Interrogating Ivan

Gay entrepeneur and politico Ivan Massow is vying to replace Boris Johnson as Mayor London and will find out next week if he’s made the final shortlist of Conservative nominees. Chris Godfrey asked the would-be mayor what his plans are for London and its gay scene.

 


Your first campaign video ended by asking us what we wanted from a future mayor; now that you’ve had a chance to hear from us what is it that you think we want?

The thing that comes up all the time is housing. That’s all we’re talking about. We’ve run surveys and asked people repeatedly what’s your next most important thing and they just answer ‘housing’. So housing and affordability and not being able to live in the centre, close to where they work.

There’s also another thing which comes up, which is more LGBT related, which is like the closure of the Black Cap and Madame Jojo’s. I get the same sort of thing from people in Brixton that are worried their arches are being closed, or that the character of their area is changing. I even get little old ladies in Acton saying that Acton’s changed. There’s a real sense that London’s villages need protecting.

There’s a strange conflict which is that London needs a great big master plan, a TFL style master plan that groups housing and new places of business around transport hubs in London. On the flipside of that is that no one wants it where they are. So they all want their kids to be able to afford to live, as long as no one builds on their street.

It’s deeper than that. People don’t like the homogenisation of London. They want Peckham to feel like Peckham, Brixton to feel like Brixton and Bloomsbury to feel like Bloomsbury. And there’s a feeling that the current borough system has slightly let that down.

And how would you deal with those problems?

I think you have to put in place a planning tsar who will make councils offer up their 30 square kilometres of brownfield sites and look sensibly at existing public buildings that are being inappropriately used. If they’ve got warehousing sites next to a tube station for example then possibly that should be houses or businesses. Warehousing can be stuck on the north circular for all I care. It’s about looking at that local culture and allowing local residents to have an increased voice in how those decisions are made locally.

In terms of tackling London’s exorbitant rent prices, I’m guessing you’re not the type to advocate for a rent cap?

Market chaos is not the solution. If you artificially reduce rents across the board, first of all people will stop investing in big buy to rent schemes, I mean they won’t build buildings anymore. The value of properties would fall. There would be negative equity. It just wouldn’t work.

They always say ‘well it’s worked in Berlin’, but there’s a completely different set of circumstances in Berlin where it’s almost like buying. When you take on a unit it often doesn’t even have a kitchen. You take it like a shell and it is a place for life. It’s a completely different relationship. In New York they’ve tried it as well and it has been a bit disastrous. In London we’re just playing with a different set of cards. And there are ways that you can reduce rents but this probably isn’t one of them.

You’ve previously praised the ‘meritocratic spirit’ of London, but with the way wealth is distributed at the moment do you not think that it’s a bit of a myth?

I’m as concerned as you are, I’m genuinely upset about it. It seems that to have gone to the right school is the passport for many jobs, from being an actor all the way to working in the city. I still think London is an amazing city and you can get on. People come here from all over the world. They used to hear stories of America, but now it seems they all come to London, and some of them don’t even speak English. They can make it happen if they want to make it happen. It is that sort of city. But there is a problem with social mobility and a lot more needs to be done. And that’s exactly what my candidacy would be about.

So how would you increase social mobility?

Well I’d like to see a lot more work from city institutions from schools bringing them in for internships and work placements in the schools. It’s happening already, but just loads more, so that a closer relationship between specific schools and let’s say Goldman Sachs starts to occur, to give people a real gateway in.

As far as I can see when some nice guy is down playing golf and offers his mate’s kid an internship I don’t think they’re doing it deliberately to exclude some kid. I don’t think there’s any malice; I just think it’s the easiest thing to do. It’s easy because you’re cocooned from other people’s needs and other people’s kids.

So I think really breaking down those barriers is important. For me it would be about creating masses of incubators as well because I think one way out of the mundanity of burger flipping, so even if you do have a job, is through entrepreneurship, through starting businesses and through having the facilities. I watched an interview yesterday on London Live – I mean, who watches London Live – with Richard Branson and he was giving advice about entrepreneurship and he said you have to work really hard but most importantly surround yourself with good people. As he said it I just thought it was a throwaway line. But I realised it was what I’d been saying all along.

One of the things I wanted to do is the mayor’s fund (which is all about social mobility) survives on £2.5million pounds a year; well I’ve found £100 million lying around in TFL from unused oyster money. So I’m campaigning to have that released.  At least 75% of debt that’s more than two years old will be a very safe amount to release. I worked in financial services so there are all sorts of devices and calculations to make sure this is correct.

Do you think being gay makes you more electable?

Yes. Isn’t that odd?

Why do you say that?

When we were speculating, people would just say about potential candidates coming in, they’ll say ‘yeah, but he’s not gay, doesn’t stand a chance’. I think that because London is so diverse it just means that you must be able to relate to a bit of their story, whether they’re Jewish, or come from some sort of ethnic group.

There are a few things you’ve said which have caused quite a storm recently; what exactly did you mean when you said ‘all gays are Tory’?

I didn’t say that! That was the headline by that lovely gentleman Ben Cohen. He’s definitely got it in for me.

I was trying to say that some people feel obliged to identify as a labour supporter partly because of the way they’ve been treated by the conservative party in the past. But in fact if they analyse those beliefs and the way they live their life – if they were blindfolded with a multiple-choice questionnaire – they’ll surprise themselves that they were conservative. Even now no matter how you write it people will say: “don’t speak for us you cunt” or “tory twat”. I cannot get out of that.

And do you still feel your statement that “a lot of gay people don’t tend to use state services” is an accurate one?

I haven’t done any analysis. I’m gonna have a child who will go to a state school so I’m guessing that I’ll use them. But I know that in the old days – especially when there were no retrovirals – that people did rely more heavily on the state in those times. But maybe I live in a bubble. I’m prepared to admit that the gay scene that I’m exposed to in London seems to be very industrious and seems to rely on the state very little. It’s only anecdotal.

It’s estimated that 1 in 4 homeless youths may identify as LGBT; doesn’t that suggest the community is vulnerable and still needs government support?

Well, I’ve had the Albert Kennedy Trust in here; it’s something we’ve discussed. I’ve been working with Shelter on a project called No Second Night Out. But there seems to be a big problem, it’s not just about homelessness, it’s also about the drug culture in the gay community. I think that the state has been slow to identify the trauma that growing up gay does to us as adults, regardless of whether we find ourselves homeless or not. That’s just another layer of trauma.

I’m now genuinely wondering whether the psychological affects of feeling the need to hide who you are, for no matter how long, even if you come out quite early, even if you feel you need to hide it until you’re eleven or twelve, even just being very frightened that you’ll be different at a time when you’re feeling insecure or worse, or might be rejected by your parents – this must leave an indelible mark on your psyche. It must be responsible for behaviour patterns, which in some cases seem slightly destructive and worrying. It would be great if that could be dealt with.

If a young person is subject to some form of abuse and the authorities find out about it, a whole system springs into action because quite rightly the child will need care and counselling and help at that point.

But do the figures not imply that this system is failing?

These kids are leaving homes that are failing them, leaving parents that are failing them. I don’t know if it’s the system, they may not have been able to be identified as out. So this might be their coming out when they leave to come to London, they might feel that their parents will react badly and then the only system that will have failed them is society and the schools. The lack of education in schools and lack of a broader education not just aimed at LGBT people but all of the kids. Luckily for society, kids are doing the job for them. Kids are getting really good at not caring about sexuality and it’s becoming easier for kids to come out. I’d like to see more done.

There’s been a lot written about chemsex recently, despite the fact it’s been happening for a while. Do you feel it’s an issue you could tackle as mayor?

You can start at schools and try and change the way kids hit the scene with a level of self-respect. Because at the moment, if you feel you can’t talk to anyone about your sexuality you spend your life hiding, you feel the world is a rather aggressive abrupt place. Then you come into this amazing glamorous world of London, and beautiful toned people of similar age in penthouse flats at four in the morning after you’ve had a fantastic night out offer you chemicals, then you might say no for the first six weeks but you’re eventually gonna say yes – unless you’re a super hero.

It’s so alluring. That’s always going to be difficult to tackle. Lots of this happens. It’s not like you can close clubs down or even punish clubs, because most of the serious abuse doesn’t happen in clubs, it happens in chillouts afterwards.

So what can you do? You can do things like this; you can talk about it all the time and you can start to bring it out in the open so that it’s just less glamorous and less interesting. The more secret, subversive and underworld, the more glamorous it feels. So that’s one thing you can do. You can work with sexual health agencies too. I’m meeting 56 Dean Street and actually doing a talk for them on this subject, so you can work with them.

What do you think draws gay men to it? 

I think something is missing – some form of acceptance and the ability to be who they are – missing from their childhood.

The other thing – and I say this as someone who has issues with addiction myself – the other thing is that we need to talk about drugs and alcohol in a way that’s realistic. When I was growing up the images were of people shooting heroin and their lives were in tatters. And of course then you go and take a tab of ecstasy and the next day your life isn’t in tatters and you haven’t got a needle hanging out of your arm. You were just late for work.

So the experience of taking drugs feels so different from the way the dangers are portrayed, and it’s helping people to understand that it’s progressive. And that pretty soon you won’t really think a weekend is a weekend without doing that. And then it takes over. It just takes priority over everything and eventually you don’t know how to have sex without it. So everything just seems boring and grey.

Do you feel the gay scene should be protected and could you do this as mayor?

I don’t know how you can. I’ve thought of the idea of listing businesses and it would require primary legislation. I Just don’t know how you would do it. And of course the other thing, everyone is concerned about is Soho – and even Vauxhall is slipping – and no longer having that gay identity. But when I walk through Soho it feels gayer than ever. On a hot Saturday night the streets are rammed, it’s like gay pride was 20 years ago yet this is every Saturday. So for me it still seems to be incredibly buoyant.

But, we have an amazing community and we’ve moved. When I was growing up it was all about Earl’s Court in the Colherne. Now that’s a family eatery and you just think ‘God, I wonder if these people know went on in here’. It was hardcore. Would they enjoy their steak and chips if they just realised probably what happened on their table? There must be an aura of sex there.

And finally, why do you feel you’re such a divisive figure in the gay community? 

I don’t mean to be! I’m always quite shocked. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because people like me make the conservative party seem more approachable, and that makes people upset. I just don’t know. I think only other people can answer that.

It’s not something I experience though and it’s not because I don’t come from hardship. I reckon if we were to have a contest I certainly reckon I’ve had my fair share of shit backgrounds; I’ve lived in squats and been poor. So they can’t out-poor me. So that can’t be a qualification for hating me because I would have it too. I’ve just always looked on the bright side of life and tried to find a way through the middle and tried to bring everyone along with me.

• Ivan Massow will be speaking at ‘What is the LGBT Community in 2015’ on Monday July 27th, taking place at the Landor Theatre, 70 Landor Rd, SW9 9PH.

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