Being mayor won’t be a walk on easy Street
Andy Street has done the easy bit. He got himself elected as the first Mayor of the West Midlands.
Now comes the hard part – turning this political non-job into something so significant we wonder how we ever managed without one.
The former John Lewis boss scraped in as the winner over Labour’s Sian Simon by just 3,766 votes out of 523,201 cast.
It was a pretty audacious decision for a highly successful businessman to give up the good life for a shot at the dubious glory of becoming the West Midlands’ great panjandrum.
Especially as the electoral mathematics said there was no way Andy Street could win the contest against a well-established Labour candidate in a predominantly Labour-voting area.
Whether Mr Street was really trusting in the Corbyn factor when he decided to go for the job is questionable.
The Labour leader has been under fire from his MPs throughout the long, drawn-out Mayoral campaign. If, at any time, Labour’s dissidents had managed to dump Jezza, Mr Street’s hopes of victory would have plummeted.
Luckily for him, Mr Corbyn isn’t put off by little things like deep unpopularity and almost total lack of confidence in his ability.
As a result, he helped secure Mr Street’s narrow win which is being taken as a good guide to the outcome of next month’s General Election.
But, while all the attention focuses on what Theresa May will do with her improved position as Prime Minister with a bigger majority in Parliament, Mr Street has to grapple with a new reality.
It’s all very well applying for a new job. Once you get it, you’ve got to deliver.
And in this case, not only has Mr Street got to demonstrate he is, indeed, the man for the job, he’s also got to prove that the job itself is one worth doing. For the truth is nobody, except perhaps ex-Chancellor George Osborne, thought it was a good idea to have an elected Mayor in the first place.
And even fewer really believe in the idea of the West Midlands as a single, unified entity. Indeed there aren’t that many people who could point out the whole area on a map of Britain.
Their confusion is made worse by the fact that, while Mr Street was elected by voters in the Black Country, Birmingham, Coventry and Solihull, his role also covers the surrounding counties. And what was Mr Street’s first great pronouncement? He wants to reduce the number of homeless people on the streets.
It is, of course, a laudable aim. But the solutions are not simple and most of them have been tried already yet some people persist in sleeping rough.
Allegedly, this was an issue which kept cropping up during the Mayoral election campaign but it is hardly the kind of problem Mr Street has been elected to deal with. His priorities will have to be persuading universities and colleges to give young people the skills they need for the jobs of the future, for instance, and dealing with congestion on our roads.
He will have to work out how to encourage entrepreneurs to set up new businesses here and how to persuade companies to invest in the region. And he will have to become as much of a ‘name’ on the national and the world stage as Boris and Ken became when they were the elected Mayor of London (I don’t need to add their surnames because you know who they are, which is more or less the point).
Mr Street may not be a gaffe-prone blonde bombshell with a neat way with words, nor is he a bizarre left-winger expelled by his own party for anti-Semitism. But, if he’s to do a decent job promoting the West Midlands to the world, he will need a similar profile. And it won’t be enough to fall back on his past career as proof of his ability. Unfortunately for successful businessmen, politics is a different game. When you run a company and everyone else answers to you, it’s easy to say ‘do this’ and find it done. And if it isn’t, you can always sack the slackers.
It doesn’t work like that in politics where you have to persuade, wheedle and wade through swamps of treacle before some watered-down version of your original idea finally sees the light of day some years after you first thought of it.
There will be people everywhere – in town halls, Whitehall and in a variety of quangos – who will frustrate, impede or simply veto him at every turn. This will try his patience beyond endurance. Business leaders want results and they want them now. Bureaucrats and politicians often regard that sort of world as alien and inexplicable.
John Lewis, the business, is owned by its employees who are described as ‘partners’. Mr Street will find his new ‘partners’ a lot harder to manage – especially as many of them are never knowingly overworked.
