LONDON LETTER:Budget cuts will make it tough for Boris Johnson to placate voters in the city's poorer boroughs
OLD POLITICIANS do not always fade away. Instead, they can, as Labour’s Ken Livingstone has done, stubbornly decide to sit in the public gallery and watch their successor – in his case London’s Conservative mayor Boris Johnson – in action.
Livingstone, who was elected as an independent to the office of mayor in 2000 and then for Labour in 2004, having been readmitted to the party’s ranks, has never come to terms with losing to Johnson in May 2008.
“Losing a job you love is painful,” he said recently.
Since then, he has maintained his profile in the city, partly through a phone-in show on LBC Radio, along with regular press conferences and criticism of the one who came after him.
Livingstone has now launched his bid to be mayor for the third time. If successful in the May 2012 election, he would be back in City Hall in time to welcome the Olympics, which he did much to secure.
Labour is preparing early for the battle, which would be the first serious electoral test for the Conservatives.
Nominations for the Labour contest close tomorrow, though, so far, only two have thrown their names into the hat: Livingstone and former Bethnal Green and Bow MP Oona King.
The final choice will be made in late September by an electoral college made up of Labour Party members in London and of affiliated organisations.
Labour insists that a candidate needs to be in place early, though some London MPs, including Jim Fitzpatrick, believe HQ is trying to stitch up the race in favour of Livingstone.
Fitzpatrick, who supports King’s candidature, said the party’s standard-bearer was not supposed to have been chosen until Christmas, offering Labour the chance to reinvigorate itself in the capital.
“To an outsider it will look like the changes are meant to stifle debate, and to the wider party it looks like one candidate on the inside has an unfair advantage,” he said, especially since it is not clear who has “affiliate” voting status and who does not.
Labour’s general secretary Ray Collins has rejected Fitzpatrick’s allegation, saying that the party had always intended to have a mayoral candidate in place by September.
But others in Labour, not just King, are unhappy about the speed, believing that some high-profile Labour figures might be prepared to leave national politics and take part in the race once the drudgery of opposition sets in.
Former home secretary Alan Johnson, a Londoner, seems to have ruled himself out, though he does possess the type of public profile that King lacks – a problem that has, up to now, held her campaign back.
James Purnell, the man who quit cabinet in the hope of sparking a revolt against Gordon Brown in 2008 only to be left on his own, is another that many would like to see enter the race. But he has not declared a wish to do so.
The choice matters because Johnson is defeatable. His record in City Hall – which he occupies with undoubted style – is questionable, if only because of the number of key aides forced to resign over a variety of malpractice charges.
Two years from now the spending cuts planned by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will have bitten hard, particularly in the poorer boroughs of the capital, testing even Johnson’s ability to portray himself as the city’s champion.
Tube and bus fare rises imposed by the mayor have been unpopular, even if it can be argued they are necessary to sort out the Byzantine finances of Transport for London and fund refurbishment works.
Johnson has never liked Livingstone’s most enduring legacy: the congestion charge motorists in central and western districts of the city have to pay. He pledged to get rid of the western extension in his election campaign.
However, he has struggled to deliver on his promise and only recently launched a bid to see it gone by Christmas Eve. And he he has had to match that move with a plan to increase the charge by £2 in the areas where it will remain in force.
Transport for London believes his plans will cut £55 million from the city’s coffers and increase congestion and pollution, while motorists are unhappy that the planned increase will have doubled the charge since 2003.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s decision to back the City of London so strongly during the financial crisis, particularly over the size of bonuses handed out, will have done him few favours.
He argues that London cannot and should not go along with the national mood for vengeance against bankers because the city is so dependent upon their taxes.
Like most politicians, he has his pet projects and hates. In particular, he wants to see the return of the hop-on, hop-off Routemaster buses and has backed a £10 million plan to redesign the iconic image of London for the modern age.
But he loathes another creation of the Livingstone era, the “bendy bus”, and has vowed to remove all of the articulated extended buses from the streets by 2011. “These writhing whales of the road have swung their hefty rear ends round our corners for the final time,” he has said.
Although Livingstone and Johnson – both egotistical, both brilliant communicators – disagree about what each other has done, both believe that the mayor should have greater powers to raise taxes and ever more freedom from the bureaucrats in Whitehall.
