How long should London keep Ken?

The Tories want to limit the number of terms the Mayor can stand. But that won't help them win - and it's also plain undemocratic

Published in the Evening Standard

Here’s a novel way to see off Ken Livingstone. If you can’t beat him at the ballot box, why not simply bar him from standing? It’s a tactic with quite a pedigree: Margaret Thatcher deployed it when she abolished the Livingstone-led Greater London Council 20 years ago and Tony Blair tried it when blocking Ken’s selection as Labour’s mayoral candidate in 2000. And guess what: the Tories are trying it all over again.

In the House of Lords on Tuesday, two Tory peers – who double as the leaders of Kensington & Chelsea and of Essex County Council – slipped in a little amendment to the bill reforming London’s governance. To the category of people disqualified from serving as London’s mayor, they added a new type of person: anyone who “has previously been elected or been the Mayor twice.” Not many people who fit that description. In fact there’s just one. You know the guy: middle-aged, nasal drawl, fondness for newts.

Thanks to Tory and Lib Dem votes, the amendment passed. Unless the Commons reverses it, it will become law – possibly in time to bar Ken in 2008, and certainly to block him in 2012. You can see why Baroness Hanham and Lord Hanningfield would have congratulated themselves on Tuesday night. It must have looked like such a smart wheeze, bringing the London mayor in line with his New York counterpart, who has been bound by a two-term limit for the last decade. With a simple tweak of the law, the seemingly invincible Livingstone would be swept out of the way, levelling the playing field and giving the Tories, at last, a chance of winning power in the capital.

But it’s a delusion, another error by a Conservative party that seems to get more accident-prone the closer it gets to the politics of London. For David Cameron, like Tony Blair before him, City Hall is surely coming to resemble a giant steel-and-glass headache.

Advocates of term limits are keen to present the move as a high-minded democratic reform. Running this city should never be a job for life, they argue. Indeed, Baronness Hanham warned that “the office of mayor now in this country is the nearest thing we have to a dictator,” adding that “there is very little that can stop the mayor doing what he wants to do.”

But that suggests the problem is with the mayor’s powers: if they’re too great, they should be reduced, regardless of how long he serves. The mayor shouldn’t be allowed to rule like a dictator for one day, let alone eight years. (In fact, the mayor’s powers are far weaker than those of his opposite numbers in, say, Chicago or New York.)

It’s futile to look for a coherent, constitutional principle here: you won’t find it. This is raw politics and nothing more. With term limits it always is. Take the most famous example, the rule that prevents a US president serving more than two terms. That was instituted by an exasperated Republican party worn down by losing four times in a row to the great Franklin Roosevelt. You don’t have to think that Ken is a latter-day FDR to see the parallel.

Don’t take my word for it. Tory mayoral hopeful Nicholas Boles was spitting blood yesterday at a move which he insisted had come “from out of the blue.” He told me term limits were “crass and fatuous”, insisting that it was “idiotically defensive to suggest we can’t beat Livingstone without resorting to some device outside politics.”

Principle is on his side, too. In a democracy, voters should be able to choose who governs them and when to kick them out. The notion of two unelected peers, of all people, restricting that right truly sticks in the craw.

One of our more thoughtful politicians agrees with that. In January, he told the House of Commons that term limits were “alien to the British constitution” and would inevitably be seen not as an impartial act but “as an attempt to clip Ken’s wings.”

The trouble is, those words were spoken by Michael Gove, the frontbencher leading for the Conservatives on the London bill in the Commons. Six months ago he was against term limits; now his party is for them. What’s changed? The official line last night was that there had been no shift, and that Tory policy remains as Gove explained it in January. Yet the peers were hardly freelance operators: Hanham is a Conservative frontbencher and was leading on the London bill in the Lords. In other words, Conservative policy in one chamber is the polar opposite of Conservative policy in the other. It looks uncomfortably like another Tory shambles, which have been coming with awkward regularity in recent months.

And nowhere more so than in London. Barely two months have passed since the Greg Dyke fiasco, when Cameron was revealed as ready to put forward no Tory candidate in London, in order to give a clear run to the former BBC boss – only for his offer to be rebuffed. That episode confirmed that whichever Conservative does eventually take on Ken, he will be the leadership’s second choice. Meanwhile, Cameron’s much-vaunted primary process is still stalled, with all too few of the big-name candidates he coveted. As one contributor to the activists’ website, ConservativeHome, put it yesterday: “David Cameron and his office monkeys at CCO [Conservative Central Office] really need to get off their backsides and get a candidate for next years Mayoral elections!”

It’s not just the hunt for a plausible challenger that’s got the London Tories tripped up. They’ve also been outmanouevred on the apparently obscure issue of nominating people to serve on London’s fire authority. The mayor initially rejected all but one of their list of seven names – because there was not a black or Asian Londoner among them. The Lib Dems have been lambasted by the mayor, too: their three nominees were all white men. (Ken has now backed down and accepted the Lib Dem choices). Labour’s nominees were three Asian men, one black woman and one white woman.

The Tories retort that race and gender have got nothing to do with a body that’s about putting out fires. But they’ve walked straight into a classic Livingstone trap. He can note the 41 black, Asian or minority councillors the Conservatives have in London and ask why none were deemed good enough to serve on the fire authority. He can further claim, as one of his senior aides did yesterday, that the two main opposition parties “just don’t get London”. That hurts Cameron especially: just this week he was saying that Gordon Brown “just doesn’t get Britain.”

It’s vintage jujitsu from the mayor, skillfully wrongfooting his opponents, exposing as hollow their claims to be progressive. London is a warning to Cameron of how bumpy the path ahead could be – and no amount of clever parliamentary tricks will help him.

Posted on June 21, 2007 02:50 PM

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