Nobody actually knows who runs Wandsworth

Some time this evening, Wandsworth’s Council is supposed to settle who leads it. Nobody outside the room, and quite possibly nobody inside it either, knows what the result will be.

Two months ago, faced with a 29-28-1 split, residents were told a confidence-and-supply deal had settled the question. The man who negotiated that deal, Conservative leader Aled Richards-Jones steps down this evening. In his place, the man who’s meant to be confirmed as Leader, having won his own party’s backing by the narrowest of margins, has lost two cabinet members over it in a week, and cannot be certain of the votes to actually take the job.

If Robert Morritt isn’t confirmed, nobody currently running the council will still be running it by tomorrow morning. If he is, he leads a party that only governs at all because one independent councillor keeps deciding it should.

This isn’t a story about one bad meeting or one divisive man, although Morritt is that. It’s about what happens when two parties who spent years dominating each other outright finally have to share power roughly down the middle, and neither has worked out how.

Start with the Conservatives. They came into this term with something that looked, on paper, sensible: a confidence-and-supply arrangement with independent councillor Malcolm Grimston, and an explicit commitment to hand back some of the scrutiny and transparency the previous administration had stripped out. Whatever else you think of it, that was an attempt to govern differently on a knife-edge, rather than pretending the knife-edge didn’t exist. Then the Leader who signed it resigned without warning, his successor sent shockwaves through the party, and it is genuinely unclear tonight whether he’s in a position to become Leader of the Council. Whatever the confidence-and-supply deal was meant to buy the Conservatives, instability wasn’t supposed to be the price.

Now Labour. In Monday night’s committee meeting, Labour’s Cllr Rex Osborn put the problem better than most commentary could: both sides, he said, are “prisoners of a history of always opposing one another, which is what we are actually supposed to do most of the time. But the result is that we always end up assuming bad faith.” What it isn’t, yet, is a change in behaviour. Labour named the trust problem in that room and then voted down the Conservatives’ offer on cabinet questions, watched its own trust-and-review amendment fall, and got a “we’ll minute it” instead of an answer. Diagnosing the disease isn’t the same as taking the medicine, and so far only one side of this chamber has done much beyond the diagnosis.

Which brings us to Malcolm Grimston, who has spent this whole process sounding like the only adult in the room. “I don’t know a single councillor who I could correctly apply that issue to,” he told the committee, on the idea that either side is acting in bad faith. “We have more in common as a group of fifty-eight people than any other fifty-eight people in Wandsworth.” “Almost any constitution can succeed if there’s a real will to make it succeed. No constitution can succeed if there isn’t.” Whatever you make of Grimston’s politics, that is a councillor trying, in public, to talk his colleagues out of tribalism. The uncomfortable footnote is that his influence exists only because the arithmetic currently forces both parties to listen to him. A Trinity ward by-election next month could hand the Conservatives a majority and make Grimston irrelevant to the maths overnight. The single voice of reason in this process has a use-by date.

And then there’s what the council hasn’t told anyone. On Monday night, a clause handing the chief executive the power to make committee appointments passed without a single objection from either party, introduced verbally by the council’s own Monitoring Officer. It does not appear in either of the two published papers for that meeting. Whatever else is true of this administration’s promises on transparency, “you had to be in the room to know it happened” is not what restored scrutiny was supposed to look like. By the time that powers disappears, in October, we will have a new CEO – who was herself selected through a process so lacking in transparency that you can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a deeper reason why we have a sixth chief exec in just six years.

So what’s the answer? It would be satisfying to end here with a solution. We don’t have one, because we don’t think there is one. Yet. There’s a comforting version of this argument that says a more plural council, one where a Trinity by-election result or a future election broke the two-party grip entirely, would force both sides to learn the compromise they currently can’t manage. Grimston himself raised the prospect that Wandsworth might be heading toward multi-party politics whether either big party wants it or not, and Peter Graham, defending the administration’s own rules, pointed out that “we could easily have had multiple groups on the council at this time.”

Both were speaking almost in passing, but the idea is a real one: a third or fourth voice on the council would make the current habits of assumed bad faith much harder to sustain, because there would no longer be just two sides to blame each other. That would also come with risks: if we do end up with our first ever Green councillor in August, it is unlikely they will have the experience or wisdom of Cllr Grimston and could end up as one more point of instability.

Knife-edge politics doesn’t tend to make people more careful. Sometimes it makes them grip harder. Anyone who has watched a finely balanced US Congress over the past decade has watched entrenchment, not maturity, be the more common response to a slim majority. There’s no guarantee a more fragmented Wandsworth would behave any better than a more evenly split one has. It might just multiply the number of parties assuming bad faith of each other, rather than curing the assumption.

Tonight’s meeting is not a formality. Robert Morritt may or may not become Leader of the Council because Conservative members may or may not turn up in the numbers needed. Nobody outside that chamber knows which of those things will be true by the time it rises, and going on the evidence of the last ten days, no one inside does either. That uncertainty, more than any one resignation or any one vote, is the real state of Wandsworth Council this evening. Residents deserve to know that plainly, rather than be told, again, that it’s all been settled.