2 Mavericks Are Jousting to Become London Mayor Under New System

This teeming modern metropolis of nearly 10 million people has never had an elected mayor. Bizarrely, London is still run as if it were 32 villages, each with its own small-scale borough council.

London’s succession of lord mayors, in their furred robes and gilt chains, are purely ceremonial figures dating back to medieval days. The city administration, which had become a fiefdom of left-wing local councilors under the appointed lord mayor, was abolished altogether in 1986 by Margaret Thatcher, then the Conservative prime minister.

Now the system is about to change again.

“We are giving Londoners their own elected mayor,” Home Secretary Jack Straw told Parliament in June.

“Our challenge is to restore confidence in our democracy, to bring decision-making closer to those who are affected by decisions and to restore trust in the way in which we are governed,” Straw said.

But preliminary skirmishing over who will get the mayor’s job has aroused suspicion that the contest may not cast British democracy in such a glorious new light.

The “Vision for London” of Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair, who won power last year, is part of a big government program of devolution and constitutional reform that also takes in changes in representation in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the House of Lords.

In a May referendum, Londoners endorsed the plan to let them elect an executive mayor and city government in 2000.

The powerful mayor, and the proposed Greater London Authority, will have responsibility for strategic matters such as public transport, major planning, police and fire. The 32 boroughs will retain control of local issues: social services, education, housing, planning, roads, parks and trash collection.

So attractive is the prospective fiefdom that a battle for it has begun two years ahead of time. It is being fought between Ken Livingstone, a member of Parliament detested by colleagues in the mainstream of the Labor Party, and Jeffrey Archer, a Conservative loathed by the leaders of his party. The fighting has been brutally below the belt.

Livingstone was the flamboyant darling of left-wing London in the early 1980s, when he ran the huge and unwieldy Greater London Council that Thatcher later abolished.

Despite widespread allegations of inefficiency, abuse and “loony leftiness” (Thatcher-speak for too much political correctness), Livingstone was loved for slashing public transportation costs in the city and for keeping newts, frogs and salamanders in his garden as pets.

Now Livingstone has decided he wants to run London again. These days, however, he is too leftist for Blair’s slickly remodeled centrist team, who have made no secret of their intention to keep him from winning the post or even running as an official Labor candidate.

“Mr. Livingstone is a man of the left, as were many past heroes of the Labor movement; Tony Blair is a man of the right,” political analyst William Rees-Mogg commented. “The Labor left is [Blair’s] most dangerous enemy, and the last thing he wants is to have it given new leadership and a new base in London.”

Livingstone himself seems to have accepted that he will not pass the first party selection procedures this month. In a wry comment to the Sunday Telegraph newspaper last month, he said he had set his sights on a new job close to the heart of power if Blair blocks his attempt to become mayor of London: He wants to become the prime minister’s gardener.

The most controversial of the rival Conservative candidates, millionaire novelist and former deputy party chairman Jeffrey Archer, is having an equally rough ride at the hands of his own side--but taking it less philosophically.

Archer, 58, has had an unlucky career as a Conservative politician, despite a talent for self-publicity.

Twice, he has had to turn to writing steamy novels after his political career came to a crashing halt. In 1985, after 11 years in the political wilderness, he was given the Tory party post by Thatcher, but within a year scandal engulfed him after he was caught paying off a prostitute with an envelope stuffed with cash. More scandals accompanied accusations of insider trading in 1994 and of corruption when he was a municipal councilor in London in the 1960s.

A sudden burst of bad publicity in the British media recently--reruns of these long-ago incidents--prompted a former Conservative member of Parliament, Timothy Kitson, to demand a new investigation into Archer’s past.

The unexpectedness of the media exposes made many British readers suspect that Tory chieftains were plotting to prevent an embarrassing candidate from their own ranks from running.

The famously roguish Archer was indignant.

“Heaven knows I made mistakes in my life. I am neither genius nor saint,” he wrote in one of several line-by-line rebuttals, while declaring his innocence on all counts.

Nevertheless, the Conservative Party decided that Archer would be the first person to be investigated by a powerful new party ethics committee if he put forward his candidacy for London mayor when selection begins next year.

“I sometimes think Lord Archer is not running for mayor but for Houdini. . . . Something perpetually hangs in the air, wisps of questions which would lie dormant if only his lordship would do the same, but which stir whenever he protests his innocence and demands preferment,” political commentator Simon Jenkins noted.

“This is a contest of political loners, of two men with a colorful past, a semi-detached present and no exciting vision for London’s future beyond themselves at its head,” Jenkins said. “There is no political acid in this virtual campaign, no great issue to put candidate against candidate. We are left with a choice of pasts.”

But, Jenkins added wistfully, “I shall miss the Ken and Jeff show.”