“The quickest way to lose a million quid”

By David Scane

On 23rd August 1994 the band KLF shocked the world when two of its members filmed themselves burning £1m in £50 notes in a disused boathouse on the Isle of Jura. The act was conceived and executed as a piece of performance art and in the years since has generated fierce debate about what motivations lay behind such a wanton act of destruction.

Since then, this rather bizarre episode has served as perhaps the most egregious and shocking waste of £1m in history. Watching the video it is hard to think of all the worthy causes that could have benefited from the money, which disappeared up the chimney in little over one hour.

I thought back to this episode today on reading the news about a consortium of business leaders, who have committed to raising £1m to ‘help beat Sadiq Khan’ in the 2021 London Mayoral Election. The campaign, which is focusing attention on Sadiq Khan’s track record on crime, has reportedly already raised over its £1m target much of which has been received in the past few weeks.

Whatever your views on Sadiq Khan’s tenure as London Mayor over the past 5 years there’s one thing we can all agree on; he’s going to win re-election. Political predictions are inherently dangerous, and subject to the fate of ‘events’, but as nailed on certs go, you couldn’t get a safer bet than this.

To explain why Sadiq Khan is definitely going to win you have to understand the voting system for electing a Mayor. The London Mayoral election operates on a supplementary vote system, with voters asked to express a preference for a first and second choice for candidates. If after the first round no candidate has achieved 50% of the vote the top two candidates proceed to a second round and all other candidates are eliminated. Voters whose first round preference has been eliminated, but who’s second placed candidate is still in the race, have their second preference votes added to the candidate’s total. Since the inaugural London Mayoral election in 2000 no candidate has ever won on first preferences alone.

If the latest polls are to be believed (and with the usual caveats about polls applying) Sadiq Khan could become the first candidate in history to win the election on first preferences alone. His closest competitor, Conservative candidate Shaun Bailey, has struggled to ever get higher than 39%, even when second preferences are included.

While the London Mayoralty is very much a lost cause for the Conservatives, somewhere that the party should be concentrating time and resource is Hartlepool.

The news yesterday that the incumbent Labour MP is standing down has triggered the starting gun on a contest which will likely define both Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson’s leadership. At the 2019 General Election Labour was able to hold off the Conservative advance which saw other seats in the region turn blue, but with the demise of UKIP and the diminution of the Brexit (now Reform) Party Boris Johnson will be hopeful of smashing through yet another brick in the red wall. Should the Conservatives manage to take the seat from Labour, and the betting markets currently suggest they will, then the left of the party will likely look to mount a challenge against Keir Starmer to replace him with one of their own. If this outcome were to happen, then the Conservative Party would ultimately benefit far more from this than it would from the unlikely chance of winning the London Mayoralty. 

So while spending a tonne of cash on the Conservative Mayoral campaign may feel cathartic to some, I politely suggest that this money would be better directed towards much more fruitful endeavours like the Hartlepool By-election.

If however the campaign remains intent on wasting £1m then perhaps they could take a leaf out of the KLF’s book and call it performance art.