Boris on the doorstep
I have no political ambitions, so I can speak freely: I didn’t spent three months campaigning for Boris Johnson because I thought he would be the finest mayor ever elected to municipal office.
Nor was I greatly motivated by hatred of Ken Livingstone; although I came to loathe him more as his campaign got grubby and mendacious.
What really got me out leafleting and canvassing night after night was an idea kindled in an Evening Standard column by fellow Hackney resident, Jonathan Freedland, which was published in May 2006 - long before Tory councillor Harry Phibbs first floated the idea of a Johnson mayoralty.
Freedland’s piece appeared just before a set of local elections, and although he rightly thought “Hackney falling to the Tories is about as likely as Wayne Rooney throwing off his plaster cast and dancing Swan Lake at the Coliseum”, he was impressed to receive a Conservative leaflet through his front door:
…full marks for effort to the Hackney Conservatives. They clearly understand something that the wider Tory party is only just beginning to learn: that if the Conservatives are ever to win a general election, they have to rebuild themselves in even the most unpromising areas - which include Hackney.
What Freedland seemed to have missed was the fact that the three Tory councillors he was being asked to vote for - “Jacob Landau, Eric Ollerenshaw and Shuja Shaikh” - were busy defending the seats they had won back in 2002. Far from rebuilding themselves in his area, the Conservatives were hanging on to what they’d long held: a small number of wards in the largely Orthodox Jewish areas of north Hackney.
That said, his point about the Tories needing to get a foothold in unpromising areas was bang on the money: in 2005, the (now) GLA member Andrew Boff had fought a by-election in Queensbridge ward and won convincingly. He picked up a lot of support by campaigning to preserve the future of Broadway Market, rightly enraged by the way in which Hackney Council had greedily tried to destroy successful local businesses.
Boff’s tenure was short - he narrowly lost the seat in 2006 - but he proved that the Tory party could gain a foothold in any area, provided the candidate took a practical and inspiring lead on pressing local issues. But, as Freedland went on to say (and I paraphrase), taking a localist approach to capture individual wards is a slow old method of Stamping Out Socialism (or what passes for it in the Hackney Nu-Lab fiefdom).
But Freedland saw a much more effective alternative, originally spotted by the LSE’s Tony Travers:
Where’s there’s a mayoral election to be won, the Tories, armed with a sufficiently attractive candidate, could conquer in a single night a city that might otherwise have taken a decade to capture.
That’s the sentence that’s been at the back of my mind as I’ve stuck yet another thousand leaflets through letterboxes, or tapped politely on yet another yob-splintered front door. It’s not an election, it’s a conquest; and the conquest is not simply significant power to clear up the divisive mess that has blighted this city, but winning the belief amongst many more Londoners that there is a decent alternative to the target-driven indifference of a Labour-run local council. With a popularly-elected mayor in Boris, there should be no Labour councillor who is safe from a concerted, localist Conservative campaign. Even in Hackney.
That’s why, paradoxically, to boost the longer-term hope of Tory representation across the whole of Hackney (and boroughs like it), local activists first had to be relentless in taking Boris’s message out to those areas where support for the Tories was already the strongest. Over the last three months, the bulk of Conservative leafleting and canvassing in Hackney was focused on the three, predominantly Orthodox Jewish wards the party already holds. And that’s why many of us spent election day in Chingford, getting out the vote in the streets with the strongest concentration of supporters.
It worked. And, in a sense, a similar approach of getting out the inner-city vote in estates and plush, left-wing areas like Stoke Newington worked for Ken Livingstone and his supporters. But there was one vital difference, and this is what I think won it for Boris: Ken had had eight years to woo outer London and failed to do it; Boris was promising new policies for the whole of London, which picked him up a good proportion of votes in the inner-city, as well as in the traditionally Tory outer boroughs.
Certainly, as I canvassed in Hackney, I picked up on a determined desire for change. Of course, the bulk of this was in strongly Tory areas; but in some of the less solid estates in Stamford Hill, along with the council blocks down in the south Hackney ward of De Beauvoir, I sensed that the tide of support was slowly shifting in the Conservative direction. What was hampering much of it, though, was an entrenched feeling that voting Tory was still taboo.
It’s not an easy thing to prove, but it would explain the woman who - on seeing her neighbour pass by - dropped her voice and whispered that she would be voting for Boris; the Turkish woman who wouldn’t say who she was voting for, quietly launched into a diatribe against Livingstone, and then admitted she was going to vote Tory; the many people who refused to say who had won their vote, but then shouted “good luck” as I moved on to the next flat. It would also explain why local Labour councillor Luke Akehurst failed to uncover much of the Conservative vote as he did his rounds.
Boris’s victory, then, has the power to do several things. Firstly, I think that - coupled with the Conservative success in the English local elections - it will shatter the taboo amongst working class voters for voting Tory. It will also break that inner-city mentality that a Tory vote is a wasted vote, and help people realise that Labour councils can be held properly to account or booted out. And it will make people turn to the Tories and start asking: “What can you do for my area?”
The latter question is by far the most important. Let’s return to Freedland’s prediction back in 2006:
Let’s say the Tories get lucky with candidates; there’s still more they have to do. This is a shift larger than personalities; it is about principle. For the Conservatives would have to become the lead advocates of localism, the belief that decisions are best taken close to the people they affect - which means locally, wherever possible.
There’s no denying the party got lucky with their Mayoral candidate, but I feel there’s a long way to go before the Tories properly re-establish themselves as the party of localism. Now they have a mandate in London, it’s time for local associations to throw themselves into those solid Labour wards and start proving they can make positive changes in those communities. If they do that, and the new mayor carries on as he has begun, the political map of London could look very different in two years’ time. Wayne Rooney has lost his plaster cast - here’s to him dancing Swan Lake at the Coliseum.
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“I have no political ambitions”
First rule of politics is never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.
The second is, of course, the governments lose elections, rather than the oppositions win them.
It became taboo to vote Tory because they became despised for incompetence, arrogance and the perception they were more interested in power than in the people who elected them.
Now it’s happening with Labour.
One thing that might help, all the parties, is ending the situation whereby politics has become dominated by a self-perpetuating cast of professional politicians whose whole lives have been devoted to politicking.
Boris probably won because he seemed somewhat different. (Ditto Ken in 2000) It’s not true; really both are sui generis. Still it’s nice to have the illusion for a while.
(As a comparison it’s worth looking at the States, where at least both Obama and McCain have done more with their lives than just politics).
Comment by bill — 6th May, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
I hopw Boris doesn’t forget transport, thats all. I’m no fan of bendy buses but it would be a futile effort to just undo what Ken has, on the whole achieved.
I hope to look back & think Ken was the mayor of transport, Boris of tackling the youth/social issues with success.
Bron.
Comment by bron — 6th May, 2008 @ 3:04 pm
I think it’s an amazing sign that Bron can look at a newly-elected Tory mayor and see hope that he might tackle youth and social issues with success. That says to me that things have moved on a huge amount…
Comment by Ben — 6th May, 2008 @ 3:08 pm
[...] was interested to read this post by the ever-reliable and good Ben Locker - unusually for his Hackney home, an active Conservative. I [...]
Pingback by Ein Boris. « Come On Up To The House — 6th May, 2008 @ 4:12 pm
A few years ago I made the comment that I’d like to se some chance in the makeup of my local council - solidly Labour for years.
Well it happened. We got the BNP. Not the change I was hoping for.
Good luck to Boris, and here’s hoping that some attention is focused on Barking and Dagenham in the future elections. I’m still looking for a change, but rather hoping it is of the Conservative or Liberal form.
Comment by Dave — 7th May, 2008 @ 9:57 am
Dave,
I’m a native of Dagenham too (albeit in exile, for good reason).
I hope the same - the place has been a one-party state for too long, and the BNP are certainly not the solution.
At the notorious 2006 elections, I wonder: why did the Conservatives put up so few candidates in the borough?
(None at all in some wards, especially on the Becontree estate, where the BNP won every seat they contested, and only one or two in some of the other three-member wards). In fact, UKIP outperformed the Tories in several parts of the borough. Given that in 1983 and 1987 the Tories came almost within a whisker of winning Dagenham parliamentary constituency (and didn’t do much worse in Barking)…what has happened?
I can’t see the LibDems catching on in B&D, though - something in the borough’s favour, I think. (they put up a grand total of 2 candidates for 51 elected positions in 2006).
I see Boris has been in Dag, on youth issues, today. I’m yet to be convinced that Cameron’s brand of green-toryism-lite will have much appeal in places like B&D - but I’m prepared to be proven wrong.
Comment by Venichka — 7th May, 2008 @ 12:13 pm
I think Boris was wise to get out to Dagenham, and to focus on youth issues. The sight of him doing something practical - if only nascently so - is far more constructive and appealing than yesterday’s anti-fascist protest outside City Hall (they never do much good, and they’re really little more than recruitment drives for the SWP and allied factions).
Comment by Ben — 7th May, 2008 @ 12:24 pm
Well, yes, indeed.
Meanwhile, how to stop Southend Council continuing in its misguided trajectory that is sadly related to its no less permanent status as almost a one-party state?
(Smug, complacent, incompetent Conservatives who don’t know their arse from their elbow: I don’t see it happening imminently, but it’s not inconceivable, that if present trends continue, the BNP could eventually become the official opposition there too)
Comment by Venichka — 7th May, 2008 @ 12:45 pm
Well, Ven, why don’t you get involved in one or other of your local parties and start clamouring for change? Or would you rather let the place slide BNP-wards?
Comment by Ben — 7th May, 2008 @ 12:48 pm
I am sure there were plenty of closet Boris voters. But I like that in a way - people voting with their hearts and instinct rather than toeing a party line.
Comment by kris — 7th May, 2008 @ 6:27 pm