"... and bumbling Tory chancers, it could have added. Conspicuous by its absence is perennially popular self-help tome What Colour Is Your Parachute?, the "popular manual for career-changers", which Ken could have used in the past fifteen months.