“I remember saying at the time that it would be very, very disappointing if in about 20 years’ time, it was exactly the same kind of forum,” said former Labour London Minister Tony McNulty, who helped craft the office. “That’s more or less where it’s stuck.”
City Hall vs Whitehall
While the mayoralty arrived not with a bang but with a whimper, it soon found its feet.
Just 34 percent of the electorate voted in the 1998 referendum approving its establishment. Yet two larger-than-life politicians — first Ken Livingstone, then Boris Johnson — helped put rocket-boosters under the institution, which stepped into a power vacuum created when Margaret Thatcher as Tory PM scrapped the Greater London Council after endless clashes with its left-wing leadership.
“It was a bit of an anomaly that London had no citywide institutions or democratically elected institutions,” said Akash Paun, a program director at the Institute for Government think tank. “London was missing out from not having a strategic authority.”
Handing power away from the notoriously centralized U.K. government inevitably led to fights with Whitehall civil service.
The first mayor, Livingstone, was a left-wing veteran of the GLC, who ran as an independent after a falling out with Labour. He riled up ministers by introducing a new congestion charge on vehicles traveling in central London — but the policy stuck, and remains a defining achievement of the office. Livingstone ran for a second time, now back in the Labour fold, before being defeated by Tory big beast Johnson in 2008.