Shaun Bailey was repeatedly briefed against during his campaign for the London mayoralty. It was put about that he wasn’t a charismatic candidate and that Sadiq Khan would beat him easily.
Nonetheless, Bailey ending up losing by only 160,630 votes in a city of some 8.8 million people. The closeness of the result was a reminder that the claims of London, which twice elected Boris Johnson to the mayoralty, to be a Labour stronghold are a bit exaggerated.
Admittedly, the Party is far worse position nationally than it was two years ago, when Johnson sat not in City Hall but Downing Street: it then led in the polls by about ten points. But I’ve been surprised by how bullish the Tory high command has been about next year’s contest.
Its argument is that if capital’s voters contest see the contest as Conservative v Labour, then Khan will indeed be returned as London Mayor for a third time next June. But that if they come to view it as Khan v Change, then anything is possible. They say that Labour’s poll lead for election falls to within a few points once the Mayor’s name is put into the question.
Which is understandable. Few voters know precisely where his responsibility for policing, say, and the Government’s really begins and ends. But they grasp intuitively that there is a dark side to London’s moon, as its inhabitants grapple with the downsides as well as upside of living in a great international city.
Whether the matter to hand is crime, housing or transport, this extraordinary place, whose story has been chronicled so accessibly by Peter Ackroyd, faces extraordinary challenges. Khan’s shtick is basically to take the money…and blame the government.
Where Johnson is a cheeky chappie – like Ken Livingstone before him – the Mayor is a joyless apparatchik. ULEZ expansion in the outer boroughs gives their Tory voters, and others, a reason to turn out for the poll in droves. The imposition of first past the post ought to help the Conservatives (on paper, anyway).
So it isn’t hard to see where the case for Korski came from. The argument is that to frame the election as London v Change, the Party needs a candidate no less unconventional than Johnson himself. Admittedly, none of the three candidates selected for its candidacy get the latter’s name recognition.
But with his saturnine looks, beard, teccy buzz, loafers, tieless shirt and stupendous braggadocio, Korski neither looks, sounds nor is a Party-formed Conservative who has risen through the ranks. Yes, he served in David Cameron’s Policy Unit when the latter was Prime Minister.
But London is relatively young, Remainy and liberal – and the Party hasn’t a hope of performing well in it in next year’s poll if a healthy slice of those voters don’t turn out for its candidate. The case for Korski was a plausible one. Then came Daisy Goodwin’s allegation that he groped her breasts during a Downing Street meeting in 2013.
Korski categorically denies the claim – and it’s said that he raised it with CCHQ when his candidacy was mulled. Nor is it new: the TV screenwriter and producer first made the allegation in 2017, though she didn’t name him at the time. But Tory fixers will have known beforehand that Korski was the man concerned, as will have others at senior levels in the party.
There are two main takes on what the Party should then have done – and I use the term to refer primarily to CCHQ, since Rishi Sunak seems, unlike Cameron and George Osborne, not to have involved himself in the selection, at least in detail or to any significant degree.
The first is that no candidate should be barred from standing by an unproven allegation. The second is that this first view is nuts, given the way the world works, especially since the rise of MeToo. Furthermore, no-one – including Korski himself, by the way – seems to be suggesting that Goodwin has simply made the claim up.
Either way, the long list of candidates put to a Party selectorate to be whittled down to two or three will have been vetted. So the question arises: how closely was Korski pressed? Was he asked if other claims might emerge? Were the kind of questions that journalists could put to the eventual Tory candidate tried on him, including ones about his private life?
Was his candidacy – and those of the other two finalists, Moz Hussain and Susan Hall – war gamed? Some Conservative sources say yes. Others claim otherwise. “He was heavily promoted by people who said the accusations and rumours were bullshit,” I was told yesterday.
“The truth is that they wanted a metropolitan liberal Cameron/Osborne type.” Which would be reasonable enough: putting up such a candidate makes a certain amount of sense in London, though it’s not the only potential route to a possible Tory win. Another would be a Johnson-like force from outside.
Or, say, a socially conservative ethnic minority candidate, rather in the mould of Bailey himself. But there was a solid case for Korski, and I was mulling whether to vote for him in the selection myself, for what it’s worth, and if so whether or not to bother this site’s readers with my reasons.
A second question follows from the first – especially given the shortlist, which surprised some observers. The conventional view was that the finalists would be Hall, Korksi and Paul Scully, the Minister for London. Or perhaps Samuel Kasumu, a former adviser to Johnson.
Was the vetting skimped on to aid a modernising candidate? Today, we re-publish a list of the three candidates’ main supporters. Korski’s includes two full Cabinet Ministers and four others with a right to attend. Most of his backers were on the party’s centre-left (though by no means all).
There is a view within parts of the Party, as is inevitable, that the contest should be re-run. Greg Hands has been quick to rule this out, and one can see why. Members are due to vote next week and the candidate needs time to bed in. The original plan never ruled out putting the names of only two candidates to activists.
Whatever your view, an inquest into the vetting is needed. I appreciate that incidents like this one bring wisdom after the event. But that Goodwin might make her claim was foreseeable, and one needs little imagination to picture the consequence.