Greg Dyke
David Cameron's first choice for Mayor has said he will vote for Ken Livingstone in the mayoral elections.
Greg Dyke says Mr Livingstone has helped to make London a "vibrant, exciting place".
The Tory leader wanted Mr Dyke, the former BBC chairman, to enter as a "unity candidate" for both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in a bid to unseat Mr Livingstone.
But the plot descended into farce last year when Lib-Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell flatly rejected his offer and Mr Dyke said he was "not considering" standing.
Mr Dyke said: "I shall vote for Ken. I think he's done not a bad job at all, if you look at London today compared with a decade ago it's a pretty vibrant, exciting place and I think he's responsible for some of that."
CAMPAIGN CAPERS
Boris Johnson has talked passionately about the problems caused by middleclass flight from state education in London. But he has now admitted that he "extracted" three of his own children from local schools in Islington because they weren't up to scratch. What would the Old Etonian do about the problem as Mayor? "Sort out a lot of the disorder and incivility that I think deters middleclass parents from sending their kids to inner-city schools," he says. Incivility? The hundreds of thousands of Londoners who have no option other than their local school won't be too pleased about that.
