Britain needs French mayors

Farewell also to those odd 24 hours when overexcited political correspondents sought to make their lives more compelling by pretending, to themselves and to us, that she had a real chance of running the capital. They were fun while they lasted! God, we really do have fun, sometimes, don’t we?

Sadly the fun is now over, as Sadiq Khan got reelected for a third term with a very healthy-looking majority. London, for the time being, remains a Labour city. It also remains a place which refuses to succumb to dog whistles, and will not let itself be run by people attempting to divide and conquer.

Still, we shouldn’t be popping open the champagne quite yet. Khan isn’t a Trump supporter and that is great, but that doesn’t mean that his record is entirely worth celebrating. London has, over the past decade or so, visibly been decaying.

Public transport has become more unreliable than ever; pubs keep closing at an alarming rate, and new ones are struggling to open; countless people have been priced out of the city altogether, and have had to move elsewhere. Nightlife isn’t what it used to be and women often don’t feel safe in the streets; anecdotally, occasional visitors keep going on about London no longer being what it used to be.

There is no point in denying it: London currently isn’t thriving, with or without Khan. Of course, it isn’t an exception. Few British cities are doing tremendously at the moment, as you may have noticed. We could get into the reasons why that is the case, but it would take too long, and anyway I suspect that we could both name them anyway.

Instead, it may be worth wondering if there is a world in which Khan really could have done a lot better. England’s mayors are, for the most part, kept on quite a short leash. There isn’t a whole lot they can achieve, and they are often treated as quasi-ambassadors, paid to bang the drum for their patch, as opposed to truly running it.

That is the case in London but also elsewhere. Westminster loves to talk about the successes of metro mayors, and the political figures they have brought to the forefront of national politics. West Midlands’ Andy Street is a prime example, and his defeat was mourned by people across the political spectrum.

The next step, however, would be for them to put money where their mouths are, and actually devolve more powers to those mayors. It wouldn’t exactly be a revolutionary move: countries like France have long had all-powerful mayors. In fact, most prominent national politicians across the Channel built their career by being local politicians.

On top of being a good idea in and of itself, greater devolution could also make Westminster a more interesting place. Turning mayorships into more coveted and powerful positions would mean attracting a wider range of people to the job. Those people could, after their stint running their local areas, decide to turn their ambitions to the Houses of Parliament.

After all, not everyone was built to toil as a backbencher for a decade before getting even a whiff of real power. We often talk about the need to widen the pipeline and make it more diverse, and this could be a solid way to do it. Perhaps more importantly, it could make people feel like they have a more direct input into how their corner of the world is being run.

A lot has been said in the past few years about Westminster’s disconnect from voters but maybe that cannot be avoided. Instead, couldn’t the solution be to put more power in the hands of people who, by definition, will always be more in touch with their communities?