Andrew Gilligan: Can the Conservatives rebuild through the mayors?

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

By the end of this week, we’ll have at least five new directly-elected mayors, one or two of whom might even be Tories. (There are six mayoral elections, including two to newly-created posts and three where the incumbent is not standing.) So it feels like a good time to ask: can the Conservative Party use the English mayoralties to rebuild?

For many on the left, from Gordon Brown on down, devolution has long been a magic answer to Britain’s governance problems. But so far, with the exception of London, it cannot be said to have worked. In 1999, Scotland had often better public services than England, and the same taxes. Now it has worse public services and higher taxes. A special case, with the nationalists? Yet Wales, too, has fallen further behind England than in 1999.

We can’t make as clear a judgment about English regional devolution, because it hasn’t been going as long. But the signs aren’t good. The longest-established metro mayor, Greater Manchester’s Andy Burnham, has in eight years accomplished little. (Repainting the buses has been great PR but is not, on its own, an achievement: most of the steps London took to make a success of its bus service, above all hundreds of miles of new bus lanes, haven’t been done.)

In devolving (some) power but little or no fiscal responsibility, we’ve made English mayors into campaigners, not leaders – demanding central government do things and pay for things, and telling their voters that all would be well were it not for the failures of Whitehall.

Despite big mandates, the mayors have mostly (again, with the exception of London) been unwilling to make even slightly difficult decisions. Why should they? Campaigning is easier and more electorally profitable than leading. Burnham won landslides even in the Tories’ best years. Some mayors have in effect dedicated themselves to campaigning, focusing on matters entirely outside their powers: Kim McGuinness, the Labour mayor of the North East, says her top priority is to tackle child poverty.

Most mayors go largely unscrutinised, with bombed-out local papers often now little more than reprinters of press releases, and nationals, too, treating Burnham with a reverence he never got as health secretary. Last year, the political editor of the Liverpool Echo, Liam Thorp, ghost-wrote a book, described as a “half-memoir, half-manifesto,” for the metro mayor he is supposed to be covering!

All this makes for bad governance – but also a potential opening for an opposition party like the Tories. More campaigning than doing, little accountability or responsibility, few nasty bills to send out and largely uncritical coverage of everything you say? Sounds like not a bad deal.

And imagine if you were any good – if you actually did want to do something real with the job? You could use it to shape an alternative vision to Labour, show that Tories can be competent and deliver, that we can change some of the things that voters think aren’t working (many mayors are also police and crime commissioners, for instance.) Some mayors have, in parts of their remit, more leeway than a government minister.

At the 2019 election, two Conservative mayoral practitioners of this approach, Andy Street and Ben Houchen, had significant coat-tails. The Tories elected more MPs in their patches than in areas with a Labour metro mayor. The effect carried on for several local election cycles beyond, electing more councillors than in other areas, even as everything went wrong for the party nationally. At his own election in May 2024 Houchen, of course, bucked the general disaster and Street (helped by a Gaza independent) came within 1500 votes of doing the same.

Given the incumbency advantage, and Labour’s dominance of the mayoralties, it might seem far-fetched to see this as a route to Tory revival. In three or four of the ten biggest ones, it is far-fetched. But Labour’s collapse may make it possible in the other mayoralties, including the West Midlands, East Midlands, London and West Yorkshire, and more than possible in some of the smaller places.

Possible, that is, with the right candidate. The other thing about mayoral elections is that they are personality contests. If London’s were a purely party contest, Labour would have won it seven times, not four. The Conservative Party should make the strongest possible efforts to get the best possible people for future winnable mayoral elections. The opportunity is all the greater because most of Labour’s mayors are pretty underwhelming personalities.

Alas, in this cycle, just like in all the others before it, and just like Labour, we’ve usually gone for backbench MPs or council leaders. In London, we achieved the difficult task of finding in a city of 8 million people a candidate less impressive than Sadiq Khan. Yet in 2024, even a poor London mayoral candidate far outpolled the party nationally: maybe personality-focused contests can overcome some of the fragmentation now happening in purely party-based politics.

To anyone decent reading this: these are the best jobs in British politics.

And to the leadership of the Conservative Party: there really is a gap in the market here.