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London was a prize indeed for the Conservatives. Boris Johnson's win in May put the Tories back in control of the capital's metropolitan government for the first time since 1981.
Meanwhile, last Thursday's Henley by-election suggests David Cameron is within striking distance of Downing Street. If the Conservatives win the coming general election, millions of Londoners will live within three levels of Tory government - town hall, City Hall and Westminster.
That's an awful lot of Conservative power. But how will a Tory capital be different from a Labour one? At this point, we still don't really know.
For not only is Johnson no ideologue - Ken Livingstone set the terms of the debate in the mayoral election. Meanwhile, the first two months of Johnson's regime have, unsurprisingly, been taken up with appointing senior staff. There will now be a further stage while his office starts to link itself to the remaining City Hall machine. Only after that process will stronger signals start to emit from Planet Boris.
They need to come soon. Above all, we need to know Johnson's approach to growth and to the power of the boroughs. That will in turn determine his policy in most of the areas where he has real clout - transport, economic development, the Olympics and relations with central government.
The contrast is with Livingstone's clear "narrative" for the city. London, Livingstone believed, should grow flatout, accommodating a fast-rising population, sharp employment growth and new housing, all in as "green" a way as possible. Power should be grabbed from Whitehall and/or the boroughs.
Once established, this centralising model underpinned almost every decision made by City Hall. Indeed, it was imposed with an iron fist on mayoral agencies, boroughs and neighbourhoods alike. Like it or hate it, the former Mayor's philosophy was widely understood.
Now Johnson has to create his own narrative. Yet far more is at stake politically than merely Johnson's own popularity. We now look to City Hall for evidence of what the Cameronised Conservative Party really stands for.
Johnson was swept to power by an electoral coalition that included a huge "traditional" outer-London Tory middle-class vote plus a core of affluent inner Londoners in places such as Fulham, Chelsea and St John's Wood. However, there were also a significant number of fed-up, white, ex-Labour supporters in places such as Bexley, Havering, Barking & Dagenham, Croydon and Enfield who tipped the balance away from Labour. Presumably in 2012, the Mayor will wish to hold on to all of his 2008 vote while convincing many others, including the liberal middle classes and minority ethnic voters, that he is better than his enemies originally suggested.
Yet Johnson can look to no single, clear model of London Tory government in the boroughs. The Conservative town halls demonstrate some very different approaches to "centre-Right" government.
Kensington and Chelsea, for example, has always been dominated by moderate Tories of the old school, with a keen concern for the disadvantaged.
Wandsworth, on the other hand, has successfully pioneered a privatised, low-council tax - some would say Thatcherite - administration.
Westminster is halfway between these two approaches. Meanwhile, many outer boroughs, especially where power shifts back and forward from Labour to Conservative, have a less distinctive brand - but tend to give priority to clean streets and efficiency.
Johnson's first key decisions will be in his review of the London Plan, the central guide to mayoral thinking about issues such as accommodating growth, architecture (including tall buildings), green space, the environment and transport infrastructure.
The new mayor has made it clear he wants to end the indiscriminate "reach for the sky" approach to architecture. But less-tall buildings do not mean lower population densities. Existing official projections show London's population rising from 7.5 million today to eight million by 2015 and on to nine million in the early 2030s. There will be a corresponding increase in employment.
Sustained high fuel prices would encourage even more people to move into London. The city appears to be trapped in an inescapable spiral of growth.
So Johnson's first decision will surely be about whether to accept such growth - or to attempt to reduce it. In reality, it is hard to see how most of the population growth could be avoided: it is the result of the capital's youthful, fertile, population. The real question will be how to ensure a supply of extra homes, to improve transport capacity significantly and to make living at higher densities acceptable.
The Mayor will also need to explain how he will encourage the boroughs to deliver their shares of the new housing, bus routes, waste transfer plants and other facilities needed to make growth comfortable. Out in the neighbourhoods there is an understandable desire to keep noise and disruption to a minimum. Mr Livingstone was from time to time prepared to take on "Nimby" pressures for the good of the city as a whole. For example, he supported the unpopular Thames Gateway Bridge in east London. But if the new Mayor wants to avoid such an authoritarian approach, he will have to find a better way of doing the same thing.
Mr Johnson will also have to decide which major transport and Olympic projects to prioritise and which, if any, to abandon. This kind of awkward decision is just around the corner, as the Crossrail project, the Olympics and the redevelopment of the Tube all reach expensive stages in 2009 and 2010. And what about commitments such as the introduction of a Paris-style network of bicycles for hire?
And that's not all. The current Titanic struggle within the Metropolitan Police strongly suggests the need for a greater degree of political control from City Hall. Other services such as the commuter railway and even parts of the health service could be brought within the Mayor's control - but only if he has a convincing plan to take them over and run them well.
If Boris Johnson's regime is to be seen to be the blueprint for progressive modern Conservatism, it needs to get a strategic grip on London, and soon. If he doesn't, it will soon become obvious - and we will thus all have learned an important lesson about the Tories' capacity to govern on a wider stage. For Johnson - but for Cameron too - the stakes could not be higher.
• Tony Travers is director of the Greater London Group at the LSE.
Reader views (1)
The chances of BoJo ever having a "strategic grip" on anything are negligible. Remember John Major floundering around with banalities like the Cones Hotline when his administration was sinking? BoJo seems to have begun at that level of gormless vacuity rather than declined to it.
The strategic vision of BoJoland (if any) was always going to be determined by the deputies and senior officers assembled around him. I assumed these were going to be installed by Tory central office and would be the usual arrogant but efficient bunch of misanthropes and sociopaths.
Seems not. The characters paraded before us in the last few days appear to be pure Borisonian clowns. Expect the revolving doors to whir over the next few months as a succession of gurus and snake oil salesmen flit in and out of office under BoJo.
Eventually, the Tory Party will have to get a grip for him or suffer the consequences.
- Jim Paton, London, UK, 07/07/2008 00:58
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