Livingstone unveils his secret family

Mayor Ken Livingstone, who was thought by Londoners to have become a father for the first time at the age of 57, when he had the first of two children with his partner Emma Beale, admitted on Thursday that he actually has five children by three different women. Livingstone, fighting a tough campaign to keep his job in the May 1 election, confirmed to BBC London that he had two older daughters with one woman and a son by another.

Livingstone, who is behind his Conservative rival Boris Johnson in the opinion polls, refused to believe voters would be scandalised in any way. He said: "I don't think anybody in this city is shocked about what consenting adults do. As long as you don't involve children, animals or vegetables they leave people to get on and live their own life in their own way."

It is understood Livingstone made the announcement to pre-empt a new biography Ken: the Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone by Andrew Hoskens which contains the revelation. The book is being serialised by a national newspaper and Livingstone, who said family and close friends already knew about his five children, was keen to deal with any fallout in advance.
"If I had secrets that my family or my close friends didn't know about, then that would be a different matter," he told the BBC. "But there's a difference between private and secret and I think the media's got to understand that." He added: "It seems like only yesterday the press was trying to imply I was gay."

Boris Johnson is unlikely to make political mileage from the revelation. In 2004 it emerged that when he was editor of the Spectator, he had a four-year extra-marital affair with one of the magazine's staff, Petronella Wyatt.