Will red London turn blue for Cameron?

Published in the Evening Standard 4 May 2006

You've got hand it to them for sheer dedication. Yesterday - cutting it fine, I'll admit - the Conservative party of Hackney dropped a leaflet through the door, asking for my vote in the local council elections that take place in London and across England today. That's dedication because, as I'm sure even their most bullish partisan would confess, Hackney falling to the Tories is about as likely as Wayne Rooney throwing off his plaster cast and dancing Swan Lake at the Coliseum.

Still, that hasn't deterred them from offering a robust local message, denouncing the council for wasting #70m on a new Town Hall, and offering a slate of candidates that reflect some of the borough's ethnic mix: the three Tory names on my ballot paper are Jacob Landau, Eric Ollerenshaw and Shuja Shaikh. Their mayoral candidate is Andrew Boff, a gay man who took part in one of the first civil partnership ceremonies last December.

So full marks for effort to the Hackney Conservatives. They clearly understand something that the wider Tory party is only just beginning to learn: that if the Conservatives are ever to win a general election, they have to rebuild themselves in even the most unpromising areas - which include Hackney.

This is not a platitude; it is hard-headed political reality. Tony Travers, the LSE's local government doyen, believes it's an iron rule that no party can win a parliamentary seat in an area where it has no councillors. That's the Tory party's plight in parts of the Midlands and the north, which is why it's sinking huge resources into individual wards in Manchester and elsewhere, determined to get the local toehold which, according to Travers's Law, will put them back into contention for national elections.

"In that sense," says Travers, "London is the least of their worries, because they do have a presence here." The Conservatives will hold citadels like Westminster and Wandsworth tonight, but they also hope to grab Labour boroughs like Croydon and Hammersmith & Fulham, too. And those are the easy ones. Remarkably, the Tories used to hold Haringey; today it is a Tory-free zone, a northern city inside London. Disaffected residents defected to the Lib Dems, not the Conservatives, squeezing the latter out altogether. When the Tories start winning there once more, picking up council seats in Hornsey or Wood Green, we'll know they're back.

But that is a long process. At a recent briefing of senior Conservatives, Travers (who, rigorously independent, is happy to share his wisdom with all parties) spelled out the challenge. "You have a tall mountain to climb," he told them. "You can take the stairs - or you can take the lift."

The "stairs" refers to the long, gradual process of winning council seats in once hostile terrain. To build up the critical mass required could take as long as 12 years. The "lift" refers to winning not council seats, but mayor's races. Where's there's a mayoral election to be won, the Tories, armed with a sufficiently attractive candidate, could conquer in a single night a city that might otherwise have taken a decade to capture.

That would require the Conservatives to embrace the mayoral idea more emphatically than they have so far - seeing in it the route to their own salvation - but something else, too. They would have to find the first class candidates who could sweep cities and boroughs that have remained impregnable until now.

That is harder than it seems, as London illustrates. For which Tory would have a plausible chance of ousting Ken Livingstone? Steve Norris has made two manful attempts and remains popular, but there's no evidence he would be third time lucky. Sebastian Coe is plausible, but his sights are set on running the International Olympic Committee rather than City Hall. That leaves one other possible, the perennial prince across the water who BC, Before Cameron, was the object of Notting Hill Tory yearnings: Michael Portillo.

The trouble is, Portillo doesn't want to do it; he insists he's given up politics for good, preferring a media career that allows him to speak his mind and nuzzle up to Diane Abbott on Andrew Neil's TV sofa. I'm told that leading Cameroons are advising him that his "media balloon will need reinflating soon," and that there's no better oxygen than a re-entry into politics. Even if he loses, runs this logic, he'll have refreshed his media brand.

Let's say the Tories get lucky with candidates; there's still more they have to do. This is a shift larger than personalities; it is about principle. For the Conservatives would have to become the lead advocates of localism, the belief that decisions are best taken close to the people they affect - which means locally, wherever possible.

Right now, the Conservatives are talking a good game. Oliver Letwin, in charge of the policy review, promises a 'localism audit,' ensuring that all public bodies are "pushing power in the right direction, which is downward." He says the party has learned from its mistake in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's response to disobedient authorities in London and Liverpool was to claw power back to the centre.

But the words don't quite fit the deeds. One of Cameron's earliest acts was to back the government's education bill, which sought to take power away from local education authorities. He also vowed to block local authorities from instituting selection in schools: whatever you think of the merits of selection itself, that still represented a preference for national government over local. Meanwhile, his health spokesman denounces the 'postcode lottery', which allows certain medicines to be available in some places but not others, promising to impose national standards. That's a funny kind of localism.

The suspicion lurks that David Cameron could turn out to resemble Tony Blair on this matter - officially signed up to devolution, but with none of the in-the-gut commitment such a change in political culture really requires. Yet it's the local that could offer his party their best route back to power - as tonight may well prove.

Posted on May 4, 2006 11:26 AM

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