Christian Wolmar declared his wish to become London’s next mayor way back in September 2012. The seasoned transport commentator and long-time Labour Party member had written an Evening Standard article the previous April, lambasting the policies offered by both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson in the run up to the last mayoral election as shallow and piecemeal. Wolmar called the pair “hackneyed” and lacking vision. One reader of the piece declared that if Wolmar ran for mayor, he’d vote for him. This praise planted a seed. He’d never been a politician. But by the end of the year, Wolmar was fully engaged in the most extensive grassroots political campaign the capital has seen in recent times.
Basically, Wolmar got on his bicycle and covered the ground. First, his daughter contacted as many of London’s Labour party branches as she could, asking them if they’d like her dad to come and speak to them. Initially, there were just a few responses - the first was from Muswell Hill ward in Haringey - but interest gradually picked up.
Wolmar says he has now addressed almost 80 meetings, in the process visiting around half of London’s 73 constituency Labour parties, many of them located far from the party’s electoral heartlands in the capital. Twickenham, Hornchurch, Orpington and Bexley have all been graced. He hasn’t made every excursion from his home in Holloway on two wheels, but reckons he’s clocked up more than 1,000 miles that way. When we met at Benugo in St Pancras, one of the transport hub watering holes he uses as a campaign office, he was preparing a foray into Johnson’s prospective parliamentary base of Uxbridge. “I’ve been to all four corners,” he says. “In terms of engagement with the grassroots of the Labour Party, it’s been absolutely fantastic.”
He’s been delighted too by the quality of the team he has assembled. Initially, the 65 year-old - “I look older, but feel younger,” he jokes - was concerned that he might embarrass himself; that he’d run his flag up the mayoral pole and not a soul would salute. But political friends and fellow writers encouraged him to give it a go. Owen Larter, from the public affairs agency Lexington, came forward early to become his campaign manager. By the time Wolmar staged a fringe event at Labour’s annual conference in 2013, one year after launching his campaign, his team had grown to around a dozen. It now includes policy manager Tom Morrison-Bell, another Lexington (and ex-Google) man, architect and urban designer Simon Carne and community engagement expert Millie Macdonald from Dods.
One of the joys of the endeavour has been, he says, the quality of the debate on the ground - a huge contrast with the media-framed fatuity of the Ken and Boris show. “The real issues weren’t being addressed,” Wolmar says, looking back. “No one was thinking about the future of London.” His urban rides have been about, “finding out what people want and also putting out some quite strong ideas”.
Transport is a core responsibility of London’s mayors and bold transport policies would be at the core of a Wolmar mayoralty. He would seek to reduce London’s diminishing car use still further, especially in the centre, with a series of initiatives. He’d mitigate the rising number of delivery vans by awarding franchises to exclusively serve individual postcodes from a local consolidation centre. He favours more of what he calls “the right sort of car club,” meaning the type where the car stays in one parking space and its used by a number of people. He’d want a radical change in the way black cabs operate too: “Surely you can reduce the number of taxis for hire driving around, using modern apps. Do you really need to go out and hail cabs?” Shades there of the great Uber debate.
“The space you relieve by reducing cars is the key point,” he explains. “You don’t just say, ‘we’re going to ban cars from here and you can all bugger off’. You’d have a strategy to reduce cars and reallocate the space you create. He’s big on pedestrianisation. “The obvious case is Oxford Street, which is going to die if it isn’t pedestrianized”. His website also lists Parliament Square and the northbound stretch of Park Lane. “Someone at TfL said to me that you could also pedestrianize the south side of Aldwych. Why is Aldwych a gyratory? With Somerset House there, you could create a wonderful pedestrian space.”
The Wolmar approach argues for “enabling sustainable transport” with what he calls “a more holistic approach” to street and road design. The aim would be to create “spaces in which pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles can all safely co-exist. We want all Londoners to enjoy the city alongside each other”. But, Wolmar is equally committed to “developing proper cycling infrastructure” and fully supports Johnson’s revised cycle superhighways approach, which he believes will be “transformative”.
Wolmar, the transport historian, points out that some of the road space people now take for granted hasn’t been there all that long. “Why is Park Lane a motorway?” he asks. “It’s because John Boyd-Carpenter, a Tory transport minister in the 1950s, said it was the most important road scheme in Britain and he pinched a bit of Hyde Park to make it wider. How about a slogan about giving the royal park back to the queen?”
He points out that such reclamations have happened before: “Remember, Horse Guards Parade used to be for car parking. There were 500 of them there every day, all for senior civil servants.” Despite protracted resistance, this handsome perk ended in 1997 in the wake of the IRA’s mortar attack on 10 Downing Street six years earlier. Wolmar is old enough to recall the London ringway plan of the late 1960s, which would have knocked out thousands of homes and seen Centrepoint become the centrepiece of a huge roundabout at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street. Labour, having previously been quite keen on the “age of the car”, decided to oppose it.
This stance prompted Wolmar to campaign for the party for the first time, during the 1973 Greater London Council election. “It would have been a true dystopia,” he says. “The Archway roundabout is a huge, historical monument to the failure of that policy. The first bit is a multi-lane highway, but then as you go north it shrinks to two lanes and causes a bottleneck.”
There’s clear green water between Wolmar and Labour’s London political leaders over additional Thames road crossings east of Tower Bridge, whether bridges or tunnels. He is adamantly opposed. A new tunnel at Silvertown would not, in his view, solve local traffic problems and would simply increase demand for more road space. Rail crossings, whether over the water or beneath it, would be a different matter. He’d have Johnson’s much-publicised flyunder plans “quietly shelved”.
Wolmar policies in other areas are closer to the mainstream of Labour and indeed other parties: he wants councils to have more freedom to borrow to build homes for social rent and favours a mayoral housing development corporation; he wants more employers signed up to pay the London Living Wage; he backs greater fiscal devolution to London and would like the mayor to have more powers of health and education. But on policing he is more radical. He’d like the London duties of the Met detached from its national ones and see it merged with the City’s separate service - something plenty of people think should happen, but very few dare to say.
“We need a police force for London,” Wolmar says. “The senior people at the Met are always focussed on national issues – terrorism and diplomatic squads and so on. The Met can’t cope. Some senior officers there admit that it’s just too big.” He shares the view that the community policing model introduced under Livingstone has been eroded under Johnson: “I spent a day with Islington cops as part of my campaign including a couple of hours on the beat with the guy who had been a dedicated ward officer, who now has four or five wards allocated to him. He said he’d completely lost the focus and the knowledge that he’d had.” On gangs, he’s very much a liberal intervener: “Boris announced last week some clampdown on gangs. It’s completely the wrong approach. You need to talk to these people and have links with them, engage with them.” He’d also want a greater focus on internet crime: “That’s the thing they really need to gear up on.”
In keeping with his different way of doing things, Wolmar’s outline programme is organised under the headings “affordable”, “liveable” and “sustainable”. But he insists that being different doesn’t mean that his bid should be dismissed as plucky and worthy but doomed. “I’ve always wanted to win this. I wasn’t going to mess about and play at it. I’ve always thought, I might be an outsider but I’ve got a chance. I see it as an insurgent campaign by somebody from the outside. Why should this just be for the Tessa Jowells and the David Lammys?”
Not all have applauded his initiative. “In terms of senior people in the Labour Party, some of them really like what I’m doing. And that includes some in the London party. But with other it seems like a case of, ‘look what the cat brought in’. I’ve been cut dead by one or two of them and I know all these people.” He was angered and, I sense, a little hurt by a comment by Barking MP Margaret Hodge when she revealed last week that she’d decided not to seek her party’s nomination, having given it serious thought. Hodge complimented the four fellow London MPs who’ve made known their interest to differing degrees, but answered a question about Wolmar with one word: “Who?”
The remark seemed so pointlessly graceless I wondered whether something might have got lost in translation, but Wolmar thinks not. In a sharp riposte he reveals that he’s known Hodge for 30 years and eaten breakfasts in her kitchen after leafleting residents for her when she was leader of Islington Council. He also claims to have once had to explain to her that London’s buses have been privatised since 1995. “Mrs Hodge’s view of politics is that it is a closed shop,” he writes. “No one else is allowed to play the game”.
By contrast, others still in the contest have been generous - he names Lammy and Diane Abbott - and recognised that an ordinary Labour member mounting such an effort from scratch is rather special. Wolmar calculates that he’s sunk up to £10,000 of his own money into the enterprise but he’s raised a couple of grand in small donations. The largest has come recently from a Conservative supporter, who gave him 500 quid. “He just said, ‘I love what you’re doing’”.
Once the general election’s over, Labour’s mayoral candidate selection process will quickly begin. Applications can be submitted from May 13, barely a week after the national poll, and no later than May 20. That date will also be the last on which non party members can, for a £3 fee, sign up as “registered supporters” and make themselves eligible to vote in the selection ballot.
All applications will then be circulated to the 73 London constituency parties (CLPs) and the party’s roughly 30 affiliated organisations, such as the Co-operative Party, the Fabian Society and trade unions. These will be asked to make nominations to a candidate long list. The CLPs will each pick two nominees, at least one of which must be a woman. The affiliates will nominate a single applicant, of either sex. All applicants who secure five or more nominations will then be interviewed by a shortlisting panel, 50% of whom will be from Labour’s national executive committee and the other 50% from its London region.
The panel will meet on or around June 15. It has not yet been decided how long the shortlist they settle on will be, but those on it will be plunged into a short series of hustings within a very few days. Voting, by post or online and probably using the single transferable vote system, will begin on July 1 and end on July 29. The result will be announced on July 31.
Wolmar’s biggest disappointment about his campaign is that, for all his media contacts and their many good wishes, he hasn’t received the coverage he’d like. But he is confident of securing the five nominations he needs to win a hearing by the shortlisting panel. If he gets there, he believes he can match of any of his rivals. And if he makes it to the hustings, he reckons he can do the same in public, citing his speech in December at a Changing London debate which Lammy and Jowell also took part in. He deserves those five nominations, and more.
