London fog

How Tony Blair, loony leftists and a sex scandal around a charismatic author turned the London mayor's race into a political-party nightmare.

By Elkan Allan

Dec 8, 1999 | This spring, London residents will choose a mayor who will have hitherto unheard-of authority. The vote will follow months of struggle for Prime Minister Tony Blair and other British political leaders. Ironically, the search for viable mayoral candidates has all but exhausted the very political parties that had hoped to gain power through the election.

London has had a lord mayor since the Middle Ages, but in modern times, it has been little more than a courtesy title, an annual reward for merchant philanthropists. The lord mayor's nominal jurisdiction is only over the square mile in the center called the City of London.

So when Blair came up with the idea of executive mayors with real power for Britain's larger cities, the only people who bridled were hard-line traditionalists. They objected that it was one more step down the slippery slope toward complete Americanization.

The political parties in Britain particularly loved the idea. A LaGuardia-Walker-Giuliani for London provided the opportunity to promote one of their own to greater glory -- and maybe even tackle some of London's chronic problems, such as traffic gridlock, lamentable public transportation and a failing police force. Party leaders enthusiastically began preparations for the first election to be held May 4, 2000.

But of the three effective parties, only the Liberal Democrats could agree on a candidate. They speedily nominated an unknown, Susan Kramer, who has stayed that way and will inevitably finish a poor third.

The Labor and Conservative parties, however, soon found themselves with splitting headaches, for more or less the same reason. Each had a charismatic front-runner whom their party machines did not want.

On your left, find Ken Livingstone, an unreconstructed far-out socialist. As leader of the last local London administration, Livingstone consistently embarrassed the Labor government with such radical gestures as inviting two leaders of the Irish Republic Army as official guests, long before they were welcome anywhere else in the United Kingdom.

But ordinary members of the Labor Party loved "Red Ken" for introducing cheap subway tickets and other populist measures. Many of them -- perhaps a majority -- prepared to vote for him. Blair, faced with the prospect of his great ideas being subverted by "the founder of the loony left," as he called Livingstone, set about stopping him.

On your right, we have Jeffrey Archer, author of lurid bestselling novels, whose passion is politics. Archer has held a series of high-profile jobs under Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, culminating in a seat in the House of Lords. Never mind that Lord Archer's career was littered with allegations of theft and fraud. In order to get into Oxford, he falsely claimed to have been at the University of California. In another gaffe, he walked out of a Toronto store with two unpaid-for suits, insisting he was looking for the shirt department. He also indulged in insider trading of television shares.

Next Page: Murdoch tabloid pierces Archer's "probity and integrity"

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