Tories’ London Mayoral Own Goal?

The Cameroonian Conservatives may rue the day that they decided to hold US-style open primaries in their candidate selections. It may have proved a useful gimmick in raising the profile of PPC selections in individual parliamentary constituencies, but it could backfire badly on them in the London Mayoral selection process. According to Paul Waugh in tonight’s Evening Standard, the Labour Party is plotting to sabotage the Tories’ selection campaign by urging Labour Party members to register to vote in next month’s Conservative mayoral primary, to try to stop Boris Johnson winning. Some opinion polls have suggested that Boris is the one prospective Tory mayoral candidate who might threaten Ken Livingstone, though the evidence is mixed, given that Boris is such a loose cannon.

I’m probably unusual among Liberal Democrats in that I have met all four of the Tory hopefuls in my political and professional wanderings round the capital. My entirely subjective, non-professional judgement is that Warwick Lightfoot is the nicest, and Andrew Boff is the feistiest political campaigner. Victoria Borwick is something of an also-ran. Boris is sui generis. But people should not be fooled by his slovenly charm and amusing way with words. He is deeply unsound politically, not just on issues such as multiculturalism (as Doreen Lawrence and others have been pointing out), but also on Europe. When he was a journalist in Brussels, he was filing the most awful Europhobic twaddle.  The LibDem candidate for Mayor should point that out, if Boris does become Tory candidate, as the Mayor of London must be a champion of London as Europe’s greatest city, not a Brussels-bashing populist.