At last, the Tories have produced their candidate for next year’s mayoral election. Susan Hall is the woman. She is not, even in London, a household name. She has undoubted local government experience, being until recently head of the City Hall Conservatives, but what is striking about this contest was the failure of the party to attract any candidate with discernible public recognition.
The Tories lag so far behind Labour in London that what was needed to disrupt Labour’s apparent stranglehold on power was an eye-catching candidate with sufficient experience to be credible; Susan Hall has the experience but to date lacks popular appeal. In the campaign anything might happen, of course. But this contest will be nothing like as interesting as, say, Boris Johnson’s campaign against Ken Livingstone: these were substantial, eloquent candidates with large personalities. And that is what London deserves.
It’s in the interests of democracy that there should be a compelling, closely contested mayoral election next year. The incumbent must be held to account, and in the case of Sadiq Khan there is plenty in his record — on crime and policing, housing, transport and planning — for Hall to challenge. London is open for change. We congratulate her on her nomination: now let’s see whether she has it in her to give Khan a run for his money.
Now the good news
On another front, the Tories can take heart from good news: consumer inflation fell last month to 7.9 per cent from 8.7 per cent, and it was chiefly from food and fuel. That’s good in itself and it has several happy results for the Government. The chances that the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee next month will raise interest rates by another half per cent has diminished. It’s less plausible for striking workers to claim pay rises of over 10 per cent. Fears of a wage-price spiral have reduced. All this matters for morale. Inflation is the PM’s personal priority. At last, for now, the trajectory is going his way.
Barbie and the bomb
You wait ages for a must-see film, then two come along at once. In theory, Barbie, the film that celebrates two Mattel dolls (Ken steals the show) and pink merchandise, should satisfy a very different audience from Oppenheimer, about the man who invented the atom bomb and thereby destroyed Hiroshima. Yet what’s interesting is that a number of people will see both. And they’ll do so in cinemas. Between them, Barbie and Oppenheimer could rejuvenate the habit of going to the pictures.
