I’m sure Craig Smith was just trying to make things understandable for his readers in his article about London mayor Ken Livingstone in yesterday’s New York Times.

Hence, this explanation: “Red Ken, as he was once known because of his outspoken liberal views”.

One thing no one has ever accused Livingstone of before is being a liberal. Under any definition of the term, whether the debased, current American version or a more traditional European one, Ken has always been passionately illiberal.

The reason he was labelled Red Ken in the ’80s was because he was determinedly socialist, verging towards the Trotskyite on numerous occasions. So it was red in the sense of reds under the bed. Not red in terms of roses.

I realize liberal is an all-purpose term of political abuse in the US, avoided at all costs by any elective politician (although not, I trust, in my new home of Berkeley). But Smith and his editors at the Times are only encouraging the trope that liberal equals red (in the communist sense), which is nonsensical.