Profile: Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson

Both seem to have moral compasses that occasionally go haywire

MOVE over Barack and Hillary, the Ken 'n' Boris show is here. Boasting monstrous egos, pantomime villains, Machiavellian mavericks and polls that will soon have fingernails bitten down to the quick, Thursday's London Mayoral election has it all. Never before has local politics been so enthralling, or so lurid.

Realistically, the word 'local' doesn't come close to doing justice to a contest that involves 5.5 million registered voters and which will determine how £13.1bn of taxpayers' money is spent for each of the next four years. These elections may ostensibly decide whether Labour's Ken Livingstone or Tory Boris Johnson will be the next mayor of London, but because of the way the high-profile campaign has captured the attention of the UK capital, their significance stretches far beyond the M25. It is surely the ultimate irony that a contest between the two least stable political mavericks known to conventional party politics is crucial to the standing of a prime minister with such a serious image problem.

If the polls are to be believed, the outcome is on a knife edge. Less than a fortnight ago, Johnson was 13 points ahead, this week Livingstone had edged in front. The most recent polls put the two men neck and neck, with Red Ken on 45%, Boris on 44% and the rest precisely nowhere. With second preferences key to the outcome, and 26% of voters yet to decide how to cast that second vote, the prognosis is as clear as the Bass Rock in a haar.

All of which means that the next four days will feature a frantic ramping-up of the cult of political celebrity which forms the bedrock of both campaigns. This is an election that's 10% about policies, 90% about presentation and mood music (which should help Livingstone, who has 175 press officers and almost £10m at his disposal).

The figures make for interesting reading: 62% of Londoners may think that Livingstone has been a good mayor, but almost half of these, 28%, say it's time for him to go, while 23% say he was always a bad mayor and should be voted out. The figures in favour of Johnson are equally confusing: 28% think he will make a good mayor, while a different 19% would vote for anyone who could oust Livingstone.

The two men have been sharing the hustings a lot of late and they cut very different figures. On the one hand there's David Cameron's old school chum, bumbling patrician toff and quasi-academic Johnson, stuttering and stumbling as he tries to convince voters he can play the part of a serious politician. On the other there's the curiously downcast Livingstone trying to persuade the electorate that at 63 and with eight dictatorial years at the helm he is still in touch with his electorate's concerns and retains the requisite drive and energy.

Bizarrely, both men like each other (Livingstone called Johnson "my most formidable opponent so far" and complained that "60% of Londoners know who Boris is without prompting (and] everyone thinks he's hilariously funny") and have much in common. For a start there's their amorous adventures. Twice-married Johnson is a noted adulterer whose dalliances once got him sacked by Michael Howard, while it has emerged during this mayoral contest that Livingstone is also a bit racy when it comes to affairs of the heart, fathering five children by three different women, all out of wedlock.

Both have done enough to suggest that they have moral compasses that can occasionally go haywire. Livingstone's dogged refusal to give up his anti-racism adviser Lee Jasper in the face of allegations of favouritism in funding projects threatened to bring him down until Jasper's resignation last month.

In 1995, Johnson's morals came under scrutiny when it was revealed that a tape existed on which he promised former Eton schoolfriend turned fraudster Darius Guppy that he would furnish him with the home address of a News of the World reporter so that he could be beaten up. When Johnson asked Guppy how badly the journalist would be beaten up, Guppy replied that: "He will probably have a couple of black eyes and a... cracked rib or something like that", at which stage Johnson agreed to supply the address.

They also share brass neck. If Alexei Sayle and Bernard Manning were contesting this election, they could scarcely be more effective at dividing opinion, polarising the electorate and embarrassing their parties. Livingstone, for instance, was given the political equivalent of a yellow card in 2005 after he accused Oliver Finegold, a Jewish reporter working for the Evening Standard, of being a Nazi and "just like a concentration camp guard", and was promptly suspended from office for four weeks.

Livingstone once famously said that British treatment of the Irish was worse than the Nazi treatment of the Jews. As mayor he has courted Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, called George W Bush "the greatest threat to life on this planet" and prayed for the day "when I wake up and find that the Saudi Royal Family are swinging from lamp posts".

If Livingstone is a noted bon vivant and a relentless self-publicist with a talent for spotting the most effective way to raise his profile, the same is true of Johnson, who is equally adept, if even less subtle, when it comes to causing offence. Whether it's referring to black people as "piccaninnies (with] watermelon smiles", likening Tory party infighting to "Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief killing", admitting to snorting cocaine as a student, accusing Liverpudlians of "vicarious victimhood" after Ken Bigley was beheaded in Iraq, or saying that parents should be able to push pies through school railings at lunchtime, he shares Livingstone's talent for picking the issue that is certain to get people's backs up.

They share unconventional backgrounds, with New York-born Johnson's Turkish great-grandfather executed by Kemal Ataturk while Livingstone's father was a Scottish sailor and his mother an exotic dancer. Curiously, they also share many of the same policies. Removing badly-behaved school children from buses and banning alcohol from the Tube were Johnson ideas that have been taken up by Livingstone. Other Johnson pledges – tackling the youth knife crime that plagues the city and being more frugal with grants to minority groups – are accused of being little more than hollow promises. When it comes to concrete commitments, all Johnson is offering is a determination to get rid of Ken's hated "bendy buses" and replace them with modern hop-on Routemasters. Not much of a choice, is it?

You've been Googled

• Johnson's first job in journalism was with the Times, but he was sacked for falsifying a quotation from his godfather, Colin Lucas, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University.

• Ken Livingstone has kept newts since he was a boy.

• Johnson's candidacy has been the subject of international interest. Germany's Der Speigel and America's National Public Radio reported on the race, both quoting Johnson as saying: "If you vote for the Conservatives, your wife will get bigger breasts and your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase."

• Boris's full birth name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

• Livingstone appeared in an advert extolling the virtues of cheese in the 1980s, fittingly endorsing Red Leicester.

• Livingstone introduced the London Congestion Charge, which costs £8 a day for normal cars and £25 for 4x4s.