This article also appears in the October edition of Prospect
Next year’s Mayoral election should be a shoo-in for Ken...yet Boris is ahead. Peter Kellner explores why that might be
Here is a statistic to add colour to Boris Johnson’s cheeks and drain it from Ken Livingstone’s. One in five people who would vote Labour in a General Election plan to vote for Boris for mayor. It is this group that will decide the outcome of next May’s contest. If these voters stick with Boris, he will win a second term. But if enough of them return ‘home’, Ken will take back the crown he lost in 2008.
In principle, the issue looks beyond doubt. Next year’s election should be a shoo-in for Ken. There are two reasons for this. The first is that London is a Labour city. In last year’s General Election, the Conservatives held a seven point lead across Britain as a whole – but Labour retained a narrow lead in London. Since then, the capital – like the rest of the country – has seen a swing to Labour. YouGov’s latest London survey, in June, put Labour on 51% and the Tories on 32%. Given that the nationwide party battle has been fairly static since then, that is probably a good guide to where the parties stand in London this autumn.
The second reason is that in each of the three mayoral elections since the post was created, Ken has outperformed the Labour party. The graphic shows what happened. It compares the two-party division of the list vote for the London Assembly – that is, excluding the votes for minor parties – with the final run-off vote for mayor. (There are different ways to calculate the ‘Ken effect’ but each tells the same story.)
| Party vote* | Mayoral vote** | Ken bonus | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Labour % | Conservative % | Livingstone % | Norris % |
| |
2000 | 51 | 49 | 58 | 42 | 7 |
2004 | 47 | 53 | 55 | 45 | 8 |
|
|
| Livingstone | Johnson |
|
2008 | 44 | 56 | 47 | 53 | 3 |
2011 | 61 | 39 | 46 | 54 | -15 |
*2000-2008: Share of two-party vote in party-list section of Assembly vote; 2011: Share of two-party vote in YouGov poll on Londoners' general election voting intention
**2000-2008: share of vote in final run-off between Livingstone and Norris/Johnson; 2011: share of vote in run-off in YouGov poll
In 2000, when Ken stood as an independent, he defeated Steve Norris in the final count by 58-42%. The two-party division of the list vote was Labour 51%-Conservative 49%. So there was a Ken bonus of seven points. In 2004, with Labour less popular nationally and many of the party’s voters staying at home, the Tories moved ahead in the list vote. But the Ken bonus was worth eight points. This overcame Labour’s unpopularity as a party, so Ken was easily re-elected.
By 2008, Labour was even more unpopular; its share of the two-party vote in London fell to 44%. There was still a Ken bonus, but it fell to just three points – not enough to deprive Boris of victory by 53-47%.
Today, given Labour’s huge lead in London, any Ken bonus would guarantee his victory, and by a record margin. Yet Boris is ahead. The same YouGov poll that showed Labour 19 points ahead (which translates into a 61-39% advantage on the two-party vote), also put Boris ahead by a similar margin to his victory three years ago. The capital’s big swing back to Labour has not produced any swing back to Ken. The modest ‘Ken bonus’ last time has become a massive ‘Boris bonus’ of 15 points today.
By far Ken’s biggest problem is the one in five Labour voters who prefer Boris. The party’s real problem is not so much ‘Blue Labour’ as ‘Boris Labour’. By burrowing into the detail of YouGov’s data, we can see why so many Labour supporters intending to vote for a Tory mayor. They tend to think that Ken has lost touch with ordinary Londoners, and that Boris is decisive and sticks to what he believes in. The essential tasks of the coming campaign will be for Boris to sustain those verdicts and for Ken to overturn them. It will be a supreme test of the character and electioneering abilities of both men.
