Adam Boulton Diary – the Mayoral elections threatening to shake-up Westminster

I’ve spent much of this week on ghost trains in near empty high-speed carriages covering the upcoming Mayoral elections away from London.

Although shops, cafés and bars are still shut everywhere, I found much more life on the streets of the “provincial” cities such as Bristol and Birmingham than in the centres of the capital cities I’ve been in this year in Scotland, England and the United States.

When the votes are counted after 6  May most of the interest will be on the impact of these local elections on national politics. Is the SNP’s push for a second independence referendum strengthened or weakened? Is the fall of council seats going to stall the momentum of Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer? Will the “levelling-up agenda” boost the Tories in the North of England, especially in the parliamentary byelection in Hartlepool.

Such is the stuff of 24-7 politics: thirsty for pointers to the outcome of the next general election. Yet, almost unnoticed, innovations in local government introduced by Tony Blair and built on by David Cameron are stirring and may ultimately have a more long-lasting impact on the changing political culture of this country.

Thirteen mayors will be directly elected in England in May, each winning a personal mandate to preside over the governance of their part of the country. Something no Prime Minister here can ever achieve. The Mayoral contests are in Greater London: in the combined authorities of Greater Manchester, West Midlands, Liverpool City region, Tees Valley, Peterborough and Cambridgeshire, West of England and newly established West Yorkshire; and in the single authorities of Bristol, Doncaster, Liverpool, North Tyneside and Salford.

These city-centred Mayoralties are already enlivening what is widely derided as the stale and toxic politics of Westminster. They are bringing new people, and new sorts of people, into the power structure. These challengers may explain in part why Boris Johnson, a former Mayor who has now sits at the heart of the national web, was recently caught describing devolution as “a disaster”. The fact that only four of the twelve mayoralties in contention are currently in Conservative hands will have further dampened the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm.

The former Labour cabinet minister Andy Burnham is standing for re-election in Greater Manchester. When I spoke to him at home in Wigan, Burnham bent over to be fair to Johnson, joking that he could have written the speech the Tory leader delivered on his patch during the Tories’ levelling up campaign. Yet, Burnham was on the other side of one of the sharpest confrontations with central government during the pandemic, loudly denouncing what he considered to be the unfairness to his region of lockdown restrictions.

A recovering Westminster politician, Burnham argues that he is much more able to assist the people he represents than he ever could as an MP or even a minister. He tips some of his fellow Mayors to follow Johnson to Number 10, without irrevocably ruling himself out.

Bristol’s Mayor Marvin Rees says he might go back to journalism after the second term he is seeking. Startlingly, in 2016 Rees was the first black city mayor directly elected in Europe. The son of a Jamaican father and a white Welsh mother he shot to national prominence last summer when his city, a historic hub of slavery, became the focal point of the UK’s Black Lives Matter protests. Rees dealt deftly with the tearing down and sinking of the statue of Sir Edward Colston. But he doesn’t hide his impatience when asked about it, pointing to what he has tried to do for the whole city – particularly on global warming. Central government can’t defeat climate change, he told me, but local communities, led by Mayors, can.

The Conservatives are desperate for Ben Houcham in Tees Valley and Andy Street in the West Midlands to be re-elected. If either or both are defeated, Professor Tony Travers of LSE predicts that Johnson is likely to go cold on the whole idea of mayors.

Government ministers have been transparently generous to Tees Valley with taxpayer funded investment. The area is a designated freeport and will host the new UK Treasury complex outside London. The chancellor is pouring more cash into green ventures in Middlesbrough, Thornaby, Dudley and Hartlepool.

Birmingham boy Andy Street has kept central government at arms’ length, in spite of being a Conservative. He was a businessman and the boss of John Lewis Group before becoming Mayor. While in office he suffered the indignity of the permanent closure of John Lewis’s new flagship store in the newly redeveloped Birmingham Central. “I’ll only say it wouldn’t have happened if I was still in charge,” he told me tersely. He is confident that city centres will come back after Covid. This year, Street is being challenged by the former Labour cabinet minister Liam Byrne.

Street is the only directly elected Mayor in his region, although there are a number of councils below him. But the UK’s pattern of local government is a mess. Rees, for example, as Mayor of Bristol, also has a Mayor of the West of England, who is a Conservative, further up the structure.

Reforming, and building on mayoral devolution is not a priority for Boris Johnson’s government, except in one respect. The Home Secretary has announced plans to change the London mayoral electoral system to first-past-the-post (FPTP) as in MP constituencies. This is a transparent bid to improve the Conservatives’ chances in a capital city which they fear is slipping away from them.

Under the present preference vote system, the top two candidates are selected and outstanding second preference votes transferred to them. This ensures that the winner has the endorsement of half those who voted – with Liberal Democrat and Green first preferences likely to break in the Labour candidate’s direction.

This year there could be almost twenty candidates running for mayor in London. Theoretically under FPTP with an even distribution of votes cast, a Conservative (or other) candidate could be elected with barely six per cent of first preferences, provided they were a vote ahead of their nearest rival. This truly would be the Westminster system, which has often seen a majority government returned with less than a plurality of votes cast.

For all his reservations about devolution and his instinctive partisan calculations Johnson has put mayors on the map by getting to Downing Street via city hall. The levelling-up agenda depends on breathing life back into cities, especially away from the South East. The mayors of Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Bristol have all spotted the opportunity and the fundamental contradiction in Boris Johnson’s attitude towards local government. They have built their public platforms and are in no mood to let the Prime Minister and his centralising government off the hook.