What does the capital mean to the Tories? One of the best barometers for this choppy relationship is the candidate the party chooses to run in London’s mayoral election. The answer for years has been “someone not many Londoners have heard of”.
In itself, that tells us a lot about the institutional view of London as a place where untested or random have-a-go sorts try out their wings, only to fade into the footnotes.
What it does not resemble is a serious comeback bid to run the city. This achievement was last brought home twice by Boris Johnson. While he has earned many of the brickbats coming his way right now, Boris’s London record of two wins was proof that his party could win in a “Labour city”, after an overlong run of a candidate on the Left (Ken Livingstone). It also showed that a candidate with name recognition prepared to pound the streets and with a strategy for victory could win.
If the Tories are not ambitious enough to run London, however, the capital has a habit of replying in kind.
The roll call of hopefuls in recent years has veered between Establishment friends of those in power nationally (Zac Goldsmith) and a valiant shot by Shaun Bailey, a figure well known from his work with young offenders, but not much beyond that.
Daniel Korski, as the frontrunner, continues this trend as the latest untested political yearling to be put in for the Grand National of the city’s mayoral race. The former special adviser and founder of a “Govtec” company (thus favoured by a technocratic Rishi Sunak) will announce his run at City Hall in July, with the elections taking place in May next year.
Korski has extensive backroom experience as deputy policy chief to David Cameron — he’s best known in London as an unswerving lobbyist in Uber’s long battle against regulation. He also backed Tom Tugendhat’s peripheral but energetic run at the Tory leadership. His commitment to the Remain cause in 2016 would make him the ideal Svengali to a prominent Conservative candidate. Neither is he new to the media limelight as an (excellent) TV journalist reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq and well-connected, by virtue of being married to Fiona Mcilwham, an erstwhile senior diplomat who also saw service on the domestic battlefront of working for the Duchess of Sussex.
It is however, telling that Conservative HQ feels it needs to take its chances on an untried candidate — and that the list to beat (though Susan Hall and Mozammel Hossain remain possible but unlikely candidates), consisted essentially of the affable but junior minister Paul Scully.
London Conservatives with a future ahead are busy with other things and bailing out the party next year is not one of them. Korski wants to revive a “London dream”, which sounds a bit like a mixture of the “American dream”and the insistent “China dream” of the eponymous communist party. It is a phrase that is likely to tire fast. A raft of early policies range from the carefully calibrated (attack Sadiq Khan on the vulnerable flank of ULEZ) and the fanciful (giving the mayor oversight of the Crown Prosecution Service, which is probably the biggest non-starter I have covered in 20 years of mayoral races). He needs to avoid lurching between the obvious and the daft.
Yet for thin scrapings of the Tory race for London, the odds are not impossible. A change to the voting system from a Supplementary Vote ranking system to all-out winner is apt to benefit centre-Right candidates against the more fragmented centre-left. Elections nerds might also recall that Bailey was, to the surprise of many, only five percentage points behind Khan in the first round — and a third-term mayor is always a tricky act to pull off.
Khan is a resilient figure but not an especially inspiring one outside a particular part of Labour’s leftish core. He can hope to ride the coat tails of Sir Keir Starmer’s national revival, despite their personal and policy differences. It leaves a thin but not negligible Tory-shaped opportunity in London politics. The tough old truth, however, is that it helps to have fought the skirmishes of frontline politics to move from contender to victor. The hardest ask of Korski is ensuring that Londoners outside the “bubble” realise that he is an alternative at all.
