OPINION - This big beast will give Khan a real fight — but Cleverly’s eyes may be on a bigger prize

Not so long ago, when I was chatting with the Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, at a party, he spoke almost wistfully about the rubbish fight the Tories put up in the mayoral election, in which their lacklustre candidate, Susan Hall, deservedly bombed. “Once,” he recalled, shaking his head, “the Tories used to be this legendary election fighting machine. But now…”Well he must have cheered up quite a bit with the announcement that James Cleverly had put himself forward to be the Tory candidate for London mayor in the next election. Because, by any reckoning, Cleverly is a big beast in this particular jungle — big in both senses, for this solid former Army reservist would loom over little Sadiq. He’s held two great offices of state as former home secretary and foreign secretary, he’s been education secretary and if his last brief, as housing and communities secretary, wasn’t quite the first rank, it has at least a solid bearing on his putative role as mayor. Cleverly is, in short, the kind of candidate that the Tories seemed simply incapable of producing any more: a possible winner.Cleverly may indeed have had the PM Andy Burnham’s career trajectory in mind when he made his bid. Andy B, remember, was twice a candidate for the Labour leadership and twice failed. But once he left Westminster to be Manchester mayor, his profile changed. In Manchester, he had his own fiefdom where he could fight and win his own battles. It was the making of him and the reason why his latest bid to be Labour leader, and PM, succeeded. And London is way, way more important than Manchester.Springboard to Tory leader?If Cleverly were to win London and make a decent fist of it, this might give him solid credibility if the Tory leadership were again to come up for the taking. Remember, it was a very close contest between him and Kemi Badenoch for the leadership. Though as another London mayor who became PM shows, just because you can run London doesn’t mean you can run Britain. Just consider the Boriswave — that massive and damaging surge in migration to over a million a year on Boris Johnson’s watch. Poor Boris was much better and happier as mayor.What London needs and what London now seems likely to get is a proper mayoral fight by someone hungry to succeed. Cleverly seems to be that man. He has another element of Burnham and Boris about him: he’s an upbeat character. During that run for the leadership his most frequently deployed word was “optimism”. London could do with a bit of that.With all those years as minister in various offices he would be by far the most experienced candidate to run for the mayoralty. He has admirers from his time in office. One former civil servant who worked with him at the Foreign Office observed: “He’s very personable and charming and funny and so on. Absolutely not a details man in any way, but has pretty good instincts.” But in City Hall, you have advisers to work on the detail. The Mayor’s job is to put a good face on London, the way Ken Livingstone and Boris did.That’s the essence of the job, really: to be a good front for London. Here his sunny aspect would be to the good. Quentin Letts, the Daily Mail’s sketchwriter, who has observed Cleverly over years, says that in the 2024 leadership contest he was “engaging, positive and seemed grown-up. He is quite blokeish in a modern way, energetic yet relaxed. He will tower over Sadiq Khan physically — he is quite a solid piece of timber — and will be the centrist in the contest, markedly less right-wing than the Reform candidate. He is a mixture of Army assault course and metropolitan coffee shop and he has an odd little gait like a spaghetti-house waiter.”The right man for London’s mixOdd little gait apart, it’s that capacity to appeal to opposites which could be his winning attribute. For London is a very mixed bag. It’s racially diverse (Cleverly’s father is English, his mother from Sierra Leone); it combines woke central boroughs with more socially conservative suburban ones; it has lots of left-leaning voters but the Tories fared surprisingly well in the local elections in their old manors of Westminster and Wandsworth. Cleverly is affable enough to appeal to the middle ground.There is, in fact, an awful lot for the London mayor to play for under the Burnham premiership. The subtext to all the polemic about devolution and shared decision-making (unless you’re talking something actually important like building data processing centres) is that it takes away from London not just power but money. Guess where a revised property tax would fall most heavily? Yep, on us.Cleverly then, could be the candidate to take on the Burnham unspoken anti-London agenda. There’s any number of challenges he must surmount: the supplementary vote system, which allows for tactical voting; the feisty and very easy on the eye Reform candidate, Laila Cunningham, for another. But after many long years, the Tories may be in with a chance. Sir Sadiq, if he is standing, will, for once, have a real fight on his hands.