London: Mayor & More

At Guardian Politics: Boris & Big Buildings

A little something I threw together in my spare time (joke)....

Boris Johnson’s campaign promise to protect London’s architectural heritage and its neighbourhoods’ characters was a significant part of his election pitch. By pledging to prevent new tall buildings from towering, uninvited, over cowering communities or spoiling the capital’s skyline he spoke to powerful conservative sentiments about tradition and also signalled a contrast with the readiness of Ken Livingstone to collaborate with trendy architects and charmless property developers. Under his leadership, Johnson claimed, structures with lofty ambitions would be permitted to sprout and congregate only in aesthetically and socially acceptable locations.

Already there are cries of betrayal. Some have come from east London, close to West Ham Football Club, where a local campaign group has upbraided Johnson for giving a barely-qualified green light to a 31 storey tower that would be part of the proposed redevelopment of the local Queen’s Market. I should admit to being biased: I own a set of green, see-through dinner plates of the type Tommy Steele would have eaten egg and chips off in his heyday which I bought from the market many years ago. But Johnson’s hands-off attitude to the proposed development does appear to be at odds with the principles he previously espoused.

A higher profile – and higher physically – example is, according to Johnson’s critics, his capitulation to a proposed 43-storey tower of luxury apartment in Doon Street on the South Bank, behind the National Theatre Approved under Livingstone, it was “called in” by communities secretary Hazel Blears for a public inquiry, but given the go-ahead by her earlier this month despite the objections of her own planning officers and English Heritage.

Johnson had very little chance of stopping this. The inquiry had taken place by the time he became mayor and although he could have reversed Livingstone’s decision before Blears’s findings were announced, it would have cut no ice with her and risked accusations of costly gesture politics. As a spokesperson for Johnson put it, “it is not possible for the new Mayor to re-open the matter without exposing London taxpayers to significant legal and financial risk.” Nonetheless, it’s a gesture some believe Johnson should have made. Writing in the Evening Standard, his erstwhile supporter Simon Jenkins described this as Johnson failing his “first test” as “an emphatic city mayor.”

The mayor’s office reiterated that Johnson, “has pledged to review London's planning policies including those relating to affordable housing and tall buildings” Furthermore – though only after a one heck of a fashion – he has the experienced former Westminster City Council leader Sir Simon Milton to assist him. But the Queens Market and Doon Street controversies both demonstrate in their different ways that matching pledges on urban planning with effective and consistent policies is no straightforward matter. They also show that a failure to do so where tall buildings are concerned can excite political passions as high as the buildings themselves.

Will appear on the politics blog later.

At Guardian Comment: Mayor Johnson's Disarray

Hello. Yes, Spain was lovely thanks. Here's my first effort for the Guardian since my return. I'll be blogging here only sporadically for the next few days but getting back into serious action next week.

The Blond and the silly season were made for each other, I suppose, and their mating during this August has satisfied all implicated parties. As the scheduled Death of Gord tragedy ran out of plot (for the time being) newspapers’ summer craving for much political intrigue about nothing has been gratified by speculation that Mayor Johnson has designs on deposing David Cameron and becoming the giggliest prime minister in British history.

In a Telegraph column Johnson argued that Team GB’s successes in Beijing cast doubt on the view that society is “broken” and our youth devoid of moral purpose and backbone. This was read as a challenge to Cameronian orthodoxy and when subsequently Johnson used the Heseltine formula – professing himself unable to foresee circumstances under which he would seek to replace his leader - to deny having a covetous eye on Dave’s job, the frogs of speculation hopped still more madly in their box.

Johnson’s other contribution to the filling of holiday season column space came with the Olympic hand-over proceedings. Humorous diversion had been widely anticipated and Johnson duly obliged, struggling rather plumply to unfurl the ringed banner he was required to wave six times and later delivering a notably unbuttoned speech in which he pointed out that the sport of table tennis, at which the Chinese have long excelled, was a British invention.

This historical winding-up was not received with universal amusement by Johnson’s hosts. But it got up my nose for a different reason. I witnessed it for the first time shortly before 3.30 on Monday morning, having just returned from my holiday (on a camp site near Barcelona, since you ask). During my time away I’d seen only snippets of Olympic action, largely avoided newspapers and kept my mobile switched off for days on end. Only on Friday morning, 48 hours after the event, did I discover text messages telling me the dramatic news that Tim Parker, Johnson’s First Deputy and chief executive, had resigned.

This was a huge London story and still is. Not only was Parker the third of Johnson’s senior aides to resign since he took office, he was the mayor’s most powerful lieutenant. As Parker himself put it, his job had been to “run the place” on the mayor’s behalf, a brief which was intended to include chairing the board of Transport for London whose budget accounts for more than half the annual total of £11 billion the mayoralty controls. China might be another country and the Olympics another issue but given the circumstances back home a display a comedy jingoism about “ping-pong” looked flippant at best.

Now that Parker has stepped down the already fragile (not to mention still incomplete) structure of Johnson’s administration appears in disarray. The most detailed account so far suggests that Parker lost a power struggle with another of Johnson’s deputies, Sir Simon Milton. Unlike Parker and Johnson, Milton has experience of running London local government and plenty of it. If it is true that Sir Simon was so appalled by what he found on the eight floor of City Hall after four months of Johnson’s regime that he threatened to resign unless Parker stepped aside, it is grave indictment. The implications have not been lost on his media cheerleaders who have responded to the Parker crisis by reverting to tired red scare rhetoric against his (famously business-friendly) predecessor, their now standard default tactic when obliged to admit that their boy has screwed up.

Now what? In a thoroughly evasive press release, Johnson accepted that the political character of major TfL decisions make it necessary for him to chair the board (as Ken Livingstone had done) and that he could only delegate so many powers. This might be his first public admission that what his friend Charles Moore once described as his “Merry England” view of life is not suitable for a modern political machine; that running London might require a bit more than simply handing out top jobs to a few clever chaps and leaving them to get on with it; that there is a difference between light touch leadership and abdicating responsibility.

My conclusion about May’s mayoral election campaign was that in some areas (not least transport) Livingstone had better policies and where there wasn’t much to choose between the two candidates his experience made him the safer bet. This doesn’t mean I wish disaster on Johnson. He’s done the whole country a service by moving youth disaffection and safety on the streets up the political agenda. His cultural ambitions for London could produce valuable results and his approach to providing affordable housing – whatever that exactly means – may yet enhance the capital’s social as well as its property development.

But 21st century London is not Merry England and it’s certainly not the Merry Spectator. It’s a complex society of over seven million people, many of them frightened and poor. Mayor Johnson has made them several large promises. How long will it be before the million who voted for him conclude that he’s failing to take honouring them seriously?

Holiday Interlude

I'm not leaving from Croydon airport or traveling in one of these. But I am flying to Spain for my family holiday tomorrow morning. As I'm unlikely to go online while I'm away, forgive me if I don't deal with your comments or emails for a while. But please keep them coming. I have plans for this blog to be put into effect soon after my return and you, dear readers, are part of them. Till soon!

Bark Of Approval

The mayor has a new best friend.

Hammersmith & Fulham & The Politics Of Housing

What sorts of housing most benefits London's poorer neighbourhoods? My story of a test case of sorts begins:

"Boris Johnson has given the go-ahead to a £50m development project in a London borough led by a political ally, despite a warning from his own planning officers that it will fail to help meet the housing needs of some of the poorest local residents. The scheme, which will bring new housing and a health and social care centre to the White City area of west London, originally provided for 50% of its accommodation units to be 'affordable' - half for private purchase at 'intermediate' prices and half for 'social rent' by the least well-off."

Now read on.

Lavatory Humour

From the Mayor's office, a press release about toilets. It's a perfectly good press release, but I prefer the story as translated for Americans.

He's Back & He's Mad

Returning from his summer holiday, the Mayor has a bad luggage day at Gatwick:

"The only representative of authority was a nice but increasingly rattled young man from the lost luggage department. Shielded behind his attack-proof glass, he told a growing crowd of passengers what he knew. He knew nothing. Why had some bags arrived from Dalaman, and not the others? He didn’t know. Where were the bags from Cagliari? He didn’t know. All he knew was that our bags were out there somewhere in the dark on the rain-lashed tarmac. We offered to mount a Entebbe-style raid to liberate our luggage, and were told we couldn’t do that for health and safety reasons."

Not being funny or anything, but I'd love to hear the lost luggage lad's version of these events. Now read on.

Boris Meets The FT

From an interview with the FT's Bob Sherwood:

"The mayor revealed that plans were being drawn up for the creation of a "special purpose vehicle" to overhaul urgently the plans for the [2012 Olympic] games' legacy and seek to ensure that the huge public investment was translated into useful facilities, jobs and skills for Londoners. Mr Johnson is worried that a lack of joined-up planning between the agencies involved with the Olympics could jeopardise the prospect of 'lasting value' from what he calls 'this weird constellation of huge objects that we are building'. He said he was 'certain' that work that should have been done on legacy planning 'hasn't been done'."

This "special purpose vehicle" - love that jargon - will be set up next month. There's also interesting stuff about PFI investment for the Tube and those overseas offices. Now read on.

Green On The Cheap?

From the Mayor's office yesterday, a press release:

"The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, today (11 August) confirmed his manifesto commitment to encourage all Greater London Authority staff to spend time out of the office helping to 'clean and green' London - the Mayor announced he and his senior advisers will also sign up to the scheme and lead by example. The Mayor believes City Hall staff can encourage more Londoners to volunteer by spending at least one day a year volunteering themselves for one of the many organisations that are dedicated to protect and enhance the environment."

However, there will soon be two fewer GLA staff available for such good works. They are the project manager and project administrator for the London Schools Environment Award scheme which was set up under Ken Livingstone in 2003 to encourage green awareness among London's primary school children. The two LSEA posts are among those set to be "deleted" according to an internal consultation document about the restructuring of the mayor's office. Is this move rather at odds with the very public enthusiasm for the LSEA expressed by Mayor Johnson only last month? Is it consistent with the mayor's insistence that he's serious about pursuing a green agenda? Just wondering.

Boris First 100 By His Biographer

Interesting. Andrew Gimson is usually far more sceptical:

"Boris Johnson has proved a great disappointment to his critics. In his first 100 days, the Mayor of London has destroyed one of the last hopes of the demoralised and exhausted Brownites. These brutal class warriors, whose main gift is for doing down anyone who threatens their gang, clutched at the desperate idea that a man elected to the Bullingdon Club while at Oxford University would be out of his depth when elected to run a world city, and they have been proved wrong."

Steady on old thing! Now read on.