Ken cashes in on Banksy graffiti

Another bad week for London mayor Ken Livingstone - his friend and race advisor Lee Jasper resigned on Tuesday amid allegations of cronyism and misconduct - finally perked up on Thursday night when he raised almost a quarter of a million pounds for his re-election campaign with an auction of works donated by famous artists.

The auction, as previewed on The First Post, saw Ken's friends in the art world rally to his cause. Anthony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Mona Hatoum, Ralph Steadman and street artist of the moment Banksy all donated pieces to the auction. As a result, Ken's campaign received £230,000, most of which came when the Banksy, a painting of two children pledging allegiance to a Tesco bag, went for a staggering £195,000 to an anonymous bidder.

Livingstone himself picked up a Steadman cartoon for £140, and praised the artists involved for helping him to match the spending of his Tory rival, Boris Johnson. "We are allowed to spend up to £1m on campaigning. Boris has got a quarter of a million, so now we've caught up with him."

But the Bansky could return to haunt Livingstone. The work sold last night appears to be an early sketch for a Banksy graffiti that went up on the side of a pharmacy in Islington, north London, this week (pictured above). How Ken will square receiving almost a fifth of his mayoral warchest from a street artist when he has already excoriated graffiti as "the scourge of this city" is anyone's guess.