Why are the Tories vacating the political arena in London?

Natasha Pszenicki
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Laurence Fox has cartwheeled his way into the London mayoral race, promising to release us from lockdown a few weeks early — the sole talking-point intervention so far. The mayoral system was conceived as an opportunity for London to raise its voice in national life and project the capital’s appeal internationally. It is dwindling into a “so what?” interstice in the political calendar.

We cannot blame Sadiq Khan for not rocking the boat when he was about 20 per cent ahead at the last big poll a month ago and his main opponent is barely registering on the attention radar. It need not be like this. “The Tories can’t win London” was a notion disassembled (twice) by Boris Johnson, with the backing of a formidable party machine and a fair wind from Conservative media fed up with a Blairite centre-Left ascendancy in the capital. And even if we consider the Boris period as a one-off, the same New Statesman poll that gave Khan his big lead concluded that two-thirds of Londoners are open to the idea of changing sides, if the right candidate emerged.

Not this time though. No disrespect to Shaun Bailey, who is grafting away with dwindling resources and little professional campaign support. He exemplifies what the party could be in diverse urban areas — black, unposh and with a clear track record of charity work and advocacy for London’s underprivileged ethnic minorities, while taking tough “Tory-classic” positions on knife crime and eschewing the wilder extremes of identity politics.

But a back-story only works if there is a front-story too and Bailey’s ideas remain piecemeal — even after a year’s delay which should benefit a challenger refining his pitch as the pandemic caused more financial woes for the mayor. His social media looks natty, but the messaging is erratic. A recent tweet declaring that Khan had “broken 56 per cent of his manifesto pledges” since 2016  leapt out for its artificial precision, distracting us from the nature of lapses Bailey is trying to highlight. What were the 44 per cent that got delivered?

The wavering beam of the Mayor’s focus leaves plenty to attack. TfL’s funding mess predated the pandemic and is now acute. Khan’s knife-crime strategy varies too much to rank as a convincing set of remedies and there’s too great a predictability to Khanite bodies such as the new commission for “diversity in the public realm”. With few exceptions, a narrow “Sadiq clique”  sets the tone of the mayoralty. As identity politic has risen up the agenda, it feels like the old Livingstone-era, just without the Venezuelan-supporting lunacy and with the odd anti-Brexit light show. There’s no accompanying strategy for reconnecting London to disgruntled European capitals, nor any big push to connect with the world beyond.

A candidate from an ethnic minority background (Bailey has Jamaican heritage) is a smart choice for the Conservative Party, whose promotion of more diverse figures at ministerial level causes teeth-grinding in a Labour party still astonishingly white at senior levels. But a socially conservative contender is painfully ill-matched to a city where even the “donut” of outer London seats that secured the mayoralty for Boris tends towards left-liberal viewpoints, and gentrification in the inner boroughs is accompanied by creeping trendification of the outer ones.

An alternative model to the “charisma mayor” is to find bidders whose technocratic gifts bring something different to the role — the mayor of Miami is making the city into one of the newest tech-hub centres in the US. But that’s a case of finding your mini-Bloomberg and then setting a clear agenda for transformation with an expert team in tow. London is not helped by its low level of devolution— but the job brings a pulpit and convening power with it.

It is a shame that Bailey,  a committed campaigner on youth crime, doesn’t have a role in London politics — and the Sadiq clique could do with a shot of bi-partisanship in its second stint. He’d certainly bring some edge to that panel on renaming statues and buildings. But the lesson of the dullest campaign in the mayoralty’s short history is that the Tories need to take a harder look at why they have vacated the political arena in a city that should lead and inspire post-pandemic Britain. The trouble with losing municipal races is that it starts out as an omission — and turns, one dull election after another, into a habit.

AnneMcElvoy is senior editor at The Economist and hosts The Economist Asks talk show podcast

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