An election next year for the mayor of London is shaping up to be an unusually brutal battle that exposes one of the country's deepest social divisions: class.
The two candidates likely to face off in the vote - still eight months away - are among the most colorful and distinct in British politics, and often called simply Ken and Boris.
A contest between Labour Party incumbent Ken Livingstone and Conservative politician Boris Johnson would show the left-right divide in British politics is alive as ever, and may leave roughly half the city heartily loathing the winner.
London-born Livingstone went to a state school and made his mark as mayor curbing traffic, by charging cars to drive into the center of the capital; he has been maligned for dalliances with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
His likely opponent Johnson - front-runner for the Conservative mayoral nomination - is an Old Etonian member of parliament for Henley, a well-heeled town near London that hosts a royal rowing regatta.
With his trademark mop of blonde hair, Johnson, also a newspaper columnist, is renowned as an inveterate joker not shy of the occasional politically incorrect howler.
"Mayor elections attract people who are charismatic and have very strong views and have said things that they might regret. Both Ken and Boris have got track records of that," said Dermot Finch, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research's Centre for Cities.
A small sample of Londoners in a YouGov poll last month put support for Johnson at 46 percent, ahead of the sitting mayor at 40 percent.
Livingstone, labelled the "most odious man in Britain" by the Sun newspaper when he ran the London city council in the 1980s, has had his share of undiplomatic outbursts. He called the US ambassador a "chiselling little crook" last year after the embassy refused to pay congestion charge bills.
"I would've been quite happy to crush the car with the American ambassador in it, quite frankly," said Livingstone, who has also likened a persistent local Jewish reporter to a "concentration camp guard".
A Livingstone-friendly think-tank recently sifted through Johnson's many writings to argue the former Conservative shadow minister for higher education concealed extreme right-wing views behind a buffoonish persona.
Among the choice quotes highlighted by the think-tank, Compass, was Johnson's description of the crowds that would greet former prime minister Tony Blair if he were to visit Democratic Republic of Congo.
"No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird," Johnson wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Source: China Daily/agencies
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