Twenty years ago this week, London began a journey into a political unknown. For the first time in history, its voters were asked to directly elect a mayor. Their answer was a twist of irony. They voted for the same man who, 15 years earlier, Margaret Thatcher had sacked as London’s previous “indirect” leader, Ken Livingstone, the former head of the Greater London council. They chose the devil they knew. Has the game been worth the candle?
The origins of the reform lay in a report by the 1993 Commission for Local Democracy, of which I was a member, which proposed elected mayors as a route to revitalising local participation in democracy. In 1995 we persuaded Tony Blair, then in opposition, that it would be a suitably radical departure for his new government. He was hesitant, but saw the proposal as a way to circumvent his opponents among old Labour’s civic cliques. Despite the adamant opposition of his local government shadow, Frank Dobson, Blair put the idea into his 1997 manifesto and, in 1999, into legislation.
Opponents of the proposal, however, forced Blair into a crucial concession. He should allow cities to decide in a local referendum if they wanted the change. The referendums were commandeered by the same local politicians that had most to lose from the reform, with the result that it was all but killed. A mere dozen cities voted for a mayor, but one that did overwhelmingly was London, with 72% in favour. Elections were fixed for May 2000. Initially there was a burst of high-profile runners mooted, such as Richard Branson, Glenda Jackson, Alan Sugar and Jeffrey Archer.
In the event, Livingstone ran as an independent and won. He took to the job as to the manner born. He did not revert to his GLC leftwing anarchism, instead demonstrating the value of doing a job for a second time. He emphasised he was “mayor for all London”, eagerly met City and business leaders and moved from a modest office in Marsham Street to his glamorous Norman Foster-designed “glass testicle” opposite the Tower of London.
Livingstone held down bus fares, introduced a London congestion charge and Oyster cards and prepared a new London Plan, a concept long dormant. He even had a vision of sorts, albeit controversial, of London as “Manhattan on Thames”. He loved tower blocks and raised no objection to Blair’s eagerness to welcome what Peter Mandelson called the world’s “disgustingly rich” into the capital.
The mayoralty was handicapped by serious flaws in the 1999 Greater London Authority Act, which curbed the powers of the mayor’s new office. In the first place, the office had virtually nothing to run, at least compared with mayors abroad. Livingstone had no role in the capital’s schools, colleges, social care, health service or housing provision. He had only a shared responsibility for the police – which meant no responsibility in practice.
One thing the mayor did run was public transport. In the case of Transport for London this immediately drew Livingstone into a fight with Gordon Brown’s determination that the Treasury privatise the London Tube. Livingstone and his American transport chief, Bob Kiley, won the argument but lost the fight. Anyone who believes in the superiority of central over local government in Britain should study this costly fiasco. It culminated in the Tube’s renationalisation by the Tories within a decade. In a nutshell, the mayoralty was proving to be just the old GLC, indeed with the same boss.
In retrospect, Livingstone’s early term was probably the most effective of the London mayoralty so far. The decision of Boris Johnson to run for mayor in 2008 was bold. London at the time was firmly Labour and his victory over Livingstone was remarkable. Local democracy in Britain suffers from a charisma deficit, and Johnson seemed an ideal antidote. He was as lighthearted as his policies were lightweight, but he knew how to cheer people up.
Johnson was a disappointment as mayor. Like his successor, Sadiq Khan, every day seemed to be designed as his next step up the political ladder. Though he was ahead of his time in his cycleways policy, there was no attempt to curb London’s uniquely chaotic roadworks. No action was demanded, let alone taken, to halt the emptying of residential districts into foreign bank accounts, or to meet the clear inadequacies of rental regulation.
The photo opportunities were relentless. There were helter-skelters, zipwires, garden bridges, rear-entry buses, Olympic Games, bread and circuses. Livingstone’s cycle scheme became “Boris bikes”. Johnson showed no intellectual engagement with the job, delegating his limited planning powers to his deputy, Sir Edward Lister, friendliest of friends to London’s property barons. Having pledged not to create “Dubai-on-Thames”, the two men left London the only European capital with no discipline whatsoever over its skyline. The only language London planning talked was money.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
