Leadership Quote by Kenneth Robert Livingstone

The line reads like a vow, but it’s really a legal tightrope walked in public. Ken Livingstone isn’t promising to follow ethical guidance; he’s promising to “have regard” to it, a phrase that sounds obedient while preserving maximum room to maneuver. In British administrative language, “have regard” is the politician’s escape hatch: acknowledge the rule, consider it, then do what you were likely going to do anyway, so long as you can later show you didn’t ignore it outright.

That’s the intent: compliance without surrender. It’s also a reminder that the office he’s invoking is not a freewheeling mayoralty but a creature of statute, watched by Whitehall. The reference to Section 66 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999 quietly stages the real drama: London’s devolved authority versus central government oversight. Livingstone, whose brand was always part insurgent, part pragmatist, frames himself as dutiful while insisting on autonomy through procedural language.

The subtext is almost adversarial. Ethical standards here aren’t presented as shared civic values; they arrive “issued by the secretary of state,” externally authored and potentially politically motivated. Livingstone is signaling to multiple audiences at once: to critics, that he accepts the framework; to supporters, that he won’t be domesticated by it. The quote’s power is its dryness. It uses bureaucracy as camouflage, turning a mundane formula into a coded statement about power: who gets to define “ethical,” who gets to police it, and how elected figures survive under oversight without looking captured by it.