If Ken Livingstone ever hoped to be a pin-up figure for the political nuts of Westminster, he can forget it now. Politico's, the meeting-point and neighbourhood bookshop of many MPs, parliamentary advisers and party hacks, is closing. Its shelves of stolid biographies and political memorabilia will disappear; and its owner, Iain Dale, blames the congestion charge for part of his loss of business.
He would, wouldn't he? He is a Tory candidate. But it's a safe bet that any downturn in London business will now be blamed on Ken's congestion charge, even though only about 3% to 6% of shoppers came into the centre of the capital by car in the old days. It's an equally safe bet that Livingstone won't give a damn. His congestion charge, a year old this week, already looks like one of the clearest, boldest political successes of recent times. It is a strange kind of monument - painted letters on Tarmac, an army of little metal cameras. But it is a monument, to political risk-taking and chutzpah.
Traffic is moving faster. Central roads are less clogged. The predicted mayhem outside the zone hasn't happened. Payment rates for the charge have steadily increased, and the number of complaints has fallen sharply. About £68m will be raised in this financial year for other transport projects in London, admittedly a bit less than predicted. As the author of the charge, Livingstone is riding at 50% in the London mayoral polls, far ahead of anyone else. Far ahead too, of Labour's current standing in the polls, even though he has returned to the fold.
And, clincher of clinchers, there is now a vigorous debate about extending it. Livingstone would like to see it going into west London. New Labour apparatchiks, tasked with coming up with ideas for the next manifesto, are studying tolls for other roads, including the fast lanes on motorways - effectively an extension of the London system nationwide. It is quite a tribute to a man Downing Street used to revile; and let us give Tony Blair the credit for openly admitting he had been wrong about the charge and about Livingstone.
So wrong, indeed, that Livingstone was readmitted into the London Labour party despite the vigorous opposition of the chancellor, Gordon Brown, and such cabinet heavyweights as Charles Clarke. Judging by the vote of party members, it was a hugely popular decision.
Nor has Livingstone arrived quietly. He is not a tamed, New Labour Ken. After verbally belting George Bush as the greatest single threat to the planet, he has kept speaking his mind. Recently, in the wake of the French parliamentary vote to ban Muslim headscarves from schools, he stood alongside British Muslim and Hindu leaders to denounce France. This is visibly and audibly the same man whose arguments about listening to IRA leaders and about gay rights so infuriated Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
What divides him from most of his Labour parliamentary colleagues, the Politico's browsers? Surely, it is his vigorous, unshakeable sense of self. He is a grounded politician who seems impossible to intimidate, and almost immune from press attack. The congestion charge had been preceded by headlines predicting chaos, panic, confusion, "passive defiance", house price slumps and boycotts. It all bounced off him. As ministers looked on aghast, he just ploughed on. He was right.
Livingstone's self-certainty comes from an unfashionable place: leftwing ideology. He was never easy to place as a political thinker, borrowing ideas from the natural world as well as Marx, but he was a product of the socialist revival of the 70s and 80s. Unlike many others, from Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers to Clarke and Brown, he never renounced it, but hung on stubbornly to parts of his old thinking - the more libertarian, environmentalist parts in particular. So he has, in the old phrase, "an analysis". Whatever pollsters and consultants tell him, he has a way of thinking that allows him to stand out, at least sometimes, and do something different. By the standards of today's soft, timid politicians, he is hard and awkwardly shaped.
All of that is history, and obvious. But what does it mean for politics more generally - and for New Labour, in particular? The Livingstone story ought to have a resonance well beyond London. For throughout the country - and indeed much of the western world - there seems to be a desperate search for authenticity, for something real in these confected times. It is a subject much discussed by politicians and thinkers, from the Global Economic Forum at Davos to the local Starbucks sofa.
Among Labour MPs, I find an almost shocking defeatism - not rebellion, but a dispirited, punctured hopelessness. Years of focus groups have led to blurred vision. Years of sloughing off ideology have led to the slough of despond. It has almost got to the stage where they are willing Michael Howard's Tory revival on, simply to give themselves some definition, something to be against.
That is no kind of answer. Politics has to be driven by ideas and convictions, strong enough to ignore newspaper campaigns, batter aside a few bad polls and keep on doggedly going when Sir Humphrey hisses "no minister". The problem for New Labour, now that it is accustomed to power, is that these convictions cannot be acquired in SW1. They cannot be bought in from political consultancies, policy wonks or advisers.
Historically, they have come when political thinking reinforces personal experiences - the Grantham corner shop, plus Chicago-school economics; the personal rebellions of London baby-boomers plus a bit of Gramsci; an apprenticeship in a northern factory plus some Nye Bevan or Crossman. And all across Britain now, there are tens of thousands of bright and angry people forming views in the same way - war protesters, environmentalists reading James Lovelock, teachers and social workers rejecting trickle-down economics as a cruel con, and office workers rediscovering trade unionism.
The great danger for New Labour is that it has become closed off from all of them. If the main party of the centre-left is not ragged at the edges, and open to uncomfortable, challenging people, then it is fated to age - as this government seems to be visibly ageing. It does not need more quietly obedient MPs; more neatly turned-out and easy-going candidates; more cautious policy advisers warning against congestion charging as unpopular in parts of the press and therefore best avoided.
No - Labour needs a wider and more vibrant fringe, some of whom will undoubtedly turn off middle-of-the-road voters, and some of whom - like Livingstone - will inspire surprising new coalitions. It may be that somewhere inside his head Blair realises it. He was notably generous about acknowledging that he got Livingstone wrong. If Blair has begun, just begun, to realise you cannot build a movement on nervous little yes-people, then the old newt-fancier will have done Labour the best service possible.
