Wandsworth’s only independent did the tax sums himself. He will vote for the rise, and it will cost him

Malcolm Grimston sent his neighbours a newsletter this month that opens, before any figures, with a speech from 1774. Edmund Burke, standing for election in Bristol, told his constituents that their wishes ought to carry great weight with him and their opinions high respect, and then told them what he would not surrender.

“But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Grimston apologises to his readers for the 1770s language and calls the speech the single deepest influence on how he works. Having listened to people, he writes, “it is then up to me to use my judgment to decide the best way forward”, and independence does not mean splitting the difference between what the two parties are saying. Sometimes one side is closer to the realities than the other.

Grimston goes on to tell the residents of West Hill that when the council tax vote reaches the chamber in the New Year he intends to honour his side of the confidence and supply agreement he signed with the Conservatives. On his own figures that takes a Band D bill of £1,020.35 to somewhere around £2,015.

“But I will do so with a very heavy heart.”

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Grimston is the only independent Wandsworth has ever elected. And by some distance. In the May local elections, he received 4,081 votes – the most of anyone in London and two-and-a-half times the number of votes as the next, elected candidate.

He has represented this corner of Putney for over 30 years, first as a Conservative and for the past 12 years as an Independent. For a time, he has also served as the council’s conscience thanks to the increasingly partisan nature of Wandsworth Town Hall where every other seat has been taken by either the Conservative or Labour Party for the past 40 years.

And, back in May, he was put into the most extraordinary position: the results came back 29 Conservative seats, 28 Labour, 1 Malcolm Grimston. It meant that no party had a majority and thanks to the tribal nature of local politics (we can’t recall the last time anyone voted against their party) it put him in a position of enormous power.

In front of him was a choice: he could either support the current Labour Administration and mayor and give himself an effective veto on every measure decided in Wandsworth, becoming the second most powerful man in Town Hall.

Or he could reach agreement with the Conservatives and use his leverage to spread the power about, putting Labour representatives in place as committee chairs, and insist on rule changes that allows more councillors to speak – and speak more freely – in the chamber.

He chose the latter. Not many politicians would. It’s why over 6,000 Putney residents voted for him.

Malcom Grimston is also an energy specialist, and the way he reaches a decision is recognisably the same in both jobs.

Anywhere close to both being true

On the first floor of a Caffe Nero, Putney.news met up with Wandsworth’s kingmaker to reflect on a tumultuous six months since the election and spent several hours talking everything from housing and fire safety, to the council as an institution, to his role as an independent, to broader energy policy. But we spent much of our time talking about the one issue on everyone’s minds at the moment: the doubling of council tax. The largest single increase in UK history.

It’s an issue that is increasingly personal: in his role as the almost-deciding vote (the Mayor still has a veto vote in the event of a tie) he has been the subject to a campaign circulating in the borough that tells residents the Conservatives are only able to pass the increase because of him. In a divided chamber, it has become a burning issue.

“I’ve never known an issue where the difference between the two sides is as unbridgeable as this one,” he tells us. On most questions in front of a council, the two sides argue over the same set of facts and you can follow both of them: one side wants the housing stock, the other asks what the borough will have to borrow to get it, and there is a sensible debate to be had. Not this. “You can’t just say to people, oh this is unnecessary.” If £400m of income over three years is not needed, there has to be a very solid reason why not.

Labour says the rise is unnecessary and that it would hold increases to five per cent a year – roughly £50 a year for the average resident. The Conservative administration says the borough’s portion of the council tax has to go up by 188 per cent next April – over £1,000. It is an enormous difference.

So Grimston did the arithmetic himself. Five per cent a year, for three years, raises about £250m. The Conservative plan, as he reads it, raises about £652m over the same period. The difference is around £400m. Set that against what the council’s own portion of the tax raises today, which is just short of £78m a year, and the gap is about five times the entire current council tax take.

A gap that size is not a disagreement about assumptions.

He notes that the Conservative plan has been through the council’s own finance officers, and while it’s not yet official council policy, it does carry their approval. “It might be wrong,” he said, “but it has at least got an external professional eye looking at it.”

He is not accusing anyone of lying. “I never want to discount any possibility that a politician is telling the truth as they see it,” he said, and the first thing he wants to establish is whether Labour believes its own figures, because if it does then it is working from numbers nobody outside the party has seen. He has put the question to Simon Hogg, the Labour leader, and asked who costed the plan and whether anyone external checked it. Hogg has invited him to sit down and go through it. Grimston said he would do that after both party conferences, so later this month.

Until then he has only his own sums, and the method he applies to them is the one he has used professionally for thirty years. “My background is scientific. I’m used to dealing with numbers and trying to work out what they mean.” His conclusion:

“I cannot come up with any credible world in which these two statements could be anywhere close to both being true.”

What it does to a bill, and why it cannot go slower

A Band D property in Wandsworth pays £509.84 to the council this year and £510.51 to the Mayor of London, which comes to £1,020.35. Most of West Hill pays another £41.38 towards the upkeep of Putney and Wimbledon Commons.

Under the current plans, the council’s portion goes to £1,468. If the Mayor raises his precept by seven per cent, which is his average over the past five years, the total bill lands at around £2,015. Roughly double, in one go.

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He knows what the impact of this will be, because residents have already started writing to him. One resident wrote to say she would have to leave the borough, because she would not be able to afford to stay. He asked her where she would go: Wandsworth famously has the lowest council tax in the UK; there is nowhere lower to go to. The London average Band D bill this year is £2,068, and the figure across England at between £2,400 and £2,500.

That comparison is also, he says, the reason the borough’s case to government has so little purchase. Wandsworth is asking to be treated as a special case, and even after a rise on this scale it will still be among the two or three cheapest councils in London. He does not think the argument will land, and he does not think it deserves to.

“I hate the word fair in politics,” he said, “because it could always mean almost exactly what people want it to mean.” London is a “relatively rich part of the country” and should, rightly in his view, subsidise the less well off parts. “That’s that’s what being a single nation means.”

Why it cannot go slower

The question he says he is asked more than any other is why the rise cannot be phased. Six councils in or near London have been given a two-year exemption from the rule that caps increases at five per cent without a referendum, and after 2028/29 the cap comes back. So why not split the rise across the two years that are available?

His answer is the reserves. The council has, on his figures, burned through £90m of the £205m it inherited, £50m of that in the last year alone, and on the current path the remainder is gone about eighteen months after next April. Phasing the rise over two years would take another heavy hit out of what is left, and the second year’s increase would then have to be larger still to put the reserves back.

Wandsworth hid a £137m crisis for years. Now your council tax bill will fix it.

What he would rather have is ten years to do it in, with five years of flexibility to respond, and he says he has been putting that to the leader for some time. Three years, with two years of flexibility, will have, he notes, an unprecedented effect on people.

The alternative to raising the money is the one he says ends worst. A council that spends its reserves to hold the tax down cannot then borrow its way through, because the government will not permit borrowing where an alternative exists. What arrives instead is intervention: commissioners sent in to run the services, make the cuts and raise the tax anyway, with next to no local say in any of it. He puts that about eighteen months away for a council that does nothing.

The strongest evidence to his eyes to a lower tax rise is the speed rather than the principle. The borough’s grant is to be cut by £84m a year, around 40 per cent of it, over three years.

But getting the government to change course would require the support of MPs and on that, he notes, there has been a surprisingly response. All three local MPs – all of them Labour – declined to join the council’s appeal to government through the Local Government Association. Grimston has been vocal about his thoughts on that.

Kingmaker councillor accuses Putney MP of misleading residents on tax

And he raises them again in his latest letter to residents: “It is disappointing that none of our local MPs voted against the government on this issue… continuing to claim that the problem was all the fault of the incoming administration.” Putney MP, Fleur Anderson, voted for the settlement that makes the cut, when the Commons approved it in February.

The second most controversial decision of the new Conservative Administration has been to slash spending across the board. Last week, council committees met one after the other to agree to cuts in everything from free school meals to new housing.

Asked what he would have done differently, he gives one – the free bulky waste collection, which has been cut – “I’d have probably left that in and found the savings somewhere else” – and notes that because he is a party of one, he will have to go back and look at all the reports to find out what else is going.

He was not at the environment committee that discussed it, and says he had heard second hand that something in the region of £20m was coming out of carbon reduction and the watering of green spaces. He intends to go back and look at it especially.

There are families to be moved out of temporary accommodation and into private renting, some of them outside London, and he is clear about what that will mean for the households concerned. Over all of it sits the government’s High Value Council Tax Surcharge – to so-called ‘mansion tax’ – which will reach homes in West Hill that nobody would describe as mansions.

Council tax, then a mansion tax. Now council tenants face a second rent rise

What it costs him

He comes back to Edmund Burke quotes. “That’s always been my driving force.” He says he was offered a cabinet post by both sides after the election and took neither, so that “I’m not taking anything personally out of this”.

So what the agreement he signed with the Conservatives commits him to is a vote, and what it gets him is a voice at the table. He knows what the vote will cost. Another constituent has already written to tell him she was very disappointed and would not be able to vote for him again, and he said he welcomed people who take the trouble to write like that.

“I don’t imagine they’ll vote for me again,” he said, “but you should be able to do that in a civil way.” He recognises their right to make their minds up, and hopes they recognise that he has explained where he is coming from. After that, he said, people can disagree.

The sprinklers

Grimston has run against the council before, and won.

After the Grenfell Tower fire the council’s first response was measured. Two of the borough’s tall blocks were clad, one had already had a serious fire in which the flames came out of a window and did not spread, and the position was that those two would be looked at and nobody would panic.

Then, about ten days in, the policy changed. Sprinklers would go into every flat in every block of ten storeys or more across the borough, which on his recollection is 99 or 100 blocks, ten of them in West Hill. Both party groups agreed it was the right thing to do.

“The first thing I do is I just go and check data.”

What the data said, on his account, is the opposite of what everybody assumed. Even leaving the Grenfell year out of it, residents of blocks of ten storeys or more are the least likely of anyone to die in a fire. The people most at risk are in low-rise and medium-rise buildings. His explanation is that a tall block is designed by people who are acutely aware that there might be a fire somewhere in it and are desperate to stop it spreading, and that the fires in the blocks in his own ward over the years have never once spread to a neighbouring flat.

Then he started talking to the people who would be paying. The leaseholders put it to him plainly: “this is going to cost us 10,000 quid” for something they did not believe the evidence supported. The tenants, who would not have paid up front, were saying something else again. They had spent years getting their flats the way they wanted them. The work would be done by what was in effect a new and untested industry: “there’s never been this sort of demand before,” he said, so firms with no experience of it were springing up to meet one, running pipework through finished rooms. A majority of the tenants, not all of them, did not want it.

So he wrote a long paper going through the fire data and through what the serious fires of this kind had actually had in common, which was cladding the borough had not used. For a period he was the only argument on the other side, with both party groups against him. Labour came round after its own councillors started hearing the same thing from their residents.

It ended at the First-tier Tribunal, which adjudicates between landlords and leaseholders. On his account the tribunal threw out the council’s case for doing every block, held that it had to be done block by block, and went as far as to call it an abuse of process. He describes the outcome as a “complete hands down defeat” for the council.

He is careful about claiming the credit: there were several very good and very bright leaseholders working on it, and he strongly suspects that without someone free to run a line against the rest of the council it would never have got that far. The freedom is the point, and so is its cost.

“At any moment I have to be focusing on two, maybe three borough wide campaigns,” he said. Any more than that and he is spread so thin he can have no effect at all. A party councillor has colleagues who specialise; he has himself.

The contrast he reaches for is Manchester, which had the same policy and offered it rather than imposed it. Tenants there were told the council thought they should have sprinklers, that it would not be forced on anyone, and that the work would be done when a flat changed hands. It got almost unanimous support. The difference, he said, was being taken seriously and listened to, rather than having something pushed through despite what people were saying.

The mayor of Wandsworth now has more power than almost anyone realises

One vote, and what he would not take

Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, one. That was the result of the Wandsworth local elections in May, putting him in an extraordinary position: that of Kingmaker. The first thing he did with it was give some of that power away.

The vote that decided the shape of this council was not the leadership but the mayoralty, and he tells us it was the hardest call he had to make; he did not know where he stood until the day before. Had he backed a Labour Mayor, the chamber would have been tied at 29 each on every subsequent vote, and the casting vote would have sat with a Labour Mayor. “That would have meant that pretty much every vote that came before the council I decided with where it went,” he said. Abstain or side with the Conservatives and a measure passes on the majority. Vote with Labour and it falls on the Mayor’s casting vote.

He turned it down, and gave one reason for it.

“A single person shouldn’t have that amount of democratic power.”

What he says he took instead was stability. A Conservative Mayor meant an administration that could lose a by-election and still function, which mattered to the officers and to the organisations the council works with, and meant the borough was not run by something that would come apart within a year. He thinks it turned out to be the right call.

Had the election gone the other way, 29 Labour and 28 Conservative, he says he would have done nothing at all. The only circumstance in which he could be kingmaker was the one that happened; the other way round, Labour could have governed as a minority without him. “I’m almost certain that I just would have stayed out of it.”

On what he extracted, he is modest to the point of undercutting himself. “Most of what’s in that deal they agree with,” he said of the Conservative group, and he describes them as keener on being challenged than their predecessors were.

The new rules package that came out of the agreement remains unfinished. It is “not perfect”, he notes, and there is already “something that’s got to be changed” in it, which he puts down to the nature of trying things out and finding they do not work.

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The council that stopped testing itself

He was first elected for West Hill in 1994; thirty-two years inside the council.

Wandsworth was cobbled together in 1965 out of the old metropolitan boroughs. It nearly contained Clapham and Streatham with Battersea in Lambeth, based on demographics, but in the end it went the other way, because of physical layout. The borough has been a knocking-together of places ever since.

Grimston call recall previous arguments about council tax. From an outgoing Labour council posting the highest rate rise in London in its last year, 20.3 per cent against an inner London average of 7.2 per cent. The Conservative administration elected to cut the rates, privatised services and sold council houses, and by 1980, with inflation high, was raising rates by 18 per cent while Lambeth next door raised them by 50.

Then came the comprehensive performance assessment, the Blair government’s annual scoring of every council in England, and the borough collected the top four-star rating every year of it: one of only four councils in the country, on his recollection, to manage that throughout. He was doing peer assessment work for other authorities at the time, and he remembers the chief executive, Gerald Jones, saying something about it that he has carried since. Wandsworth, Jones told him, was “one of the best councils in the country getting four-star at CPA”. He added: “Don’t mistake that for anything more than it is.”

On his reading, the reason the borough was good was that the people running it talked like that – with honesty. Jones and Eddie Lister were chief executive and leader together for the best part of twenty years, which gave the place an understanding so settled that neither of them had to spell it out. Towards the end of that period, he says, the same settledness started to tip over into something else, at exactly the point the world outside was changing. Somebody described Wandsworth to him as a rollercoaster: thrilling if you wanted to go where it was already going, and no use at all if you did not.

When the Wandsworth Way stopped working

What he was pushing for then, and did not get, was peer review. He wanted more outside assessors brought in and more Wandsworth councillors sent out to do the work elsewhere, on the view that the peer learns as much as the authority being assessed. The resistance came from the top of the group and it was, he says, about money, with the argument being that nobody out there could tell Wandsworth anything it did not already know. Two other councillors did peer work. Nobody else was interested.

And “this thing called the Wandsworth Way” became a stone round everybody’s neck. In his late years in the group, he said, the way to end an argument was to say that this is how we did it in 1982.

Then children’s services failed, and the shock of it went through the whole organisation. His reading is not that the cabinet was poor or the officers were bad. It is that there was no mechanism by which a department could learn that it was falling behind, because there was no link to the outside at all. “It was all very internal.” Housing, he says, is the most recent example of the same thing.

Salaries is another issue. For a long time the borough paid top-of-market salaries on the reasoning that this bought the best people in local government, and he thinks that was accurate and money well spent. The high wages are still there but he does not think a Wandsworth line on a council officer’s CV carries what it used to. “All the stuff that we used to do was cutting edge is now twenty years out of date.”

The weakness, as he sees it, has been failing to pick up other people’s good ideas, and the mindset in which Wandsworth is the great innovator and nobody can teach it anything is itself the problem. “We don’t have to be the innovators all the time.”

He held the education brief after the Inner London Education Authority was abolished, and gives as an example what the borough did then. It introduce value-added scoring, which measures what a school does with the children it actually gets rather than ranking raw results.

Rather than simply rediscover that affluent areas do well, the council used the approach to leave the schools that were performing alone for a year and point inspectors at the ones that needed them. That is testing yourself against evidence, and it is the same instinct as checking the fire data before agreeing to a sprinkler policy.

Nobody actually knows who runs Wandsworth

The chamber, and what he would change

What he describes from the inside is a chamber in which almost nothing happens live.

“The debates are sort of scripted before and let people read out their sermons.” He says the only spontaneous thing left in a council meeting is the supplementary question to a cabinet member.

He does not think councillors should be made to think on their feet for the sport of it: “we’re not a school debating society.” The point of direct challenge, he says, is that it stops you falling into the habit of having someone else write your answer and reading it for the first time as you say it.

He gives an example: early in the last administration, a claim was read out at a council meeting that the borough’s food waste scheme had stopped many tonnes of waste going to landfill. Which was fine, except the borough had not sent anything to landfill for eleven years. Everything it collects is recycled or incinerated.

His question in the chamber was not about the policy. “Who’s writing these answers?” he asked. “How confident are you of the information you’re getting and passing on to us?” If something that basic goes through unchecked, he wanted to know what else does. He says he can think of two or three more of the same kind.

Wandsworth built 40 years of politics on the lowest council tax in England. This week the bill came due

There can also be more effective collaboration and problem solving if only the structures and the individuals were better aligned. During COVID, when all the members met online in a single session with no public and no grandstanding, a backbencher mentioned that children in his ward had no computers to work on, and that a local business had machines it was about to throw out. The education cabinet member at the time, Will Sweet, picked it up and turned it into a programme of businesses donating computers.

There was no other forum in which that could have been raised, Grimston notes, and there still is not. Grimston has argued for years that the council should hold such a session once a quarter. Two successive leaders told him it was a good idea. Nothing followed.

His other long campaign is about paperwork, and it is the scientist again. He is entitled to every paper the council produces. “My problem is having too much information not too little,” he said: a wall of documents that twenty-nine councillors on the other side can share out between them and he has to read alone.

With Professor Brian Prichard and Jim Cousins, both former councillors, he spent two or three years arguing that the summaries at the front of council papers should work like the abstract of a scientific paper. Read an abstract, as he puts it, and “you know what the paper’s telling you and you know how to read the paper because it’s guiding you there”. Read a council summary and you learn that the paper is going to talk about this, this and this. He would add one more thing to committee papers: they set out the options members have to choose between, but not why those are the options.

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Who can afford to stand

Which brings him to who gets to sit in the room at all. A backbencher’s allowance in Wandsworth is, he says, about £12,000. “I’ve argued for a long time that our allowances are too low,” and the argument is not about his own circumstances, which he describes as comfortable. It is that the figure limits the field, in his words, to “either people who are genuinely completely unemployed or those who are wealthy enough to regard it as a hobby”, and excludes exactly the people whose perspective the council is short of.

The national panel that was set up to work out a fair figure settled on a principle, as he recalls it, that a certain number of hours a week should count as public service and anything beyond that should be paid at ordinary white-collar rates. He does not know of a council that has stuck to it. Wandsworth’s was frozen for about twelve years.

He knows of one councillor that left because the allowance counted as income and cost them more in lost benefits than it paid. They simply couldn’t afford to serve as a councillor.

What he does not want is full-time politicians. He thinks members and MPs should keep a foot in professional life, “retain a foot in the real world and see what’s going on around them”, and he has a second reason: a chamber of people whose entire livelihood depends on the whip’s patronage will not produce independent thought. He notes approvingly that most of the current cabinet still have careers outside the council, and he applies the principle to himself.

The day job

Grimston has had a successful career outside the council in energy policy, which he has taught and written about for decades. He specialises in nuclear energy but, as with understanding a London Borough, recognises it as just one part of a much larger eco-system.

He starts with what he calls a tetralemma. An energy system has to be secure, affordable and environmentally acceptable, and to that he adds a fourth: socially and politically acceptable. It is “practically impossible”, he said, “to come up with any policy that satisfies all four of those at the same time”, and their order changes with the decade.

In the 1970s, after the oil shock, security was the only thing anyone cared about. By the 1990s it was price, which is what privatisation and competition were for. In the 2010s it was the environment. Now, he says, the political leg is on top.

His argument about renewables is not the one either political side makes. He does not dispute that wind and solar are cheap per unit generated. His objection is to what he calls “the cost in use”: the much larger grid needed to collect power from places it was never collected from before, the payments made to generators to keep plant available for the few days a year it is needed, and the payments made to wind farms to stop generating when there is too much on the system. He puts each of the last two at over £1bn a year.

Underneath that sits a piece of physics he thinks the public debate ignores. A grid built on big thermal plants has inertia: the turbines are heavy and spinning fast, and if the power behind them fails they coast down over minutes, which gives a system operator time to bring something else on. Solar panels and individual wind turbines do not do that. Last year the Iberian grid went down in seconds, and while the full report had not been published when he spoke, his reading was that the initiating event would turn out to involve renewables. A modern grid protects itself by blacking out, which is the correct behaviour; the expensive part is restarting an economy afterwards, which in Iberia took a day.

From which he makes a forecast: Britain’s safety margin has been falling for years. The top end of the peaking fleet runs on diesel. He would not want to be the government of the day “within the next three, four years”, when he thinks real outages become likely, because at that point the whole political debate turns over in a week. People will blame renewables, and nobody will be able to build a power station fast enough to answer it.

And the answer?

His answer is the field he specialises in. “Nuclear is the best we’ve come up with yet,” he argues. Britain built reactors in four or five years once. Korea does it now, because it has government backing, a domestic programme and a supply chain that believes there will be more work next year. Korea and Westinghouse are both building new nuclear plants in Poland, and he will “put money on the Koreans being ready way before the Americans are”.

The cost of Hinkley Point C, on his account, is substantially a cost of having built nothing for decades and having to assemble a supply chain from scratch, and the argument for a continuous order book is that the seventh reactor is cheaper than the first.

He also reaches back into history to explain why history may not repeat but it does rhyme. Electricity was first generated from wind, and from photovoltaics, in the 1880s; hydrogen from wind-generated electricity followed, and wave and geothermal arrived in the first decade of the 1900s. There was a boom. By 1900 a Chicago fair had more than twenty companies selling wind generators, and Denmark had ten megawatts of wind electricity at a time when that was a great deal.

Then the national grids arrived, electricity stopped being a luxury, the cost of it fell by about two thirds, and all of it collapsed except hydro. “What killed off the renewables was that they were producing a product that didn’t fit the demand. Demand was for reliable power coming when you want it at a manageable price. Hydro gives you that and the others didn’t. That’s why the others collapsed.”

So when he hears the phrase new renewables he hears marketing, applied to technologies “that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s” by multinational companies that behave like multinational companies. What is being proposed as the future, he says, is “resurrecting the 19th century approach” to electricity. He is not a climate sceptic and says so. He is arguing about engineering and about what the public will tolerate.

Where the professionals agree, and where they do not

On Thursday the electricity industry held two conferences in London on the same day. National Grid ran its invitation-only Innovation Day at Magazine London, for what its own invitation calls 200 fellow leaders, and the two-day GRID conference opened at ExCeL, billed in advance as bringing together more than 1,500 decision-makers from across the network. Putney.news was at the National Grid event.

The regulator puts the problem where Grimston puts it. Ofgem’s director general for infrastructure told the event that the grid, for all its record, is now the single biggest bottleneck to investment across the wider energy sector and to growth across the wider economy. The answer, on Ofgem’s account, is both a great deal more grid and a cleverer one.

National Grid has drawn the lesson about repetition that he draws about reactors. Its president of global capital told the event that substations in the Great Grid Partnership are now chosen from a menu of standard designs, that nobody is allowed to design one from scratch if a standard module will do, and that the aim is substations built in advance and ready to deploy. Phil Skegg, managing director of Taylor Woodrow, one of the contractors building for National Grid in the Great Grid Partnership, said UK infrastructure has a very poor reputation on the global stage, and that one of the problems in how it is built is that everything is different every single time.

On reliability, the regulator’s reading of the record runs the other way from his forecast. Ofgem told the same audience that Britain now has one of the most reliable grid systems anywhere in the world and that, on the whole, it is more resilient to shocks than those of many other countries. A grid more resilient to shocks is among the outcomes Ofgem says its £500m Strategic Innovation Fund is meant to deliver. What the regulator describes is where the system has got to; what Grimston describes is where he thinks it goes next.

The crossover

At the end of the interview and before we both head off into the streets of Wandsworth, Grimston sums up the difference between his two careers into one sentence.

“One of the main differences between scientists and politicians is that scientists spend their whole career trying to prove themselves wrong and politicians spend their whole career trying to prove themselves right.”

A scientist, he says, is reasonably confident about what happened in the past and treats the future as a thing you build predictive models for while knowing you can never be sure of it. Politicians “know exactly what’s gonna happen in the future”, and spend their time arguing instead about what happened ten years ago and whose fault it was.

He has spent half his working life explaining politics to scientists and the other half explaining science to politicians, “with almost complete failure on both fronts”.

“I’d like to see more scientists and engineers in politics,” he said, and not because scientists are better people: they can be swayed beyond the evidence like anybody else, and he says so without being asked. It is the methodology he is after. “The passion of political debate is great, but it’s not enough.”

In the New Year the council will vote on a 188 per cent rise in its portion of the council tax. He has written to his ward to say that he will vote for it, and that he will do it with a very heavy heart. He has already had the letter telling him that it will cost him one vote, and he does not dispute her right to withhold it.

It’s not a difficult choice, even if it is a hard one: he had done the maths, he knows why the decision needs to be taken. He knows why the people who voted him in as their representative will have a problem with it.

Like Burke, he offers Putney his industry and judgment and won’t betray it over opinion.