The first Labour leader of Westminster council has told how seizing key wards surrounding the Marble Arch Mound swept the party to power in a tide of anger over the £6 million white elephant.
Adam Hug, 41, was last week confirmed as the first non-Tory elected head of Britain’s richest borough since it was created in 1964.
The dramatic victory — the most eye-catching result on a night of mostly modest Labour gains in the council elections on May 5 — came after his party unexpectedly won in wards where it had rarely or never been successful before.
The married father of one said the gains that ensured Labour toppled the Conservatives as majority party were areas where Tory voters felt most disillusioned about the project.
In his first newspaper interview since election night Mr Hug told the Standard: “People had an awareness of it, it wasn’t on every door but it was a significant talking point on the campaign trail and the more so the closer you got to it.
“In some of the wards of Bayswater, Lancaster Gate, West End, Hyde Park, basically the ring around the Mound that Westminster Labour won, if you look at that, proximity to the mound was definitely a thing. It was just emblematic of a council that lost its way and was wasting money at a time when money was short.”
The saga of the now flattened 25-metre-high man-made hillock at the end of Oxford Street led to the resignation of former deputy council leader Melvyn Caplan.
Mr Hug, who is a director at a foreign policy think tank, said: “At the time we called for an independent investigation.
We’re not going to restart the process but we are going to do a thorough examination of how the council operates, making sure that its systems and processes are effective.”
He said the authority would instead look at a number of “smaller scale interactive things that will bring a bit of vitality back into the heart of town...We’re not going to build another mound, I can give you that promise. It’s not going to be an annual thing.”
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Mr Hug said he rated Labour’s chances of taking control of the council as only “one in six” when he started campaigning last year.
He said the council’s top priority would be affordable housing, saying: “I’m someone coming here whose ward casework is 80 per cent housing — families whose children have to share a bedroom and a bed.” He added: “We’re not revolutionaries, we’re respectful of Westminster’s heritage but we’re going to do things in a different way.”
