Still wanted - a Mayor who will take on Ken

Published in the Evening Standard

Well, for a moment there it looked like London was going to get a real contest. For a few short hours yesterday, it seemed as if 2008 was not only going to be the year of Hillary Clinton vs Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani vs John McCain, but of a heavyweight bout right here. We were told to get ready for Ken Livingstone vs Greg Dyke.

David Cameron clearly thought it was a runner, holding talks yesterday with Ming Campbell about a plan that would see no Conservative or Liberal Democrat taking on Ken as mayor next year, both parties rallying instead behind the former director-general of the BBC, anointed as a "unity" candidate.

You can see why the idea appealed to Cameron. It had everything: celebrity, surprise, a break from politics-as-usual. The only trouble was, the deal was not done. The candidate himself had not fully committed; then Campbell killed the scheme off entirely when he said the Lib Dems would never countenance a joint candidacy, no matter how attractive the personality involved. By teatime, Mayor Dyke was a distant dream, the former TV executive announcing that he quite liked Ken actually and thought he'd done a decent job as mayor.

The whole episode is pretty shambolic, but it's on David Cameron's face that most of the dripping, yellow stream of egg has landed. It would be embarrassing enough to let word leak of an approach to another party, only for that approach to be comprehensively rebuffed by all involved. But the discomfort does not end there.

For what the Dyke debacle has revealed, nay advertised, is the Conservative party's complete inability to field a credible candidate to take on Ken Livingstone. Indeed, Cameron has effectively admitted that his party's best chance of ousting the mayor is not to run a candidate at all. What does that say to the current crop of would-be Tory nominees? It says what everyone already knows: that the Conservative high command does not see a single winner among them.

You can't blame Cameron for looking at the existing shortlist and tearing his variously-parted hair out. Some of the names on it are comic, and not just metaphorically. Imagine, if you would, Mayor Lurline Champaignie. Or perhaps we should all hail Warwick Lightfoot, who sounds like a Shakespearean nobleman bringing news of a distant battle to Henry IV. There's also a Peter Hobbins and a Winston McKenzie. Going for the place names vote, we have Lee Rotherham. Though in this department surely Richard Barnes has the advantage: at least Barnes is in London.

"None of them would make Ken Livingstone even get out of bed," says one top-rank London Tory, who believes the mayor could snooze his way to re-election. "They're mostly local worthies whose only qualification is their own vaulting ambition and sense of self-importance." That's a bit harsh, especially on Nicholas Boles, the talented head of the Policy Exchange think tank, who's seeking the Tory nomination. Indeed, as a close Cameroonian he has every right to feel rather aggrieved by the botched Dyke manouevre: now he knows his leader and friend was ready to kibosh his chances of a shot at London's top job in a backroom stitch-up with a rival party.

If Cameron wants to look on the bright side, he might reflect that the collapse of this little scheme has probably saved him some trouble. London Tories were already spitting blood yesterday at the thought that they were about to be effectively shut out of the democratic selection process they'd been promised. Dyke could have become Cameron's Frank Dobson, a candidate imposed on his party against its will. As for getting Tory activists in, say, Bromley or Richmond to work with Lib Dems, that assumed they hate Ken more than they loathe each other - not a safe assumption.

Now David Cameron is back where he started, staring at a very empty hole where the Tory nominee should be: no Seb Coe, no Lord Stevens, no Michael Portillo. This is a serious headache for him, because if his brand of modern Conservatism doesn't play in London, if metrosexual Toryism doesn't flourish in the metropolis, what hope does it have across the rest of Britain? It's Frank Sinatra in reverse: if he can't make it here, he can't make it anywhere.

Next month's elections in Scotland, Wales and for local councils (excluding London) in England could well magnify the problem. For all the media love affair with Cameron, for all his successes in the Westminster village, the current polling and focus group evidence suggests the further away he gets from London and the south east, the more he struggles. Tories will hope that on May 3 they can make some inroads in the Midlands and the north west, to show this territory is at least not closed to them. But if they cannot break through in London, the city which should be the citadel of Cameronism, then the party's national electoral prospects would start looking distinctly shaky.

So London is a prize the Conservatives simply cannot afford to yield: they need to find a candidate who looks like he or she could genuinely become mayor, as well as a programme that appeals to the people of this city. But it's not only in the Tories' interest that they solve this riddle. It also matters to London.

Yesterday, Ken Livingstone told reporters he'd like to serve until 2016, winning re-election not only next year but again on the eve of the Olympics in 2012. Some might have reckoned he was joshing around, but Ken was deadly serious. If anything, I'm only surprised he set his departure date so early. I would have thought 2020 looked like a rounder number.

He's entitled to his ambition, and if voters keep re-electing him there's no reason why Ken shouldn't go on and on and on. But it's not healthy for that to become automatic, for the mayoralty of London to become a personal fiefdom, the capital a one-man, one-party state. Democracies are like economies: they need competition.

If the mayoralty is to become an enduring institution, Londoners need to see that it can work with someone other than Ken Livingstone. That means some big beast, plausible candidates coming forward to take him on. Greg Dyke would have been ideal. But when comes such another?

Posted on April 19, 2007 05:27 PM

---