As the 2012 mayoral contest enters its final stages, it is tempting to play up the differences between the principal candidates. Any class warrior worth his salt would point to the great divide between the Etonian chancer, with his Latin tags and top-drawer wives, and the newt-lover from a south London comp who left school with four O-levels at the age of sixteen. Yet, whereas Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone look and sound like polar opposites, in fact they have far more in common than the casual observer might believe.
London has had only two mayors since the position was created under Prime Minister Blair in 2000; both are charismatic and theatrical mavericks known almost universally by their first names alone. Boris and Ken crave attention. Yet, at the same time they are loners by nature, retreating behind carefully created facades that make them difficult to get to know properly. At various times each has been charged with solipsism, mischief-making and self-aggrandisement, and neither is strictly speaking a loyal party player. They are outriders with a reputation for jokes but also a track-record of temper. Ken has nearly two decades on Boris, but both men are notorious for their energetic and complicated sex lives.
Anthony Mayer, who served as chief executive in City Hall under both mayors and had previously worked as private secretary to several ministers, was struck by their uncanny similarities, whatever the divergence in backgrounds. ‘Boris and Ken are highly intelligent, competent and pragmatic but both choose to hide those characteristics behind their public act. Almost uniquely amongst senior politicians, and I’ve known a large number of them, what you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got. So underneath the Red Ken cheeky chappy, great-entertainer persona is, along with Michael Heseltine, the best managerial politician I’ve ever come across.‘With Boris, beneath the slightly shambolic, Latin-speaking, entertaining bon viveur is another effective operator who knows what he wants and is quite ruthless about getting it.’ Mayer added that neither can really be categorised as left- or right-wing (indeed, Livingstone was once described as a ‘curious mix of Trotsky and Thatcher’), choosing to borrow whatever is convenient from either box.
Perhaps, the most striking difference between Boris and Ken, then, is not their accent, educational CV nor even political outlook but their management style – or, as some of Boris’s detractors would describe his particular modus operandi, ‘no-management style’. With such an outstanding brain and ability to please a crowd, it is perhaps surprising that London’s first Tory mayor has made so little impact on City Hall.
For all his claims to be the ‘good value’ mayor, Boris has been surprisingly reticent in reshaping Mayoral HQ in the sort of Tory party, small-state image that he had led his admirers (and detractors) to expect. His approach, whatever the rhetoric, has been largely ‘leave well alone’. ‘The whole place is still a monument to Ken Livingstone,’ notes one frequent visitor. ‘Boris is a captive of City Hall. The meetings are like some 1970s throwback to municipal socialism. It’s a nightmare for anyone instinctively Conservative.’
A re-elected Ken might notice the dismantling of some of the wall partitions since his time, and the introduction of a portrait of the Queen. But he would not observe any great difference in the numbers of staff or in many cases their names. One senior insider also notes that while Boris has ‘trimmed at the edges’, he largely ignored the Tory warnings that ‘the place was inhabited by Marxists’. If people were good, like Peter Hendy at Transport, he mostly kept them on.
Although it was initially envisaged that the mayor of London would be served by some three hundred and fifty people, Ken’s empire-building tendencies saw that number grow under his regime to seven hundred and ninety-five. (This put unbearable strains on City Hall’s trendy eco- systems that were not designed to cope with such a crowd.) Yet, Boris, according to his own figures, has managed to reduce the headcount by a fairly inconsequential ninety-five posts – mostly through a recruitment freeze rather than a savage pruning with the big shears.
Indeed, Boris’s dislike of confrontation has meant that he has tended not to dispense with the ‘dead wood’ but has either just ignored under- performers or shifted them sideways, occasionally accompanied by a handsome increase in pay. Even Downing Street is frustrated that there still need to be calls for him ‘to take an axe to City Hall’ at the end of a first term that straddled the biggest squeeze on living standards for eighty years. ‘It’s just the world’s biggest think-tank,’ complains another Tory frustrated with Boris’s inaction. ‘The Police and Transport run themselves and it produces a lot of reports that are largely ignored.’ Even Boris has admitted that much of City Hall’s output has to be ‘filed vertically’, yet seems unwilling or unable to change it.
Few would disagree that City Hall has been a pleasant place to work under Boris (although a more febrile and accusatory atmosphere has certainly taken hold since the polls started turning against him at the end of last year). Until recently, however, the factionalism that could break out under Ken had been replaced with a generally lighter touch on the tiller. Where Ken, for all his faults, was known for giving clear direction and involving himself with detail, Boris’s laissez-faire approach has produced problems. The mayor is notoriously secretive and difficult to predict but also increasingly hard to nail down on decisions. ‘I imagine it’s rather like the Spectator,’ observes one old hand. ‘Boris is surrounded by people who are seeking to advance their own careers rather than his vision but he doesn’t seem to mind and we’re not clear what his vision is anyway. After a load of shouting, they get down to things, but no one knows what.’
Boris abolished many of the management meetings but not the management structure. He has, if anything, added more layers to it, leading to a lot of duplication in areas such as youth – and more than one incidence of turf war. He has a habit of leaving his staff second-guessing not only him but each other. Perhaps as a result, City Hall under Boris has been noticeably slow in coming up with striking new ideas – an absence all too obvious in the early stages, at least, of his electoral campaign.
Of the coterie of deputy mayors, directors and mayoral advisers that surround him in City Hall, few if any have made their name outside London’s political anorak fraternity (and one or two not even to them). Boris once said that he would mount a ‘Stalingrad-like resistance’ against attempts by David Cameron to poach his ‘top team’. But the PM has consistently failed to show any interest. ‘We have not even thought of making an approach,’ sniffs a highly-placed Downing Street source. Nor does anyone leave to go elsewhere – the pay and conditions are too generous.
Astonishingly, Boris himself is paid more for overseeing a limited range of London services than the Prime Minister is for running the whole country. The difference is not huge but the disparity in responsibility is. Although a reasonably wealthy man, Boris has not yet chosen to follow Cameron’s lead in self-imposing a five percent pay cut and heavily increased pension contributions. Cameron has also waived his right to a Prime Ministerial pension of sixty-six thousand pounds a year. We have yet to see any such sacrifice downriver at City Hall.
Under Boris, the total number of City Hall officials earning more than a hundred thousand pounds has nearly doubled to twenty-eight. At the same time he has raised transport fares by fifty percent. One example is Munira Mirza, Boris’s thirty-four year-old advisor on culture and youth. When her role expanded last year she received a fifty-five percent pay rise. She now earns just seven thousand pounds less than the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Other City Hall officials on the same salary include Dan Ritterband, director of marketing (responsible, in baffling jargon, for brand development), and Pamela Chesters, advisor on health and families, neither of whom are well-known nor preside over core mayoral responsibilities. They earn considerably more than key Downing Street advisors, even the PM’s outgoing director of strategy, Steve Hilton. Boris also increased the pay of his housing advisor by over a third, again to over a hundred thousand. This was announced at roughly the same time it emerged that construction had started on only fifty-six new affordable homes in six months of 2011 in the whole of London compared to eleven thousand in 2008.
Over at Transport for London, however, where Boris is chairman, it is welcome news that some highly-paid posts are to be cut. Yet, in 2011, the number of executives earning over a hundred thousand soared by fifty percent from two hundred and fifty-one to three hundred and seventy- nine. Meanwhile, performance on eight out of eleven Tube lines got worse. Most London commuters, plagued by breakdowns and strikes, would be bewildered by the apparent lack of a relationship between the seemingly ever-increasing transport pay and Tube reliability.
Ken was also known to be a generous payer to his tightly-knit band of advisors when he was mayor. However, the sums were lower than they are now and he was in charge during a time of public sector largesse. If there were hopes or expectations that Boris would create a leaner (and perhaps meaner) City Hall as a red-blooded Tory, they have been well and truly dashed. Curiously, it is the south London technician whose presence is still felt around City Hall after four years of absence rather than the Old Bullingdonian, apparently born to rule, who took his place.
Sonia Purnell is the author of Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, Aurum Press, £8.99