Labour has not got "the heart" for another mayoral election battle with Ken Livingstone, warns a member of the party's National Executive Committee.

Responding to a row over a rumoured reconciliation between Millbank and London's mayor, expelled from the party for beating May 2000's official candidate Frank Dobson, Mark Seddon, believes that no one "in their right minds" would field a Labour candidate against Livingstone in May 2004.

"The vast majority of the London Labour Party would welcome him back with open arms. I don't think anyone in their right minds is thinking along the lines of running an official Labour candidate against Ken Livingstone this time," he told ePolitix.

Labour activists, the Tribune editor cautions Millbank party chiefs, will not put in the work for another candidate "to have his her nose rubbed in it".

"I don't think there is the heart for it, for that candidate to have his or her nose rubbed in it," he said.

The NEC member is unconcerned that Labour would have to overturn its own rules to allow Livingstone back into the party fold - he was expelled for five years in 2000, the next mayoral contest is in 2004. "[Millbank] can come back and make a rules revision, that's not a problem."

Seddon believes that "everyone knows" what happened following the centrally imposed electoral colleges in London and there is no "real" debate in Labour about undoing the damage done by a "fixed" election process that excluded Livingstone .

"The electoral colleague for London was cobbled together and everyone knows what happened there. There's no real debate, we know what happened," he said.

"We know how that election was fixed and that is one of the reasons why Livingstone won, people don't like seeing people treated unfairly".

He rejects continuing claims, made on ePolitix, from leading Labour MPs, Tony Banks and Mike Gapes, that Livingstone remains untrustworthy.

"It is time to make amends and I think people like Tony Banks and Michael Gapes are simply out of touch," he told this website.

And Seddon insists that Tony Blair must eat humble pie, "right an old wrong" and let Livingstone back into Labour.

"I think he is going to have to, I think it would be a magnanimous act that would right an old wrong."