Oh dear. Wandsworth. Barnet. Westminster. Some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, rammed with bankers and lawyers and Tory for as long as most of us have been alive. They’ve gone Labour.
The jewels have been dislodged from the Conservative crown and rolled to the feet of Keir Starmer. It is such an embarrassing moment you almost feel sorry for the prime minister – the man who lost London.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor who succeeded Johnson, calls it historic and he’s right. No matter how badly the Tories used to do local elections, they could also answer their critics with one word: “Wandsworth”.
Once upon a time, pre-Thatcher, it was a then typical working-class inner-city Labour borough; a tatty place where they filmed “kitchen sink” dramas round Clapham Junction. It was full of council housing, greasy spoon cafes and presided over and patronised by a paternalistic and complacent Labour establishment. Wandsworth was somewhere the Labour Party could rely upon to return Labour MPs, as well as a Labour council.
Then came social change in the 1970s, early gentrification, the first stirrings of what we came to know as the yuppie, and a Conservative Party ready to capitalise on a national feeling of malaise – and a promise to sell you your council house or flat for well below their market value.
A client electorate was about to have its head turned by free wonga. In the general election of 1979, good Labour MPs lost their seats. It was a harbinger of the Thatcher decade – and Tory resilience long after. Even when the poll tax disgusted the rest of the country back in 1990, an accident of the local rating system and some prudent Tory councillors meant Wandsworth was able to set a zero council tax on its residents.
The Tory chairman of the day, Ken Baker, was able to brandish a copy of the Evening Standard with a helpful headline about their favourite borough. The line was that Tory councils save you money. It gave an embattled Margaret Thatcher some respite – though she was out by the end of the year…
By the same token, “Wandsworth”, Conservative council since 1978, is now a shorthand for the revival of the Labour Party; something that can be brandished whenever anyone suggests that Keir Starmer is lacking a bit of electoral appeal. It is the X-Factor, if you will, where the X is what goes on the ballot paper next to a red rose logo.
“Wandsworth” is excellent propaganda, even when the reality is that Labour will need to do a lot more to return to government outside London and the wealthier parts of the south. It is strange that Labour has become more the party of the well-heeled professional middle classes – the bosses – and the Tories appeal more to the workers, but so it would seem.
Our politics are as tribal as they were, but the tribes are more culturally determined than by income or wealth. Wandsworth proves it, just as it symbolised an earlier generational political shift.
From what can be seen thus far, much of the country, and especially the capital, are fed up with the current generation of Conservatives and have found any excuse to stay home or vote for an opposition party. Not necessarily Labour, it must be added, but certainly not for a Tory party led by this prime minister.
It is proof that he is an electoral liability, even if Keir Starmer isn’t the kind of magnet for the electorate that Tony Blair once was. Johnson has a particular problem with London, very possible a product of its pro-EU, anti-Brexit instincts. It is yet another reverberation of the 2016 referendum rumbling through the body politic.
Labour is now once again the party of the kind of people who live in Wandsworth; it’s just that the people have become more socially liberal and feel European. The Lib Dem south west of the city, where Tory councillors are virtually extinct, may as well still be in the EU, such is the mindset.
It feels hard to believe that Boris Johnson was, not so long ago, Mayor of London. Indeed, he beat a famous and wily Labour incumbent, Ken Livingstone, when no one else in the Conservative party wanted to take him on, and Johnson went on to win a second time.
In those days, the Conservatives had no trouble holding on to Wandsworth, in good years and bad. But in those days “Boris” was liberal and expansive, highly conscious that London is a world city, one that had to be open to the rest of the world, and benefited enormously, disproportionately from being the EU’s financial centre.
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Mayor Johnson was a clown but a progressive one: pro-Eu and pro-migration and pro-multiculturalism – and amusing with it. Londoners liked that.
Nowadays, he is the man who visited the disaster of a botched Brexit on the capital, and who leads a party that stigmatises London as some sort of over privileged bubble (even though some of the worst pockets of poverty can be found there).
London, a place he has lived in for most of his life, is the target of the culture wars Johnson sanctions and the divisive attitudes he stirs up. The Tories seem to hate London and all it stands for, now. Johnson should not be surprised when even Wandsworth and Westminster decline to vote for him.
