Boris sends out a missive to the GLA staff: (h/t to Tory Troll)
“As you may by now have observed, Tim Parker has relinquished his role as First Deputy Mayor and Chief Executive of the GLA.
“I am hugely grateful to him for his help and support over the last couple of months, and he will continue to be giving me advice as a member of the board of TfL.The key factor in our decision – and yes, it was a joint decision – is that it has become quite obvious to both of us that the Mayor must chair TfL. This body is not just a major London employer. Decisions taken by TfL have an impact on the lives of millions of Londoners, and there must be direct political accountability.“We will also be taking forward Tim’s work on restructuring the GLA. He has come up with some excellent ideas, and these will now be developed by Simon Milton, who will be assuming greater responsibilities within my office, together with the interim Head of Paid Service, Jeff Jacobs. This plan will now be put into effect next month.”
So it looks like an assertion of power by the borough boys against the CCHQ favourites. The three remaining Boris-appointed Deputy Mayors plus the statutory Richard Barnes are ex-leaders or deputy leaders of Tory boroughs. The two DMs to leave have both been proteges of Francis Maude’s wing of the Conservative Party, which now seems to be in retreat. What could have provoked this?
Firstly, it’s worth considering that Milton and co. are genuinely keen to see Conservatives elected, which means offering the voters something - this isn’t always (ever?) understood by the wonks and ideologues of Policy Exchange and elsewhere. If Tim Parker is running around the place slashing and burning without a hand on his collar, eventually you’re going to have a situation in a sensitive constituency where a bus route is cut or a Tube station loses staff or someone brings in a new super-efficient camera to catch illegal parkers and make £££. You know, something which will filter up through the local press and embarrass the elected politicians. It’s essential, therefore, for this to be headed off at the pass before it reaches this point. From there to the conclusion that it’s better to have the borough boys keep a close eye on things is a short step, and Milton appears to have turned the Mayor on to the pitfalls of the Central Office way of doing business.
Milton and co. would prefer it if they could offer their electorates a cut in their council tax without a cut in their transport services. They require two key levers here - firstly to target the cuts in the GLA to pay for the cut in the precept away from their constituents, secondly to steer TfL into putting the pork into Tory areas. Obviously TfL has to be under their thumb to do this - it’s fundamentally incompatible with hiring in an outside guy and running it hands-off so given this background Parker had to go. Sir Simon, on the other hand, is now clearly the power behind the throne, which considering he learnt his trade at the knee of Dame Shirley Porter is not a great thought. The GLA and TfL now look like Caliban tamed to the service of the Tory boroughs.
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This what I originally assumed would happen and was slightly surprised when Boris pursued the Big Tent approach.
From watching many sessions where Tory AMs desperately tried to gain assurances from Parker, Milton and Boris (and anyone else who sat in front of them) whether there would be a shift in power back to the boroughs, it’s pretty clear that there will be a lot of smiling faces on the Tory side of the Assembly in September.
Whether this will lead to the kind of Gerrymandering style of politics we saw in Westminster during the eighties and nineties remains to be seen. But it doesn’t look good.