Ken is now his own worst enemy

London's Mayor, Ken Livingstone, is going through a bad patch. The cheery chap from Cricklewood of public good repute is fading. Dr Jekyll is being replaced by the old GLC Mr Hyde. This is not good news. The Mayor employs his girlfriend in his private office and seeks £70,000 each for a new retinue of courtiers. He rants at those who baulk him, brawls drunkenly and meets in secret with property tycoons whom he should keep at arm's-length. He was able to rebut none of these charges yesterday in his defensive counterblast at the Evening Standard. He is looking ever more like an old-fashioned Labour city boss, though lacking the same control. In Mr Livingstone's case, powerlessness corrupts and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

I was enthusiastic about London's first elected Mayor. Mr Livingstone was a typical Londoner with an easy-going rapport with the electorate. A vigorous champion of civic autonomy, he rightly made transport the area most in need of leadership. In challenging the Treasury over the Tube and thinking the unthinkable about traffic he was correct. Mr Livingstone hired Bob Kiley to run Transport for London, indeed he seemed to hire everyone he met. He was truly "inclusive".

Ken Livingstone has put the mayoralty on the map. Had Labour's Frank Dobson been elected, the mayoralty would have sunk into the pit of obscurity intended for it by Gordon Brown. The Mayor became a celebrity, London's answer to New York's Ed Koch. He was ubiquitous and wide-ranging in his patronage. Everyone knew his name. The old cabalistic Livingstone appeared reformed. The key to this job, converting electoral popularity to real power, seemed within his grasp.

Instead, the stories swirling round Mr Livingstone's office are alarming. His private life is of no concern of London, though it is bound to be intriguing. What is of concern is his lack of self-control. Common prudence suggests that the Mayor's partner and the mother of his child should not continue in his private office. Nor does the Mayor have duties requiring aides paid at the same rate as junior ministers. This is abuse of office.

The Mayor has made himself devoid of admirers among the new generation of London borough leaders. At one meeting he screamed abuse at the equable Sir Robin Wales of Newham. He infuriated the boroughs by levying huge precepts onto their rates within his first two years. Yet in reality these leaders are more powerful than he is. They can make Mr Livingstone's job undoable. They can screw up his traffic policy, as the west London boroughs already intend. They can wreck his planning ambitions.

They can laugh at his hopes for low-cost housing. When Mr Livingstone's congestion charge arrives in 2003, they will be delighted to see him hanging from one of his myriad camera towers.

Mr Livingstone's relationship with London property developers is extraordinary. He cut his political teeth attacking these people. Now he is the toast of their banquets. They are indeed a charming bunch, but the Mayor has fallen for them hook, line and sinker.

He has forgotten what they are about, which is shortterm profit. To deal with them in private without consulting the London Assembly may give the Mayor a thrill. It is dangerous and wrong.

Mr Livingstone argues that he can squeeze donations from these developers to build low-cost housing elsewhere in London. Planning control was never meant to be a source of property tax.

Flogging off the London skyline to pay for housing subsidy is madness. Whatever the motivation and however worthy the cause, a kickback is a kickback, a distortion of sound planning. London risks emulating the bad old days of 1970s Newcastle under T Dan Smith, its notorious council leader.

The Mayor has shown no feeling for the relationship between London's fabric and its economic success. He abuses London conservation and English Heritage. He cannot see that the City is losing out to Westminster as an office venue not because it has too few modern towers. It is losing because for years it has pursued "slash and burn" development while Westminster has shrewdly guarded its environment.

The future wealth of city centres does not lie in clifffaces and skyscrapers crammed with clerical workers. They should be on the outskirts. The future lies in smaller units in attractive surroundings of the sort that Westminster has been careful to preserve. Mr Livingstone is stuck in the planning battles of the 1960s, and is on the wrong side.

In his battle with Gordon Brown over the Tube, Mr Livingstone has also run out of steam. Those of us who cheered him on assumed at least that he had a fall-back position. Apparently not. Mr Kiley's thesis that privatisation is a bad deal for London may be true. But the deal is becoming reality and vendetta is pointless. London must keep moving.

The Mayor's morass of cycle lanes and speed bumps do not make a transport policy. Nor does a crime policy lie in Mr Livingstone allowing Downing Street to seize the initiative on street muggings. The Mayor could not even protect his admirable Lambeth police chief, Brian Paddick.

Elected mayors never come perfectly formed. All have warts and weaknesses. Mr Livingstone's are becoming all too evident. Any city leader knows that being mayor is a negotiating job. It is about making deals and maintaining the confidence of those on whom those deals depend, both in central government and in subordinate boroughs.

This seems to be beyond the present Mayor. I thought at first that the Labour Party was mad to refuse Mr Livingstone's nomination for reelection in 2004. The prospect now is that they will refuse but that he may yet win again.

Central government will then feel justified in seizing back his surviving powers and leave him to swing in the breeze, an increasingly decrepit figure.

London will be the loser.