It must have seemed like such a good idea to someone to run Boris Johnson as the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London. It seemed he had very little chance of winning, but would raise the party’s profile and, frankly, fill the embarrassingly huge gap that no-one else was coming forward to be the Tory candidate. But then, just as in 2000, the voters of London made the calculation that in the grand scheme of things the Mayoralty of London wasn’t really that important, and so seized the opportunity to vote for the maverick outsider candidate as a cost-free way of showing their displeasure to the occupant of Downing Street.

And so we get to see what a new-style “post-nasty party” Cameron Conservative government would actually do, through what Boris and the Conservative team are doing in City Hall. And make no mistake, Boris may be a one-man maverick, but for exactly that reason, those close to Cameron have foisted on him their top team of managers, to make sure that it is not just a goofy Boris show, but a proper Conservative government of London.

All of which makes it all the more significant that it’s not working out well.

This week Boris’ “First Deputy Mayor” left the team, the third senior figure, and second Deputy Mayor, to leave that team in some disarray (there have also been one or two more routine departures).

Applying the Lady Bracknell test, this is really start to get pretty embarrassing. You cannot continue to lose one senior figure a month, and remain credible for very long.

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My post suggesting that, despite all the reasons for not doing so, there might perhaps be something to be said for voting for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, as some kind of vaccination against a future Conservative Government, attracted quite a lot of criticism in Lib Dem circles. Jo Christie-Smith, for example, made a good critique of this position on her blog (apologies to Jo that for some reason I don’t understand Wordpress won’t let me link to her blog, but if you put her name into Google, it comes up pretty quick!).

In fact I wasn’t firmly saying that I thought anti-Conservatives should necessarily vote for Johnson, just highlighting the dilemma – and for the record, my own second preference on Thursday went to Livingstone.

I remain firmly of the view that a Boris Johnson London mayoralty is bad news for London – my concern limited only by the fact that the Mayor of London’s powers are in fact pretty limited. Talk of the job being that of ‘running London’, while perhaps understandable, are very wide of the mark. Even of those aspects of running London which lie in the public sector’s hands, few lie with the Mayor – he has no influence at all on health, for example, almost none on schools, not much on the green agenda (despite Ken’s generally admirable efforts to expand its power in this area), very little on waste (despite Ken’s more unsuccessful efforts here too), and very little even such London bete noires as parking. Public transport, policing, some aspects of housing, and major planning issues are the only really important areas the Mayor has real control of. And even in these areas he has to find agreement with a multitude of government departments, local councils and various other bodies (even if you live here you may well never have heard of the Government Office for London or GOL, but it is not too far from the truth to say that this government quasi-department exists largely in order to prevent the Mayor and 33 Boroughs from doing things that central government doesn’t really want them to do).

On the question of whether a Boris Mayoralty is good for the greater Conservative cause or not, it is fairly clear that the Conservative hierarchy, if not quite sharing my views precisely on the merits or otherwise of Boris Johnson, did have some concern about how he might perform as Mayor, and indeed how he was already showing as the Conservative candidate. The role of Australian Conservative spinmeister Lynton Crosby in sorting out the Conservative Mayoral campaign, and specifically sitting on Johnson, has been fairly widely discussed.

Boris’s first few pronouncements since his election confirm that he has behind him a strong team who are determined to control what he says pretty closely. Read the rest of this entry »

We citizens of this extraordinary and amazing city will be going to the polls on 1 May to elect ourselves a new Mayor. The polls of the last few weeks have seemed to indicate that this year Londoners really have finally had enough of Ken Livingstone. Personally I still find that difficult to believe: the man who is so far the only person to have held this post is one of politics’ great survivors – and more importantly the issues that have made the headlines about him so far – City Hall intrigues about how a couple of tiny organisations were funded, and how many children he has – seem to me like the sorts of issues which get journalists and political opponents excited, but have no real impact on the lives, and therefore the voting intentions, of normal voters.

It’s no surprise that I will be voting for Brian Paddick – he has a track record of innovative leadership on the London-wide stage, and perhaps more importantly, of doing so in a way which is popular with the local community. He would make a good Mayor. And he comes without Ken’s voluminous political baggage – encompassing everything from campaigning from low transport fares in the 80s to introducing record high ones in the 21st century, from doing odd deals with revolutionary leftwing South American presidents to being one of the biggest fans of City plutocrats.

But then of course there is the second preference choice to be made. And here I stumble across a dilemma which I actually think now faces (even if we haven’t realised it yet!) all Londoners who don’t want to see a Conservative government after the next General Election – which is most of us.

To be clear to start with: I think Boris Johnson would be a complete disaster as Mayor. His various performances over the last few months have entirely satisfied me that underneath the external appearance of a clowning buffoon, there lies in fact….a clowning buffoon. I don’t think he’s really interested in being Mayor of London, and when he did have to make a decision on something, I don’t doubt for a moment that he would do it based on what he thinks would be the interests of him and his friends rather than the interests of London as a whole. He is a true Conservative and I don’t think he should be entrusted with government.

I’m confident that within a few short months it would be clear what a disaster his mayoralty would be – and indeed a taste of what a Cameron Conservative government would be like.

And this is where it becomes a dilemma.

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On Friday the Conservatives launched a major advertising campaign and I think it’s quite an interesting milestone for showing where they have now got to in the development of “Cameron’s Conservatives”.

The top slogan for the campaign is “You can get it if you really want”, with ten individual promises in specific areas: health, schools, immigration etc.

This structure has taken some flak, for example from the Guardian, for emphasising different messages to different groups of people: so for example the immigration ad has gone in the Daily Mail, crime in the Sun and the education one in the Guardian.

This has been picked up by some (though not quite as explicitly as this by the Guardian) as further evidence that Cameron is willing to be all things to all men.

This doesn’t seem to me to be quite the right analysis.

Firstly, all political parties - indeed all of us all the time - say different things to different groups of people, without that meaning that we are inconsistent. It is hardly unreasonable for a party seeking to win votes to emphasise to particular groupings, their policies that they think will be of particular interest to that group. When this becomes a problem is when these messages are either explicitly or implicitly contradictory to each other, or (to a lesser degree) when it’s not possible to discern a linking thread between them.

Secondly it’s all very well to dismiss, for example, talking about education to Guardian-readers - but the actual messages they are putting across there are not the stereotypical messages you would expect Guardian-readers to love: the first headline here talks about splitting children up by ability (not quite the comprehensive ideal) and the second one emphasises discipline. These ideas may be right or they may be wrong - and the Conservatives obviously think they will appeal to Guardian-readers - but they cannot be dismissed as simply pandering to the lefty prejudices which this group of people are commonly supposed to have.

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As part of preparing something last week about politics online, I looked up David Cameron’s website for his TV clips, WebCameron, and I must say that I was very impressed with it.

It was set up with the intention of helping people get to know him better, and I think it does an excellent job of making people feel that. Clearly what is shown is pretty carefully selected, but when formal appearances by politicians are so carefully staged and scripted, it does give a better picture of who someone really is through how they speak relatively off the cuff, and in formats other than just standing up making a big speech or in an interview.

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I found this week’s Conservative conference very interesting to observe - not because I thought they managed to establish a new position and momentum for themselves, but in fact because of the very opposite. For the position they were groping towards setting out is all too consistent with what the Conservative party has been saying really ever since Thatcher.

Let me explain.

The developing wisdom seems to be that Osborne’s proposal to restrict Inheritance Tax (IHT) was very clever in winning back more public support, and that alongside a reasonably strong performance from Cameron, they have therefore together re-established the Conservatives somewhere near back where they were before the departure of Blair.

In fact I don’t share the general consensus that the IHT proposal puts the Tories back into the game of winning support from the mainstream: it remains a fact that even at the moment 94% of the public don’t pay IHT, and while aspiration means that something more than just 6% of people are interested in it, cutting the proportion who pay it to just 2% seems to me a very long way from the really ambitious and radically different policies that Cameron knows he needs to win votes form the centre ground.

But more generally I don’t share the analysis that the unstoppable Cameron bandwagon of last year is now back on the rails - for several reasons.

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After much heavy trailing, the Conservative policy group on Economic Competitiveness, today finally published its report.

The headline that the Conservatives are pushing is a call for Inheritance Tax to be abolished, on the grounds that too many middle-income earners are now paying it.

As house prices have continued to rise very fast in recent years, it is true that the number of estates qualifying to pay inheritance tax has risen. So have they got a point?

Well, according to the BBC, “no inheritance tax is currently payable on 94% of estates, according to official figures”.

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Gosh, David Cameron really is ditching the moderate image and scarpering back to cover his home bases:

Cameron on offensive with call for tax cuts (Daily Telegraph)

Osborne vows to ”˜pick fight’ with Brussels (FT)

This really is tantamount to giving up on trying to win over the moderate voters he would need in order to win a General Election, and just doing what’s necessary to shore up his core vote in order to avoid a meltdown in the Conservative vote.

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