A guide to the 2021 mayoral elections, part one

This time: London, Manchester, Liverpool and Cambridgeshire.

The British state, committed as it is to putting voters off politics whenever it can and to generally confusing the hell out of everyone, uses the word “mayor” to mean three completely different things. There are mayors, or in certain privileged areas, Lords Mayors, who are purely ceremonial leaders. There are the directly elected mayors introduced by the Blair government in 2000, who replace council leaders, essentially swapping a parliamentary model of local government for a presidential one.

And then there are the metro mayors, who head combined authorities: county-sized clusters of neighbouring councils that would benefit from cooperating in certain strategic policy areas, like housing or planning or transport. These guys are at the heart of the English devolution policy the government has followed for the last five years. They also, though we don’t tend to describe the post as a metro mayor, include the rather more venerable mayor of London. And they’re generally doing the bits of policy I’m most interested in, so they’re the mayors I’m going to be paying most attention to when the local election results start rolling in.

But what is actually going on with them? Who’s up, who’s down, and what does any of it matter? This is the first part of a two-part guide on what to look out for on Thursday. First up – the races which, let’s be honest, contain no suspense whatsoever.

Greater London

Obviously you’ve already heard all about London’s mayoral election and, especially if you don’t live here, you’re sick to death of it already. What’s more, the results are going to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. When it’s already dry. Not a single poll I’ve seen has put the Labour incumbent, Sadiq Khan, on less than 40%; not a single poll has seen his Tory rival Shaun Bailey top 30%. And several of them have the gap closer to 25 points than 10.

The whole thing’s oddly depressing. Khan has not used his lead to be bolder, braver or tell hard truths, but has largely kept his head down. He even pulled out of the BBC’s big TV debate on Sunday, presumably on the grounds that he could only lose, not gain, votes from it. Bailey, presumably wanting to suggest he’s playing on the same level as Khan and not wanting to become the biggest target on the stage and quite possibly from an extremely belated realisation that he sucks at this, followed. It’s hardly leadership, is it? 

City Hall. Image: Garry Knight/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons.

There will be some points of interest in the results. Will Khan become the first London mayoral candidate to get more than 50% of first preference votes, and thus win in the first round? (Probably not, but plausible.) Who will place third – the Green Sian Berry, or LibDem Luisa Porritt? (My money’s on Berry, partly because she’s a bigger name, partly also because she, er, appears a lot further up the ballot.) Will the comedy candidate Count Binface get more votes than the tragedy candidate Lawrence Fox? (Please, please, please, please.)

The most interesting thing, though, will be seeing whether Bailey sets an all time record low for the Tory candidate: some polls have shown him getting less than the 27.1% Steve Norris did in 2000, when the Labour vote was split between the official candidate Frank Dobson, and the then extremely unofficial one Ken Livingstone. This is not as shocking as it may sound: London has become a lot less friendly to the Tories, and he’s a truly awful candidate, not just incompetent but with a history of saying horrific things about women or religious minorities. Khan doesn’t deserve his easy walk to victory, but make no mistake, Bailey deserves his humiliation.

Greater Manchester

Another tension free zone: in 2017, Labour’s Andy Burnham won on the first round after getting 63% of the vote, the biggest ever seen in an election of this type. Since then he’s been by far the most visible of the non-London mayors, banging the drum for the entire north, getting rough sleepers off the streets, offering more space for cyclists and, belatedly, taking control of the region’s bus network. There’s not been any polling this cycle that I can see – but I’d be stunned if he didn’t win big again.

He’ll be helped by the fact that those on the ground say the Tory candidate Laura Evans has been almost invisible. (Her campaign slogan, incidentally, is “For the whole of GM” – take that, Manchester City Council metropolitan elite.) I’ve not in all honesty heard much of the LibDem candidate Simon Lepori, either, though I was amused by the fact that John Leech, the LibDem leader of the opposition on Manchester City Council, recently promised: “Vote for the Liberal Democrats on the 6th of May and we’ll work twice as hard as Labour,” a pledge that I suspect reflects the fact he’s one of only two LibDems on Manchester City Council.

Anyway: Burnham too is going to walk it, which is sad in some ways, because he’s far from perfect either: witness the attempts by Jen Williams of the Manchester Evening News to get him to release a report on local policing failures. But enough about that: please enjoy these baffling photographs of the independent candidate Michael Elston’s campaign leaflets. Exhibit A:

Exhibit B – a classic example of space filling:

Photos courtesy of Tom Forth.

Tragically, after all that effort, Elston won’t even be on the ballot. Administrative error. 

And now, a commercial break.

Enjoying this? Want to support me to do more of it? Become a paying subscriber for £4 a month and get a newsletter every week.

Liverpool

If you’ve been half paying attention to news from Liverpool, or indeed this newsletter, you might think that this one has been in the news of late. You would be wrong. It’s the mayor of the City of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, who was recently arrested as part of an investigation into local financial dealings, and consequently suspended from the Labour party, before announcing that he would not be standing for a third term. After some dodgy internal shenanigans (this is, after all, the Labour party), the party selected as its new candidate for mayor... Jo Anderson. No relation; Jo this time is short for Joanne, and she’s a black woman not a white man. Just one who has basically the same name as the last fella. The whole thing is a mess but it’s also utterly hilarious.

Anyway. Anderson part deux is all but certain to be elected as the city’s mayor next week, because she’s Labour and this is Liverpool. On the same day, Steve Rotheram, mayor of the Liverpool City Region – the city, plus five suburban boroughs – is also standing for re-election. He will almost certainly win, too.

All this seems to me to make the case for either ditching the City of Liverpool mayoralty, and going back to the traditional leader and cabinet model, or for renaming the bloody City Region in some way, because the only thing that could possibly be more confusing than having two people whose job title contains the words “mayor” and “Liverpool” would be having three, and obviously they have a third one too (Lord Mayor; ceremonial).

Next week, I will be interested to see how turnout for the two elections differs, and whether one post seems to have a stronger mandate than the other. I will not be on the edge of my seat awaiting the election results because both Labour candidates are very obviously going to win.

Cambridgeshire & Peterborough

The odd one out of the combined authorities at present, because it isn’t a conurbation or city region: it’s the county of Cambridgeshire, as it has existed since 1974. It’s not the historic county of Cambridgeshire because it also includes Huntingdonshire (these days reduced to the status of a district) and Peterborough (which was historically a “soke” and weirdly far flung bit of Northamptonshire, later a county in its own right, later still a part of Huntingdonshire). Why it gets its name included in the combined authority and Huntingdonshire doesn’t is anybody’s guess.

The Soke of Peterborough was once part of Northamptonshire. Why, god, why? Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Anyway: again, not a very interesting election. In 2017, Conservative James Palmer (I don’t think much of his party affiliation, but I do feel a kinship with his tendency to always look like he’s just fallen through a hedge) won on the second round, beating a LibDem 57 to 43. There’s little reason to think he won’t win again: Peterborough has flirted with Labour, Cambridge is increasingly safe territory for the reds, and South Cambridgeshire is currently LibDem, yet the county as a whole is solidly Tory. Palmer’s got this.

His policies are not too regressive as Tories go. He’s talked a lot about building extra stations in places like Wisbech, Soham and Cambridge South, and using community land trusts to get more homes built in and around the city: Cambridge has some of the most expensive housing in the country, so building more homes and making it easier to reach from outlying villages will be a good thing. He’s also talking a lot about Cambridge’s proposed partly underground light-rail network, which is – with apologies to my core readership – a less good thing, because the city is not nearly big enough to need one. So I’m tempted to assume this proposal isn’t entirely serious. But the artist’s impressions are lovely, nonetheless.

Two other combined authorities are also quite boring, if only because they’re not holding mayoral elections next week. One is the Sheffield City Region, which is actually just the old metropolitan county of South Yorkshire, thus ignoring the large but non-constituent chunk of the Sheffield City Region across the border in Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire. Sheffield and friends only elected Labour’s Dan Jarvis as mayor in 2018, and so aren’t due another election til next year. 

The other is the even more geographically challenged North of Tyne, which includes Newcastle City Council, North Tyneside and Northumberland – a county, incidentally, that until 1974 included all three of these places. That held its first election in 2019, producing a solid but not spectacular victory for Labour’s Jamie Driscoll. The reason I find the whole thing baffling is that, if you go one stop south on the Tyne & Wear Metro from Newcastle Central, you leave Driscoll’s domain altogether: you’re suddenly south of the Tyne, in Gateshead, which to my admittedly southern eyes is very obviously the same bloody city, and even if it isn’t it should be run as such from the perspective of housing, transport, planning and so forth. It’s like having a Greater London authority that doesn’t include Southwark.

Anyway, the next election isn’t due until 2023: perhaps by then they’ll have got the councils south of Tyne to join the combined authority and sorted themselves out a bit. Then again, perhaps they won’t.

In part two: the places where there’s a chance, however slim, that something interesting might happen.