Do You Ken Andrew Gilligan?

Ought there to be a comma after that "Ken"?

Andrew Gilligan has latched onto Ken Livingstone's assertion that he never voted either for New Labour or for Tony Blair, suggesting that Livingstone therefore could not have voted Labour in 1997, 2001 or 2005. But no one voted for "New Labour". That designation has never appeared on a ballot paper. The words next to the name of a Labour party candidate were then, as they are now, "The Labour Party Candidate".

Livingstone has never lived in Sedgefield, did not support Blair for Labour Leader, and doubtless never voted for him for the Shadow Cabinet or the National Executive Committee, either. So no, he has never voted for Tony Blair, just as neither he nor anyone else has ever voted for New Labour. If Gilligan wants people who voted three times for what they thought was not a party, but merely a star vehicle and half of a four-word marketing slogan, then he needs to look to the 2010 intake on the Conservative benches. Not least, to one of them who now blogs on the same site as he does. Her former party and mine has consistently refused to confirm that she has ever left it.

That MP and blogger, Louise Mensch, sits alongside that fully paid up and card-carrying Lib Dem activist against marriage and the monarchy, Liz Truss, as well as the Pakistan People's Party's Rehman Chishti. But Gilligan is no more likely to investigate any of them than he is to investigate that, how and why the entire Socialist Workers' Party faction of Respect in Tower Hamlets not long ago defected to the Conservative Party after having fallen out with the Islamists. Or the activities of Johanna Kaschke, a longstanding Respect and Communist Party figure, who left the Labour Party in 2007 after having failed to secure its nomination for Bethnal Green and Bow, and who ended that year by joining the Conservative Party, in which she has rapidly become a well-connected activist.

Or the fact that around the country, local factions of various Asian and other origins routinely defect from Labour or other things to the Conservatives on frankly communal grounds, and are always welcomed with open arms. Or the way in which David Cameron's vehicles toured Ealing Southall blasting out in Asian languages that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals would be made public holidays under his party. His "Quality of Life Commission" (don't laugh, it's real) then proposed giving the power to decide these things to "local community leaders".

What else will those figures be given the power to decide in return for filling in every postal voting form in their households in the Bullingdon Boys' interest, and making sure that all their mates did likewise? To the statelets thus created – little Caliphates, little Hindutvas, little Khalistans, and so on – people minded to live in such places will flock from the ends of the earth, entrenching the situation for ever. Not exclusively in London. But very largely so. Yet don't expect to read anything about that by the Daily Telegraph's supposedly fearless London Editor, Andrew Gilligan.