On London Extra: Election guide time!
This year's charts, graphs and commentary binge has been unleashed. Plus campaign catch-up and much, much more
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Running On London is what I want to do, but it can be exhausting and I sometimes feel insufficiently adored for my endeavours. I've been liberated from such unattractive self-pity by top communications consultancy Lowick, which has become the first ever sponsor of the On London guide to the London elections, compiled, as in previous years, by me and the outstanding elections analyst (and On London contributor) Lewis Baston.
The job was finished yesterday afternoon. Today, with less than a fortnight until elections day, I bring you a few highlights from the 60-page document. The first is a pair of maps created by Lewis which show how the distribution of support for Labour and Conservative candidates has re-aligned over the course of this century.
The one on the left illustrates by borough which parts of the city delivered Ken Livingstone his second victory, in 2004. See how evenly spread was the vote for a politician often seen as divisive. The one on the right is the equivalent electoral heat map for Sadiq Khan's first win in 2016. Khan's triumph was by a similar margin to Livingstone's 12 years earlier, yet the concentrations of backing for him, and for opposition to him, were much more sharply defined.
The pivotal contest in this trend was 2008's, the election that elevated Boris Johnson to a position of serious power for the first time. The Johnson campaign famously executed a "doughnut strategy", focusing on mobilising suburban discontent. All subsequent mayoral elections have seen variations on that fateful outcome, though the doughnut has limitations as a metaphor. A more sophisticated one - and here I doff my cap to Mr Baston - is the Chelsea bun, with its concentric circles.
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