The Greater London Authority and the position of Mayor of London are 20 years old this year. But though the mayoralty has come to feel like a fact of London life, there was nothing inevitable about its creation.
According to a new book, London’s Mayor at 20 by Tony Travers, Jack Brown and Richard Brown, it all began back in 1995, when former Evening Standard editor Simon Jenkins persuaded Tony Blair, the newly elected Labour leader, to consider replacing the Greater London Council, abolished by Margaret Thatcher in 1986, with a directly elected mayor. (Directly elected mayors were the norm in North America and common in Europe but unknown in the UK).
What if the mayoralty had not been established and London had continued to muddle on without a London-wide government? It’s surprising just how different not just London but UK history might have been. To begin with, there would have been no Congestion Charge and almost certainly no Olympics — Ken Livingstone and his City Hall colleagues were instrumental in securing both.
Quite possibly Crossrail would not have been given final approval and it is likely there would have been less public transport investment. There would be no London Overground. London would have fewer skyscrapers and even less new housing.
Neither bendy buses nor their new Routemaster successors would have hit the streets.
Outside London, there would have been little impetus from prime ministers Blair and Cameron to require directly elected mayors in Greater Manchester, Liverpool, the West Midlands and elsewhere.
But the counterfactual history really gets interesting when we consider Boris Johnson. When Johnson first ran for City Hall in 2011 he was seen as not quite serious. It was his time as mayor that transformed him to front-line politician.
But without Boris to lead the Leave campaign, the Brexiters might not have won their narrow victory in 2016 referendum. In this sense, the creation of the position of a mayor to lead London, that most cosmopolitan of cities, may, ironically, have accidentally facilitated the UK’s departure from the European Union.
Ben Rogers is director of think tank Centre for London
