Not so long ago, when I was chatting with the Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, at a party, he spoke almost wistfully about the rubbish fight the Tories put up in the mayoral election, in which their lacklustre candidate, Susan Hall, deservedly bombed. “Once,” he recalled, shaking his head, “the Tories used to be this legendary election fighting machine. But now…”
Well he must have cheered up quite a bit with the announcement that James Cleverly had put himself forward to be the Tory candidate for London mayor in the next election. Because, by any reckoning, Cleverly is a big beast in this particular jungle — big in both senses, for this solid former Army reservist would loom over little Sadiq. He’s held two great offices of state as former home secretary and foreign secretary, he’s been education secretary and if his last brief, as housing and communities secretary, wasn’t quite the first rank, it has at least a solid bearing on his putative role as mayor. Cleverly is, in short, the kind of candidate that the Tories seemed simply incapable of producing any more: a possible winner.
