Ford, the Queen and other tales of my first week as mayor

'What were intended to be formal meetings were now taking place chaotically in cafés round the building'

There is a well-known military maxim: "No plan survives contact with the enemy." My first week as mayor of London fully confirmed it.

There is a well-known military maxim: "No plan survives contact with the enemy." My first week as mayor of London fully confirmed it.

I would have liked to spend it meeting with leaders of the London boroughs, setting up meetings with key London groups, carrying out pre-arranged public events such as the Tate opening, studying briefs, considering appointments and discussing with staff. Instead we were plunged into a full-blown crisis by Ford's announcement about Dagenham.

We had known that Ford's statement was coming. Acting on previous announcements that the election result would be declared at around 7am, and as soon as the results of the exit poll were known, some of the mayoralty's first formal meetings on Dagenham were scheduled for 8.30am. In the event, the electronic count was thwarted until midday, no one could enter the mayor's building, and while press attention was centred on the count at the QE2 centre, what had been intended to be formal but were now chaotically informal meetings on Dagenham were taking place in cafés around the building.

A well-publicised morning visit to Parliament for a swim provided relaxation and, more important, an opportunity to escape the press for an hour to meet my staff to discuss the Greater London Assembly (GLA) results and Ford. By the mayor's first press conference at 3.30pm, the building was already up and running on the situation at Dagenham. A by-product was that many key issues were settled in the first days or even hours.

The press was rightly concentrating on the proposals for Nikki Gavron and Toby Harris as deputy mayor and chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, and several commented on the collaborative approach taken in the first week in office and suggested that it was out of desire to rejoin the Labour Party - something I have never disguised. That is to miss the point. Certainly a few tactical nuances were designed to make sure people understood that we were approaching matters in a co-operative way. But the essential content of all decisions was to get on with the mayor's job. Before anything could be resolved about the deputy mayor, we were already working on Dagenham with John Biggs, the Labour GLA member for the City and east London.

Stephen Byers drew the short straw, as it may have appeared to some of his ministerial colleagues, of being the first Cabinet minister to meet the new mayor. As, given the issues of funding involved, I can scarcely conceive of any mayor of London going four years without having a public difference with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), I want to put it on record that Mr Byers's reaction could not have been faster. Officials were already in contact with the DTI on the Friday afternoon after the election; we had a skeletal internal task group established by Saturday; and by 4pm on Monday the mayor was meeting the secretary of state to co-ordinate our position.

The second unknown was Ford. They could not but know that the mayor was bound to disagree with their decision on Dagenham. Ford, again, were in contact with us immediately at the highest level, with no communication problems whatsoever.

If Dagenham became crisis-management, the week's predictable set piece was the deputy mayor. Needless to say, I had thought over the matter repeatedly even before the election. I hoped Ms Gavron would take the job, I was determined to do everything possible to clarify that it implied no element of climb-down by Labour, as there would be no "cabinet responsibility", and I believed that after a long and bruising election campaign, the public would have been strongly hostile to any attempt to obstruct the normal running of the GLA.

I therefore hoped that Ms Gavron would accept, but had no certainty - contrary to repeated press reports, there had been no discussions during the election with any of the Labour members. The only definite decision that had been taken was that, as with Dagenham, the mayor's office would run the same policies anyway, with or without Labour involvement as deputy mayor, and if Labour had rejected it, I would have offered the post to one of the other parties. Ms Gavron's agreement was not only the outcome I wanted but, I am convinced, the best for London.

This being the capital, of course, the week could not go by without sections of the press deciding that other issues were the key ones for the city. The Sunday Telegraph, to judge by its choice of front-page headline, decided that the most important question facing the entire nation was the justifiable annoyance of one of my advisers on race in reaction to the Duke of Edinburgh's comments that something looked as if it had been put together by an Indian. The Evening Standard decided to do a hatchet job on my press secretary for the unforgivable crime of preventing the media from ringing me up at all hours of the night. The same newspaper divined from close analysis of Her Majesty's smile at the opening of the Millennium Bridge that she was planning to invite me to form the next government. I am still trying to work out if that story was super-subtle spin by Millbank to drive a wedge between Tony Blair and me.

Despite the latter weighty matters, the week was a success. I and all my team intended to co-operate with others. All I had not known was how others would respond. My contingency plans for what to say and do if others didn't respond positively turned out to have been a waste of effort. Last weekend, for the first time in months, I felt perfectly relaxed about spending some time in the garden.