Why isn’t the mayor making mincemeat of Ken?
Politicians do love their five-point plans, ten-point plans, 12-point plans, don’t they? Most of the points are usually Polyfilla, the political equivalents of ‘Your call is important to us,’ but at least there’s a nice round number involved. Last week, however, with characteristic originality, Boris Johnson unveiled British politics’ first-ever nine-point plan.
Unkind critics sniped that it was a ten-point plan with one point missing. Even for better-disposed observers, such as myself, Boris’s Nine Commandments — intended as the foundation of his re-election campaign — leave something to be desired.
Until recently, the Groundhog rematch between Johnson and his defeated 2008 opponent, Ken Livingstone, looked like ending in an equally Groundhog result. But since the New Year, Boris’s big lead has vanished: with eight weeks to go, all the polls so far in 2012 have put the two essentially neck-and-neck. Low murmurs have started, including in No. 10, that Boris’s campaign is ‘underwhelming’, that it lacks a simple ‘retail offer’ for voters, that people don’t know what Johnson has achieved in the job.
The nine-point plan, consciously or unconsciously, both acknowledges and exemplifies these problems. Point three, for instance, promises to ‘create 200,000 new jobs over the next four years’. But point four is ‘making our streets and homes safer with 1,000 more police on the beat’, something Boris has accomplished in his current mayoral term. It is trying to do two things at once: educate us in the great man’s achievements, and set out his agenda for the future. The risk, though, is that it simply confuses people.
The other risk is that the agenda for the future is not, so far, particularly action-packed. As well as the job creation, specific policy pledges comprise cutting waste, freezing the council tax, reducing Tube delays and planting some trees. Boris, understandably contemptuous of terms like ‘retail offer’, has acted until recently as if all he really needs is a two-point plan (point one: I am, and will remain, Boris Johnson. Point two: I am not, and never will be, Ken Livingstone).
In pursuit of point one, Boris’s City Hall staff tried to position him as almost a non-political figure, a man who reached out to all Londoners, a funnier, more hirsute version of the Queen. He spent a lot of time opening things and making jolly, small and medium-sized announcements about subjects that don’t matter to most voters.
One day last year, as Labour was campaigning hard on violent crime, which had just started to tug faintly in the wrong direction, I looked on the City Hall website and found that Boris had been ... er ... ‘meeting Peter Andre to help recruit Reading Ambassadors’ and ... well ... ‘joining his Street Party Ambassador, Barbara Windsor, at the “Big Lunch” festivities on the South Bank’. The top item on the website’s front page was ‘London’s bees are in trouble. Find out how you can help them.’
Incumbents lose when they get too wrapped up in the administrative and adulatory aspects of the job and forget the politics. Livingstone lost when he majored on what, for voters, are second-order issues like the environment, while having nothing to say about transport or crime. That’s not a mistake he’s making now. But throughout January, as Ken made headway with a simple, populist — if totally fraudulent — pledge to cut Tube fares, Team Boris allowed its opponent the pitch.
Perhaps they were too busy, down at City Hall, with key stakeholder meetings on the London biodiversity strategy. Perhaps they thought Boris should stay above politics. But the job is inescapably political. And it is notable that in the month since Johnson has started campaigning, sort of, Livingstone’s poll momentum has been checked.
Boris should be making more headway, though, because Ken is almost the perfect opponent. A full-time politician since 1971, he will be tough to sell as the change candidate. In 2008 I wrote that Johnson was a serious man pretending to be a buffoon, while Livingstone was a buffoon pretending to be a serious man. Over the last four years, both have increasingly dropped the pretence. Like the euro, the Boris gaffe index has sunk to record lows. By contrast, barely a month goes by without Livingstone calling for someone to be hanged.
The former mayor is also quite possibly the biggest hypocrite in Britain. After the hacking scandal broke, he eagerly denounced Boris for enjoying ‘at least two meals with Rebekah Brooks’. Ken had to be gently reminded that he had, in fact, been a columnist at the Sun for several months after the hacking scandal broke. In that very newspaper, indeed, he penned a fierce broadside against ‘rich bastard’ tax avoiders who should ‘not be allowed to vote’. Last week, Ken’s latest campaign push — a class-war crusade against Boris for his Daily Telegraph earnings — came totally off the tracks after it emerged that Livingstone himself avoided £50,000 tax by having his own rather large earnings channelled through a personal company.
Ken is rather freer with other people’s taxes. As if the public debt crisis never happened, he has been touring London, thrusting expensive new spending promises at every special-interest group he can find, while at the same time promising to hire more police, build new tramlines, cut fares and freeze the council tax. Asked at one point how he would pay for all this, he replied: ‘The morning after my election, I’ll let you know.’
That morning would not, alas, be a happy one for voters waiting under Ken’s Christmas tree. His pledge to ‘reinstate’ the Educational Maintenance Allowance, for instance, turns out to rely on other people’s money: money that they have not agreed (or have indeed already refused) to give him; money he does not control; money often actually ring-fenced for other uses. Even the EMA promise, though, is more solid than the fares one. That, according to Transport for London, rests on money that doesn’t exist at all.
•••
But though Boris is fighting back, he is not yet doing it effectively enough. By this stage of the last campaign, he had already launched his crime and transport manifestos. This time round, policies have been slower to emerge. One potentially distinctive plan — driverless Tube trains — could win thousands of votes from strike-weary commuters, and shine a harsh spotlight on Ken’s funding from the Tube unions. But it wasn’t properly launched, trickling out in low-impact media interviews and allowing its opponents to misrepresent it as a threat to safety.
Sometimes, unforgivably, Team Boris puts out two messages at once. The driverless Tube interview, to the Evening Standard, came the same day as — and obliterated in that newspaper, London’s most important media outlet — the launch of the new Routemaster bus, a key Boris achievement.
There are more of those than you think, by the way — achievements, that is, not buses. Crime continues to fall. Tube delays are down by 40 per cent, at least according to TfL, partly because its disastrous public-private partnership, which Livingstone could not kill, has been killed by Johnson. Hugely more people are cycling, and not just on the Boris bikes. Sleaze and interest-group politics have been ended at City Hall. But running on your record, and promising to continue your good work, didn’t cut it for Livingstone in 2008, and it won’t for Johnson in 2012.
Boris’s policies don’t only, in the parlance, need to be more ‘eye-catching.’ They need to dramatise the central test of this election. May 3 will be i mportant, not just for the fates of the capital, or Johnson, or Ed Miliband, though it will be important for all those things — but as a test of adult politics versus, if you like, pre-crash Greek politics. Is it possible to be elected on a platform of so brazenly shovelling fantasy money at people, so cynically dedicated to telling them whatever they want to hear?
In the end, I suspect it won’t be. It’s all slightly too obvious and desperate. Ken’s Exocet — the fares cut — was fired far too soon, and his other freebies aren’t gaining traction. Under enough scrutiny, as I found last time, Ken unravels. Both in 2008 and now, he was and is ahead on nearly all the issues, and nearly all the character questions — competence, being ‘in touch’ and so on — all, that is, except one, the only one that turned out in 2008 to matter: trust. Far more now than before, Ken is a Technicolor caricature of the policies that cost Labour the public’s trust. Even his strongest suit, on fares, becomes a liability if turned into an issue of trust.
Watching them campaigning, Ken and Boris, in the last mayoral election, what often struck me was how crap they were at it, in their different ways. There was Boris, flustered under fire, not brilliant in debate. There was Ken, snide and reptilian, so obviously calculating. But Boris’s failings are more endearing than Ken’s. They are, in fact, part of his appeal. And though he needs more policy, this election will mainly, in the end, be about personality, not policy.
If it went along national party lines, it would already be over. Labour is 12 to 15 points ahead of the Tories in the capital. But Boris has unusually high cross-party appeal; he is the only Tory who can win London at the moment. Paradoxically, however, that may be one of the things holding him back.
Some around the mayor are worried that if he appears too ‘ideological’, too ‘confrontational’, he will lose the so-called ‘Boris Labour’ vote. But I think these people already have an accurate idea of his politics — fiscally conservative, socially liberal. They vote for him because they prefer his personality.
Other stars are in Boris’s favour. London’s economy is doing better than the country’s. He will probably get his act together in time — he usually does. But one other thing I go by is this. I’ve talked to quite a lot of people about the election already. And what I notice is that when voters talk about Boris, they smile.
Andrew Gilligan is the Telegraph’s London editor.