Groucho Marx once famously remarked that he would never want to be a member of any club that would accept him. Perhaps I am more self centred than Groucho, but I have never had the desire to join any club that doesn't want me to be a member.
There is something sad and demeaning about people who long to be allowed into membership of posh clubs because they feel it will raise their status, or that they can enjoy the reflected glory of others around them. Such social climbing is sad enough. Imagine, though, selling your soul, your dignity and your floorboards in order to join one of these institutions just as it hits the rocks, and becomes unfashionable and untrendy.
For such bad timing to happen to you once would be seen as unfortunate, but to go back to the same club years later, just as it was once again losing its glamour, would surely be the height of chic carelessness.
What, then, of Ken Livingstone and New Labour?
Ken's tale is a strangely sad one. He joined the Labour Party in 1968! Yes, 1968--the year when anyone who was anyone of his age with a conscience, or a gut instinct and a desire for change, was turning their back on Labour.
Harold Wilson's Labour government was betraying the poor, preparing itself for an (ultimately botched) attack on trade unions, trying to compromise with white racists in what was then Rhodesia, and supporting America's debauched horror show in Vietnam. Many traditional Labour supporters and party members looked on in horror and dismay at all this. Some tore up their cards. Others had years of loyalty and ties that kept them with the Labour project despite all the betrayals.
Young people coming into politics had no such ties or loyalties. They took to the streets, they attacked the American embassy, they marched against Enoch Powell's racism, they desired to tear the head off the bourgeoisie, and they despised Wilson, his henchmen, his party. They had a world to win.
One such youngster, though, stood apart. 'Red Ken' opted for Wilson.
Now we all make mistakes when we're young--drinking a bottle of sherry and then driving home because it was 'a girl's drink' was not this author's finest hour. It cost me my driving licence, and a punch in the gob from a cop who didn't appear too impressed to be told that the IRA would get him for daring to stop an innocent Irish drunk driver.
So Ken lacked fire, passion and a sense of daring. He'd made the wrong choice. He'd learn.
And so he did. True, it took him rather longer than you'd want an adolescent to pick up on their flaws as they approach adulthood. Indeed, Ken was well into middle age before he finally walked the walk.
In his defence, it has to be said that in the interim the wild hope of 68 had seemed to die. There was Thatcher and Thatcher and more Thatcher. What's more, with little hope outside in a bleak, cold world, there was hope within the cosier confines of Labour.
For a spell the left looked to be on the verge of taking control--Tony Benn came within a whisker of being deputy leader. Those of us who had been impetuous and wild, and charged police lines or hurled rocks at Nazis, looked like we might have got it wrong. Indeed, some who had charged and hurled ended up joining what they had previously hated, as it seemed like Labour was the only hope for change.
Then along came Blair, Brown, Mandelson, and countless Byers and Darlings. Faceless grey men who were ruthlessly ambitious for themselves, totally contemptuous of those who wanted to make the world a better place. These Tammany Hall fixer politicians wanted only their own clones in the club, and Ken was not seen as 'one of them'.
So at last he walked the walk. We celebrated the walk. We (well, those of us living in London) cast our votes. He trounced the rather dishevelled clone. He offered hope, and had a chance to show so many youngsters that politics was relevant. For a new generation of young people were emerging who wanted to tear the head off the bourgeoisie, who hated the system, the warmongering, the destruction of the environment, the corporate world of logos and sweatshops and Third World exploitation.
Then he had a chance to give them a voice, and he even appeared to for a time. Standing up to the government over its privatisation of the tube, he promised support to striking tube workers, and then...? And then he urged moderation, and began talking of not costing his old club the general election.
As for the young--as they took to the streets to give us the first newsworthy May Day in years, Ken was there to join in the hysterical attacks on them, to support the provocative policing, to denounce and demean those he should have been inspiring. If protest hadn't fired his imagination in 68, it appears to have caused him revulsion in 2001.
Finally he has announced he will campaign for his old love, Labour, in the general election, turning his back on the socialist activists who are striving to offer an alternative through the Socialist Alliance.
Many of those involved in the Alliance, like him, have walked away from Labour. He, however, continues to sell his soul, his dignity and his floorboards in order to gain readmission to the second naffest club in town. He apparently would feel more at home with a party that embraces Shaun Woodward and gives him St Helens as a free membership gift than with people who really do want to stop privatisation and cuts in welfare spending, and want the world to be a better place for us all. Is it really possible to have learnt so little?
I wonder how much a bottle of Bristol Cream costs these days.