This summer’s election to choose a new deputy regional sales manager of the Co-op, sorry, a new leader of the Labour party, has rather obviously failed to set the nation on fire. But one level below the sundry Eds and assorted Milibands, there’s a much clearer and more interesting battle for Labour’s soul.
In the party’s highest-membership region, London, the graphic designers and diversity outreach consultants who make up Labour’s new industrial base are choosing a mayoral candidate to oppose Boris Johnson in 2012. Officially, the odd timing — nominations closed only six weeks after the general election, and almost two years before polling day — is to allow the successful nominee to ‘establish their presence’ with the London electorate. In practice, it seems designed to benefit someone whose presence with the London electorate is all too balefully established: the former mayor, Ken Livingstone.
By not allowing enough time for various ex-ministerial or MP candidates to get campaigns together, the theory seems to have been that Ken would have a clear run at correcting the grave error made by the voters in 2008. Livingstone’s long-standing chief of staff, Simon Fletcher, was a senior officer of the London Labour party until just before the selection timetable was drawn up, but there can’t possibly be any connection.
That, though, was the theory. A bit like the Circle Line, this particular bandwagon isn’t running quite to schedule. Ken may prefer coups to contests — he famously scored his first big job, the GLC leadership, through a putsch against the man the voters thought they’d elected — but his opponent for the 2012 nomination, Oona King, is threatening to make it a fight.
She has the support of more London Labour MPs than Ken, though he has more councillors. The characters of the rival campaigns are no better symbolised than by their supporters. She is backed by Simon Schama. He is backed by Aslef, the union for train drivers and operators.
At the campaign hustings, almost all in solidly Labour parts of the capital, the activists sit in rows, sighing with pleasure, as Ken tells them that everything can be all right. The cuts can be stopped. The clock can be turned back. Bendy buses running on Venezuelan petrol can once again cruise the streets of London. It can all be exactly how it was, if only we get rid of the evil Tories, scrap Trident and tax a few bankers. In Southall recently, Ken actually described the deficit as a ‘scare’ and said that what Britain needed was a ‘1945-style’ programme of even more public spending.
Ken’s platform is such an extraordinary heritage artefact that it would probably be eligible for a National Lottery grant. Everything which lost him the 2008 election — the gas-guzzler tax, the embrace of radical Islamists, the defiant denial of cronyism — is still in there.
He has promised to reappoint his disgraced race adviser, Lee Jasper, who he claims has been ‘cleared’ by an independent inquiry (it actually said that Jasper’s behaviour in channelling millions of pounds to friends, including a woman he wanted to ‘honey glaze’, was ‘inappropriate’ and ‘below the standards expected’ of a GLA officer). He describes Boris’s election as a ‘sliver victory’. If only four Tory boroughs didn’t exist, he would still be mayor right now!
Labour ought to have quite a decent chance of regaining City Hall in 2012. At the recent general election, it won slightly more votes in London than the Tories. Boris’s was far from a ‘sliver’ victory — he won by 6 per cent, taking 21 of the 32 boroughs — but he will still be vulnerable to the government’s midterm unpopularity. The Lib Dem south-west suburbs, which voted for Ken in 2004 and Boris in 2008, could easily switch back to Labour in protest at the coalition.
But it’s very difficult to imagine any of that happening if the candidate is the Rip van Winkle, cryogenically frozen Livingstone. He inspires both love and passionate loathing. He hasn’t shown even the smallest sign of understanding why he really lost, or of reaching out to the centre vote he spurned. This week, as the Tube strike brings large parts of London to a halt, Ken has not yet found time in his busy schedule to condemn the strikers. Could this have anything to do with the fact that his campaign for the mayoralty is being run out of the Euston headquarters of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association?
He claims he was defeated because of Labour’s national unpopularity; in fact, Labour was almost as unpopular in 2004, when he comfortably won. He says he ran ahead of his party in 2008 — true, but Boris also ran ahead of the Tory party, and by almost exactly the same margin. He thinks he can win simply by running against the government — without realising that Boris, too, is quite capable of running against the government.
The schtick of total resistance to the cuts just isn’t credible with voters who know that Labour would have done very much the same. Nor does lashing the bankers sit well from someone who, as mayor, campaigned furiously against heavier regulation of the City and against even the token taxation of non-dom financiers. King, by contrast, is clearly trying to broker diplomatic relations with the real world. She spends much of the hustings meetings talking her party back from the cliff. ‘We have to look at what gets results,’ she said in Southall. ‘The fights of the 1980s didn’t work. Posturing and gesturing doesn’t get houses built… I would ask every member here tonight if they want to win. If you do, we have to reach out beyond the core vote.’
She lacks Ken’s apparent command of policy minutiae — though, on close examination, much of what he says turns out to be made up. But the people of London won’t really be choosing policies — they’ll be choosing a person. They’ve already made their choice between Boris and Ken. Oona has the sort of personality which might persuade voters to take another look.
The odds, of course, are against her winning the nomination. Among political activists of all stripes, thinking has never been popular. Yet for all Ken’s crowd-pleasing, it does seem that at least some are not pleased. Even among the hustings activists, King gets decent, often prolonged applause. But her real task is to appeal to those members who never go to such meetings.
In that, Team King is somewhat frustrated. The London election has been buried by the national leadership contest; and most of the national contenders have been silent about their preference in the capital. They shouldn’t be: they’ll be saddled with whoever gets the London nomination, and it is in some ways as important as who wins the leadership.
Because London offers a Technicolor version of the choice which faces Labour nationally: between embracing reality, or embracing brain-death. It is also the party’s first big electoral test since losing power. If Labour takes back City Hall, it could signal that it is on track for government. If it selects a candidate who is almost certain to lose, it signals that it is happy to spend the next two years, or longer, in a coma.
Andrew Gilligan is London editor of the Telegraph Media Group.