Livingstone Elected: London's First Direct Mayor

Ken Livingstone won London's first direct mayoral election on May 4, 2000, running as an independent after the Labour Party expelled him for defying its candidate selection process. The victory was both a democratic milestone for a city of seven million and a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had created the office specifically to modernize London's governance and expected to control who filled it. London had not had a citywide executive since the Greater London Council was abolished by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. For fourteen years, the capital of the United Kingdom had no unified local government, with services divided among thirty-two borough councils and various quangos. Blair's government created the Greater London Authority and the mayoralty as part of its devolution agenda, alongside new assemblies for Scotland and Wales. Blair wanted his own candidate in the job. The Labour leadership backed Frank Dobson, the Health Secretary, and engineered a selection process designed to prevent Livingstone from winning the party nomination. When Livingstone ran anyway as an independent, he was automatically expelled from Labour. The maneuver backfired spectacularly. Livingstone won with 58 percent of the vote in the supplementary vote system, carrying every London borough. Livingstone had been the last leader of the Greater London Council before Thatcher abolished it, and Londoners remembered him as a colorful, combative figure who had trolled the Thatcher government by posting London's unemployment figures on a billboard visible from Parliament. His populist campaign focused on transport, promising to fix the Underground and oppose the government's preferred public-private partnership for Tube modernization. As mayor, Livingstone introduced the congestion charge for central London in 2003, one of the first large-scale urban road pricing schemes in the world. He was readmitted to Labour and won a second term in 2004 before losing to Boris Johnson in 2008. The office he inaugurated has since become one of the most powerful directly elected positions in European local government.