If Tony Blair wishes to head off more trouble and it isn’t too late, which it probably is (the legislation was introduced to the Commons this week), he should drop his plan to give London a popularly elected mayor. London with a powerful mayor could prove a handful. The egos of Ken Livingstone, Lord Archer and co are only part of the problem. The example of Paris should act as a warning.
Parisians had little idea what awaited them when they got the chance 21 years ago, thanks to an unexpectedly liberal reform by President Giscard d’Estaing, to shrug off the absolute power of the French state and elect a mayor. Perhaps it was more miscalculation than generosity that moved the conservative Giscard, who aimed to have a well-born pal elected. Instead the winner was his conservative arch-rival Jacques Chirac. Chirac eventually made it to the presidential Elysee Palace, and the boost that the Paris job gave him (he was already leader of the Gaullist party, the leading political force on the right) must have surprised even him.
Until Chirac’s election, Paris had been run by a government prefect who looked after Paris rather as a pope of old looked after Rome, which is to say his principal concern was the church and occasionally he had a thought for the needs of Romans. Chirac’s ballot-box legitimacy altered the scene quickly, even though he directly administered only the 2.2 million souls living inside a motorway that roughly follows the line of bygone ramparts.
Even Chirac’s enemies do not contest his triumph as mayor. The capital – wealthy, bourgeois, contentious and arrogant, at least in the eyes of the rest of France – has always been a threat to the French regime. The threat erupted most spectacularly in recent times in the revolution of 1789, the Paris commune of 1871 and the 1968 student uprising. Chirac revived this tradition, standing up to the state, but knowing when to yield and negotiate. He became a counterweight to the president. He became so popular with Parisians that fully a third of left-wing voters switched political sympathies and backed him, long granting him control of all 20 Paris arrondissements, from silk-stocking boroughs in the west to run-down immigrant districts in the north-east.
It turns out that his successor Jean Tiberi, an ex-underling, is a pale figure unable to sustain Chirac’s pace or political monopoly (six arrondissements have swung to the opposition). No doubt his old master, as president of France, prefers it this way. Tiberi is no threat because he is the president’s creature. Still, candidates for mayor of London can’t lose by borrowing from the Chirac method, which may be summarised as follows:
– Think clean. Since it got a mayor, a once-grubby Paris has become the cleanest of big cities, at least to look at. This is a sure vote-winner. Do not shrink from quasi-military means. Chirac’s “Green Army” makes a Pentagon-sized 10 per cent dent in the French capital’s budget. Manning a superfleet of customised vehicles for street-hosing, trash-swallowing and excrement-scraping, each soldier in the Green Army is issued with two high-glow green uniforms and (a nice Chirac touch which uncaring prefects never thought of) a smart pair of gloves. It is some relief to know that, if one accidentally drops something in a Paris gutter, an alert municipal servant patrolling the sewers will most likely find it: statistically, two-thirds of fallen objects are recovered.
– Act big. Be a large personality (down Jeffrey, down Ken). The reason that Chirac, a youthful ex-prime minister at the start, became such a popular mayor was that he displayed strong personal and municipal ambitions when it was still uncertain what status he could claim. This got the adversarial show going. He confronted the power of the state. Early on, when President Francois Mitterrand tried tinkering around with the administrative set-up in the arrondissements, Chirac publicly resisted, warning Parisians, “they want to break Paris”. Mitterrand stood back.
Thus was born a new sense of patriotism among Parisians, distinct from the superiority they display towards the rest of France, and it serves the mayor well. It is poor Tiberi’s inability to measure up to Chirac’s personal brio that has encouraged efforts from his own side to remove him. “Paris needs a mayor who is out of the ordinary,” reasons the Gaullist Jacques Toubon, leader of a recent anti-Tiberi putsch that ran out of steam. “After all, Paris is Paris.”
– Live high. Make sure you rule from a grand official home. An old Greater London Council base may not be right if Blair tries to fit you in there. The mayor’s base in Paris is the splendid Hotel de Ville on the Seine near Notre-Dame cathedral, which is plainly grander than the Elysee Palace. The Hotel de Ville exudes status and makes everyone think its occupant has the power to act at will, which inhibits the state. It also impresses business and contributes to the triple-A municipal bond rating which the French capital – alone among European capitals, except for Vienna – has gained under a mayor. Paris, like London, needs business to stay in the city, not drift out to distant low-rent office sites. The Parisian mayor’s spending power derives from municipal taxes on business, and also from property taxes and inner-city residence rates, swelled by a hefty rebate from the central government.
– Spend high on the social agenda. This should be inventive. It must distinguish municipal aid from what the state offers. The mayor of Paris sends a swanky box of chocolates each Christmas to every pensioner – a vote-winning treat casually financed out of the official social budget. More generally, elderly and poor Parisians receive higher rates of all-round assistance than the rest of the French. More than 100,000 of them carry a nice card, the Paris Health Card, entitling them to immediate free medical care with no further proof of qualification necessary.
On the other hand, high spending in inner Paris doesn’t extend to new council housing, which is certainly needed but which neither Chirac nor Tiberi have been keen to promote. Why lure the working class and its left-wing voters back into Paris when its economic exile to the suburbs has largely been achieved? The result is that elegant Paris hides some ugly secrets. Large numbers of immigrants (legal and illegal, mainly from Africa) are squeezed into dilapidated low-rent period buildings in arrondissements in the north-east which the city is politically reluctant to renovate or replace.
– Spruce up the urban infrastructure and public services. Since the prefect’s days, public services in Paris have improved to a point where most Parisians believe they are second to none. Although the state retains ultimate authority over buses and the user-friendly underground Metro, the mayor creates the feel of the town. He has a flying start here: Paris has 36 bridges over the Seine to moon on, 484 tree-lined avenues and boulevards to idle down and 15,000 bistro and cafe terraces to lounge on. But the restoration of a raddled Champs-Elysees to more than its former glory is entirely the mayor’s work. So is the hugely improved upkeep of parks, museums and cultural landmarks. In the provision of plentiful underground public parking throughout the inner city, Paris is decades ahead of mayorless London. It has also taken an elected mayor to halt a property developers’ lurch into high-rise building which many Parisians feared was about to destroy the architectural coherence of their city. The mayoral edict: six floors and that’s the limit.
– Bend when appropriate. Your pride, that is. Trying to be too independent is folly. When Mayor Chirac learnt that Mitterrand aimed to stamp his personal seal on Paris by spending untold billions from the national purse on a series of presidential “grand works” – the magnificently revamped Louvre, the Bastille Opera, the Great Arch, the Library of France – his resistance was limited to the odd niggle. London candidates should accept the Greenwich Dome in the same spirit. Further Blairite investments must surely follow.
– Collar, lastly, the police, and bring them to the mayoral heel. The greatest frustration afflicting the mayor of Paris is lack of authority over the police, which a jealous French state keeps under its undivided control. In New York, Rudy Giuliani, with his zero- tolerance tactics, has shown how control of the police helps a mayor to project himself, and perhaps even curb crime. In vain does the mayor of Paris knock ever louder at the state’s door for at least a share of policing powers.
But now a warning. As the mayor’s popularity advances hand in hand with municipal patriotism, the mayor may grow too dominant for the city’s ultimate good. He runs out of opposition. That is what happened for a time in Paris.
Scandal now darkens the Hotel de Ville. Justice is looking into allegations that the juiciest Paris public contracts long made a habit of going to firms that poured money into Chirac’s other consuming interest, the Gaullist party; that the administration has been packed with Gaullist electioneering operatives holding fictitious jobs with salaries paid out of city funds; and that all manner of fine city-owned apartments are awarded to municipal officials (or their sons, daughters and aunts) at absurdly low rents. Many of these apartments came into the city’s hands as a result of Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century reconstruction binge, but not a few of them, it seems clear (official Paris remains uneasily ambiguous on this matter), joined the city roster after their Jewish owners were driven out during the war.
Tiberi is taking the heat on the suspicions of financial abuse, and President Chirac has only belatedly awarded him his support to stay in office. This after Tiberi’s wife by all accounts caught the president’s ear and told him, “If we sink, you sink too.”
Plenty for Tony Blair to contemplate, then. His seeming preference for a nobody rather than a talented grandstander as the new Labour candidate for mayor is entirely understandable. A nobody would be right for him, though not for London.
Content from our partners
Related
