It must be hard for Ken Livingstone to watch Boris Johnson seizing the cycling agenda. It’s a funny old, back-to-front world that forgets the previous mayor’s great contribution to cycling in the capital – the introduction of the congestion charge, which hugely increased the number of cyclists on the city streets, even if not by the 43% of which Ken was wont to boast.
Still, we congestion-charge converts are now saddled with the reality of a revival of Tory fortunes. To see just how much is currently riding on the fashion for bicycles, look at events over the past week or so. Last Tuesday, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ran a feature on the new breed of cycling Tories in which Ed Vaizey, MP for Wantage and Didcot, claimed it as “both a Conservative and a rightwing pastime”: Conservative in John Major’s nostalgic sense of “old maids cycling to church” and rightwing “because it’s about the freedom of the individual, taking one’s own action against an overbearing state”.
The same morning a box of pastries arrived on my desk, a present from Boris to celebrate the launch of London’s “Summer of Cycling”. Why pastries? Just think of the subliminal messages about health and pleasure for the cycling classes who, naturally, don’t have to worry about anything as white van as obesity.
It was almost too good to be true when, on Thursday, David Cameron’s “beloved bicycle” was stolen in London’s Portobello Road as he bought “a few bits of salad”. The photo of the glum Tory leader summoning assistance on his mobile not only reinforced his position as leader of the cyclistas, but placed him as a man of the people, as gutted as you and me by urban crime.
As Labour MP Gwyn Prosser also pointed out on Today, the politics of the bicycle have leaned to the left for most of the 120-odd years that it has been accessible to ordinary people. The first socialist bike club in England, founded in 1894 in Birmingham by readers of the weekly newspaper the Clarion, peaked at a membership of 30,000 at the outbreak of the first world war. But the world’s biggest bike club of the time was the German workers’ cycling federation Solidarity, which had 330,000 members by 1933, when Hitler took power. One of the first things the Nazis did was to ban the club and persecute its members.
But there have always been two impulses in cycling – the communitarian and the libertarian. In France, where the bicycle is said to have raised the average height of the population by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations, an editorial in the world’s first dedicated cycling magazine thundered in 1869: “It supplants the raw and unintelligent speed of the masses with the speed of the individual.”
In the oratory of 19th-century American suffragettes – who regarded the bicycle at least partly as a powerful weapon in their bloomer wars – the communitarian and the libertarian were indistinguishable. “She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life,” said Susan B Anthony in the 1890s. You can bet that the cyclist she envisaged was a very different creature to the cherry-red peasant girl depicted in Alexander Deineka’s painting Collective Farm Worker on a Bicycle, a key work of early socialist realism.
It’s the mark of the evolutionary genius of the bicycle that it has continued to captivate both tendencies into the 21st century. Britain’s new Conservatives might claim the bike for libertarians, but they’re not above tinkering with legislation to legitimise their eccentricities as road users (see Kensington and Chelsea’s pilot scheme allowing cyclists to go the wrong way up one-way streets, as Cameron is in the habit of doing).
Meanwhile, Hugo Chávez last month announced a joint venture between Venezuela and Iran to create a National Bicycle Factory capable of producing 100,000 bikes a year. The new bicycles would be named Atomic,
he joked, to honour US fears that the factory would be a front for a plant to enrich uranium.
But perhaps the bike’s finest hour came last weekend as Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France. The first words uttered by the Spanish champion after he crossed the line roughly translated as: “It was the team wot done it.”
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