London: The beaten 66-year-old Labour candidate, wearing grey suit, blue shirt and yellow tie, stood at one remove from his great rival, separated by Jenny Jones. His result was called fourth and he fingered the speech he had prepared. As Johnson was declared the winner, he surveyed the packed chamber at City Hall. His cheeks bulged. He gave a resigned smile.
When he spoke, he said this would be his last election. "Forty-one years ago almost to the day, I won my first election on a manifesto promising to build good council housing and introduce a free bus pass for pensioners. Now I've lived long enough to get one myself. Since then, I've won 11 more elections and lost three. But the one I most regret losing is this.
He apologised to his supporters and to Ed Miliband for failing to retake the mayoralty; an effort hampered by an "incredible media battering", not to mention a tide of "negativity and smears". "These are the toughest times for 80 years," he said.
"Londoners needed a mayor to help them get through this very difficult period. They will continue to bear the pain of this recession without any help from here in City Hall."
But the first draft of history isn't always the most reliable. Yes, defeat was confirmed at that moment at City Hall. Crushing as it was, Friday's result merely took him to an all but inevitable destination. There is no doubt that throughout a long campaign he showed a better grasp of policy than his opponents. He spoke persuasively on housing, on the environment, on transport, on policing. He worked hard, in inner and outer London, and displayed many of the qualities that would have made him a successful mayor again. But he also carried so much political and personal baggage that it always seemed unlikely he would get the chance to deploy that knowledge unless he found a way to reach a new settlement with the electorate that rejected him last time.
He must have known that Labour's establishment knew that. He never found that settlement. He ended the race polling behind his opponent, but also polling behind his party; people who identified with Labour simultaneously felt they could not endorse its candidate. "I just can't vote for him," said one observer, a Labour MP. "He's past his sell-by date," said another Labour figure. "He has an extraordinary capability for annoying people," said another.
Why wasn't he elected? One core reason is that he failed to pin a blue rosette on Boris Johnson. "The Tory mayor," he said at every opportunity; Johnson and Cameron, "two peas in a pod". But Boris dodged that bullet. "On the doorstep," lamented one Labour bigwig, "people saw it as Boris v Ken."
Perhaps as significant was the fact that he was never able to decontaminate his brand. Of course there were powerful forces against him. For many Tories he remains forever Red Ken.
And then there was the press. The Murdoch papers and his perennial foes at the Mail and the Telegraph enjoy throwing punches at him almost as much as he likes throwing them back. These are constants. But he also took a battering from the Evening Standard, which, having apologised for biases in the past, threw yorkers at him, while bowling underarm at his opponent. Yes I would describe Boris as "a personal friend", the owner Evgeny Lebedev told Lord Justice Leveson.
Perhaps in the aftermath Livingstone will reflect on what may well have been the pivotal exchange of the entire campaign: a telephone call from his bete noire, the London editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan, who, while writing for the Evening Standard, did more than anyone to sully the reputation of Livingstone's last administration.
Gilligan fired a rocket about Livingstone's tax arrangements and the fact that he channelled earnings through a company. Not illegal, not unusual and, had it been any other journalist, Ken might have endeavoured to deal with it properly. As it was, he did not. Livingstone put the phone down, as was his right. But the shutters came down too.
Rightly or wrongly, the allegations stuck. It unsettled his own base. "This may be legal, but it isn't the sort of thing we should be doing," a prominent Labour figure said, voicing a good measure of grassroots disgruntlement. "It has traction whether we like it or not," said a colleague. "The Tories had leaflets that barely addressed anything else." When Livingstone came to the Guardian in April, much of the questioning related to his tax affairs. The same later in the day when he took questions at Mumsnet. It gave his political opponents a continuous narrative to use against him and provided a theme for the media outlets intent on wrecking any chance he had of a comeback. We still don't really know how the issue came to Gilligan's attention. But it was negative campaign gold. Livingstone was never able to give his campaign momentum. Johnson, as in 2008, short on detail and gravitas, fought an unremarkable campaign. But it didn't matter. The tax story hit directly at those who might have been willing to give Livingstone the benefit of the doubt. How many did it scare away?
And it was ruinous on another level, for throughout his years of vilification, Livingstone had been accused of many things, but he had never been accused of financial self-interest. He lives modestly in north-west London; shops with everyone else, takes the train. Now he was accused of hypocrisy and an eye for making a buck.
He might say that there was no way to neutralise the tax attack and that the only thing to do was soldier on with weapons such as fares and childcare and the anti-cuts campaign. But to do that effectively, he would have to avoid any other mishaps. He didn't.
How much damage did he inflict by failing to make peace with the Jewish political establishment, still sore over conflicts past: the insult to a Jewish reporter, the embrace of Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi? When in March he secretly met a group of senior figures who hoped to reach accommodation, why didn't he make nice? Instead he upset some again by referring to the Israeli government as Zionists and implying that "rich" Jews wouldn't vote for him anyway. "I can't say words that I do not feel in my heart," he once declared.
And yet the Livingstone who pitched up at Finsbury Park mosque was amiability itself. Misjudgment clothed as high principle.
On 23 January, two polls put Livingstone slightly ahead. Two weeks later, he handed another gift to his opponent. No one seriously questions his stance on equalities. But it was not smart to tell Jemima Khan that the new-look Tory party was "riddled with gays".
Self-harming and some accidents. He wasn't to know perhaps, that the real people in his election video whose concerns reduced him to tears were actors recruited by an advertising agency, but these misfortunes count when the plot is unravelling. For every step forward, two back.
Livingstone tried to shift the focus away from personalities. But it was a hard case to accept from someone whose brand signature, hitherto successful, is the singular use of his first name. He rose as a political personality, and he fell as a political personality because his personality was overwhelmed by the baggage it had acquired over years of largely distinguished public service. This was predictable. Many indeed predicted it in 2010 when Livingstone's long-held grip of the London Labour party saw him easily selected as the candidate.
"You never say never to a warrior like him," said a rueful colleague, but against a lacklustre mayor and unpopular government, a heavy hitter with less baggage might have done better. No one of that stature stepped up. The rest we know. It wasn't just Ken who failed.
