FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

There's Still Time to Save the Most Boring Mayoral Elections Yet

​Last time, the airwaves were dominated by pugilistic soundbites from Boris and Ken. This time, the airwaves have been dominated by pugilistic soundbites from Boris and Ken. What went wrong?

Last time out, the airwaves were dominated by pugilistic soundbites from Boris and Ken. This time out, the airwaves have been dominated by pugilistic soundbites from Boris and Ken. So what went wrong? How did the race for London's City Hall, historically Britain's most character-dominated contest, turn into such a greyish porridge of TfL cashflow footnotes?

If the polls are right, on Thursday voters will turn out and elect Sadiq Khan to be London's first non-character mayor. Sadiq isn't your typical mayor only because he is exactly your typical politician. He's all the people Ken beat - Steven Norris, Frank Dobson: a confirmed Westminster inmate who probably wrote down all his political ambitions age nine and has merely been ticking them off ever since.

Advertisement

Anyone who'd listened to Zac Goldsmith on the backbenches of the Commons might've assumed they were in the presence of a future star - a man of guts and iron will. It hasn't turned out that way.

Zac's euthanasia has been gentle, because the patient very clearly wants to die. In fact, watching him on the stump at various hustings, I've been put in mind of a man who thinks he is already dead. Who is suffering from a sort of political Cotard's Syndrome. You wouldn't be surprised if he started fondling his balls, or singing Aerosmith's 'Love In An Elevator' halfway into a hustings, believing himself to be invisible to voters.

Perhaps, like many of the SS guards we read so much about in the popular press nowadays, Zac's personal death wish is a function of the crimes his superiors have made him do. It seems unlikely that Zac is personally interested in whether Sadiq is going to rob Hindus of their gold. But the people behind him - agents of Tory PR 'guru' Lynton Crosby - have made it central: applying the same differentiated turnout, the same racially-slippery dog-whistle strategies, that won them two elections for Boris, and an against-the-odds victory at the last election.

All the trying to smear Sadiq with Islamic extremism: it can't be easy for Zac, apparently very charming in person, to have to go up there night after night, and run through a lot of tedious tenuous bilge about how one of Sadiq's many sisters' long-divorced husbands once gave a speech about 'kuffar' in 1997. Or how Sadiq has 'shared a platform' with extremists - recycling the ancient myth that platforms are contagious.

Advertisement

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic, because Sadiq may well be the least-Muslim Muslim operating in British politics, as demonstrated in the cringey moment when John Humphrys pulled the same trick he once did to Tony Blair: asking a man about his prayer habits. Listeners were left squirming as Sadiq attempted to triangulate the Muslim base he needed against the secular liberals he had to court, all without making it obvious that he didn't actually give a shit. "I pray when I can, if my mum's listening I'm sorry I pray late sometimes."

Zac could at least have had the decency to lead on the kind of horrorshow that Sadiq actually is: a dead-eyed careerist lawyer. Likewise, Sadiq, instead of crying racism, might've had the basic good grace to call Zac what he is: the late-lamb son of a dad he could never live up to, a series of rockpools of sadness, drowning under the weight of his own conscience, drifting listlessly around the planet in pursuit of causes that might help him lift the crushing weight of billionaire's ennui. Or something like that.

The other big issue has been the lack of a clear idea that actually divides the two. Something for voters to cling to. In previous races, we've at least had big ticket items - ideas that have marked one candidate or the other. Nowhere was this stunt more cannily done than with Boris' new Routemasters.

Overall, a new bus is a fairly minor thing, but it spoke to a change in culture. From London as a dun utilitarian place, where bendy buses were considered to decrease load-in time, thereby speeding up the bus service by 20 utils an hour. To a city that recognised its own exquisite design heritage - a London fit for Londoners. And by implication - that Ken was captain of the team of politburo technocrats who've given us the coppers-in-hi-viz gaudy visual cacophony of the present age.

Advertisement

Did Boris actually go around the TV studios making little vroom-vroom bus noises and revving his bus model across the studio floor or did I just embellish that detail? The point is, when you thought 'Boris', you thought 'bus'. And when you thought Ken, you thought 'no bus'. Bus won.

Surely, therefore, new candidates could have learned that lesson by now. With the London budget fixed centrally, there's no particular argument to be had about the macro-economy. It's just: what free stuff can you give us?

How they get to their stuff or even the quality of it barely matters. Candidates could easily be given an Etch-a-Sketch and a couple of hours, and they can figure out something to sell to London. It can be like that bit in The Apprentice where they have to come up with an ad for kosher panty-liners and it 'hilarity ensues'. I would love to see Sadiq talking through the Clerkenwell to Bank segment of his London monorail, or Zac raking up enough matchsticks to balance the aesthetics of the Trafalgar Square Dog Chariot Racing Track.

The only other point where the race turned lip-smacking was when Zac was asked to complete the sequence of tube stops: Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road… (the answer's "Holborn", obviously). But couldn't. Because, well, why would you if you had seventeen jillion pounds?

Obviously, knowing about which exit you need to hop between Charing Cross and Embankment won't help you trim a £10.8 billion transport budget. But it will entertain the mongers at your hustings by giving them a sense of upwards or downwards class prejudice they can cling to.

Advertisement

READ: How Boris Johnson Fucked London

Finally, the course for tedium was set on rails by the central issue of this election. It's obvious that whether Zac builds his fifty thousand a year, or Sadiq negotiates the release of sub-market rate brownfield land from TfL for capital-markets-financed rent-capped units, it's all going to be laughably inadequate, only apply selectively to a few who meet the criteria, is unlikely to even turn a sod before 2018, and just pissing in the ocean compared to the vast annual influx of young Europeans. The truth universally unacknowledged is that if London wants to grow at its present rate, without colossal central government intervention, we're all just going to have to get used to visiting the Geffrye Museum every time we want to know what a 'lounge' looked like. Nothing distracts voters like moaning about being Generation Rent, and nothing causes that pained melancholic expression to mist up in their eyes quite like housing - a total turn-off to a having a fun campaign.

So in future, rather than discussing in depth a range of housing plans that all sum to 'the market?', at their hustings and debates, our prospective mayors should just go through slides of those stories in the Evening Standard about garages in Chelsea that sell for £400,000, or outhouses in Barnes with planning permission to build a swan coop that cost more than the whole of Oldham. One with the most lol-tastic captions wins the round. And by 2020, there'll be plenty more of them to giggle about. Happy voting.

Advertisement

@gavhaynes

More on the Mayor of London:

How a London Night Mayor Could Revive the City's Dying Nightlife

What Does the Mayor of London Actually Do?

Meet Sadiq Khan