The Mayor of Cricklewood

In which we examine the origin of Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, the reason why all Mayors must come from Cricklewood and where we propose an important reform.

It’s a relatively well-known fact, at least in Cricklewood, that the Mayor of London lives here. That’s right, our very own Red Ken, here in Colourful Cricklewood.

What not everybody knows is why. Casual visitors to Cricklewood, as I have pointed out in other articles, often go away wondering why we refer to our area as “Cricklewood, London”, rather than referring to the rest of this urban sprawl as “London, Cricklewood”. We appear to be hiding our light under a bushel, not putting our best foot forward as a city. Just imagine what a shoo-in the Olympics would be if it were known as Cricklewood 2012 rather than London 2012! These same visitors become indignant that their travel agents had them mucking around with Big Ben and the London Eye when their time would have been better spent strolling the Broadway and checking out St Gabriel’s. Bitter is the New York shopping enthusiast who has wasted a day in Harrods and Selfridges when they could have been shopping in the Broadway Superstores and the B&Q.

Oddly enough, the origin of the Mayor and the reluctance of the Tourism Authorities to promote Cricklewood more strongly are to be explained by the same historical agreement – the unspoken Cricklewood Accord.

The Accord goes something like this:

“We the people of London recognise that the only really attractive things about our city are to be found in Cricklewood. We recognise that nothing we have can match the culture, architecture and natural beauty of Cricklewood. We acknowledge that we are in serious jeopardy of being lost in obscurity as the charisma of Cricklewood takes over. We therefore implore the people and businesses of Cricklewood to keep a low profile, to allow us to promote ourselves without their competition and to allow us to present the glory of Cricklewood as a subset of London. In return, we promise that the Mayor will always come from Cricklewood and never to install ticket barriers at Cricklewood Thameslink.”

With a proper understanding of this Accord, it becomes simpler to understand why Ken Livingstone was elected, even as an independent, and why Government has gone to such extraordinary lengths – pulling him in and out of the party, staging the Tube PPP arguments and so on – just to keep him there. The Accord must be kept, if London is to survive as a unique identity.

Those of you who have not visited Cricklewood or, indeed, London may be misunderstanding me somewhat. You might have read this to mean that there is something dull or passé about London. This is not the case. On the contrary, London would still be the greatest city in the world, even without Cricklewood. The point is not that there is anything wrong with London – merely that there is everything right about Cricklewood.

The proposition, therefore, that this newspaper would like to present is that it is now time we stood up and acknowledged this formally. We are not suggesting a wholesale promotion of Cricklewood – that would be foolish. Promoting Cricklewood at this point in history risks spoiling what is special about the place and would probably overwhelm the nation’s infrastructure. Rather, we suggest that it is time to give a more formal status to the Accord.

In this era of transparent and democratic open government, there is no longer a place for secret agreements, no matter how wisely conceived. It is time to recognise, in the statute books of Westminster, that it is agreed that the Mayor of London must always be a representative and resident of Cricklewood. In this manner, we could present more meaningful elections – one Cricklewood candidate against the other – rather than these meaningless and staged one-horse races.

This newspaper has no political standpoint and we do not comment on the suitability of Mr Livingstone for the job – except of course to state that he is necessarily better than someone from Dunfermline, Sedgefield or Folkestone. However, we are aware that there have been some local commentators recently airing views that a certain resident of Somerton Road may be better qualified for the job. Our proposal, to recognise the Accord openly, would allow for open elections where anyone from Cricklewood would be eligible to compete… and emerge Mayor of London.