- guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 May 2000 01.54 BST
"I can make many dreams come true but that's too difficult," says the wizard, "so wish for something easier."
"I've got this friend, Frank Dobson," the man replies, "can you make him mayor of London?"
"Let's have another look at that leg."
The joke, told against Frank Dobson by a member of his own campaign team, underlined how far his star waned during a disastrous eight-month bid to be mayor of London.
The former health secretary started out a political heavyweight who enjoyed telling dirty stories. He ended a figure of fun, the butt of a thousand bad quips.
Bookies stopped taking bets on the outcome of the race a fortnight ago and, though Dobson put on the brave face worn by all candidates, even his closest allies yesterday said he would not win.
Recriminations started last night before the polls closed in the capital and the result was known. Inquests by Labour's national executive committee and the Greater London party could make the "blame game" one of the best free shows in town. The emergence in second place during the last opinion polls of the Tory Steve Norris added to Dobson's woes and left him needing a miracle.
Downing Street is pointing the finger at Millbank and Dobson; Millbank is complaining about Dobson and No 10; Dobson feels let down by both.
His supporters believe he was let down by the prime minister, with Tony Blair not appearing with him in public until early April - just four weeks before the polls.
The Ken Livingstone supporters who branded Dobson a puppet of No 10 also accused him of lacking Downing Street support. He could not win.
"He was a lame duck from day one and his campaign never got past first base," said a Labour bankbencher.
"Frank," said a minister, "was never given the support he needed and because they feared he would lose, prominent figures did not want to get too close."
A Millbank official said: "We did everything we could. He can have no complaints." Another said: "This is a disaster made in Downing Street. Blair made a fundamental political error by creating a job without first deciding who would fill it."
Sympathetic Westminster colleagues conceded that Dobson's campaign was poor and never really got going.
Overtures
After months of dismissing those who claimed he would stand as "fancy nancys" and in one case "liars", Dobson agreed 10 days before last September's Labour conference in Bournemouth to put his name forward.
Downing Street had identified him as a favoured candidate as early as February 1998, nearly 20 months earlier, but he had resisted the overtures.
His reluctance was to prove damaging twice over: valuable time was lost to erode Livingstone's huge poll lead and it looked as if he had been strong-armed into running, allowing rivals to paint him as No 10's stooge.
Even when he decided to go for it, Dobson delayed again - opting not to announce his intentions until after the conference. Blair and Dobson did not want the London mayor issue to dominate the conference but they missed an opportunity to use it as a platform to launch his campaign. He had second thoughts midweek during the conference and considered using his speech as health secretary to make his plans clear but at the last minute pulled back, instead denying rumours he would stand.
Clive Soley, the chairman of the parliamentary Labour party and a London MP, said: "If Frank loses it was because he was in a very difficult position from the start. He had very little time to establish himself as the main candidate. Ken Livingstone had been running his campaign for a year or two and Frank, quite honestly, never caught up."
Some in the Stop Livingstone camp maintain that Millbank's decision to delay the Labour selection process from December to February was crucial because it did not give the former GLC leader enough rope to hang himself.
His independent campaign only recently started falling apart, and another minister said: "The defection of Mark Goddard [the Livingstone aide who quit in disgust] this week was just the start. A few more Goddards and people would have been saying this guy is a shyster."
In private Blair expressed the naive hope that a businessman, someone above party but basically New Labour - a Richard Branson or Bob Ayling - would step forward.
The prime minister's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, touted Mo Mowlam, whose role in the Irish peace process talks he had come close to superseding at times. Ms Mowlam did not fancy it and, as with Dobson, no direct appeal was made by Blair. Key aides - including Sally Morgan at No 10 and Margaret McDonagh at Millbank - and the press were used as a sounding board.
When Ms Mowlam changed her mind in the autumn, it was too late. Both she and Dobson had helped to botch last July's reshuffle-that-never-was by refusing to move. But Dobson had come under repeated "only you can save us from Ken, Frank" pleas from friends in the Labour movement in London.
Glenda Jackson had tried, but failed, to create a bandwagon - "no good at wholesale politics, not voter-friendly enough" was the verdict on an Oscar-winning star too shy for real pavement politicking. Trevor Phillips was equally bold but lacked political clout.
Tony Banks, who quit the government that July, wanted No 10's support before he would declare while Downing Street wanted him to declare and prove his worth first.
Nick Raynsford, the minister for London, did see Blair. He asked for six weeks of campaigning to see if he could beat Livingstone in a ballot. If he could not, Millbank would still have the option of blocking Livingstone from the shortlist, exposing him as an independent for two vital months, from December. Had the electoral college been imposed Raynsford would have quit.
As it was he had three days of campaigning before Dobson finally threw his hat into the ring, forcing Raynsford to swiftly withdraw.
Hollow
But Livingstone's repeated opinion poll leads panicked Downing Street and Millbank as both feared Dobson could not win a one-member, one-vote ballot of the party's 68,000 London members even if it was delayed until the spring.
An electoral college based on the discredited model used in Wales, including trade union block votes, was devised to stop Livingstone and deliver victory for Dobson.
It was to be a hollow victory. The blatant rigging of the result, together with the "will he-won't he?" saga of whether Livingstone would be allowed to stand, killed off Dobson's already slim prospects.
The former health secretary maintains that he would have won a one-member, one-vote contest. We will never know. What we do know is the two-to-one majority among party members left Dobson not a lame duck but a dead duck.
Many members refused to campaign for him in protest at the result and Livingstone, who had pledged never to quit the party, went back on his word and stood as an independent.
One activist in east London, no Livingstone supporter, locked a box of Dobson leaflets in his car. Others refused to deliver leaflets with his name on them. Most just stayed at home, refusing to put up posters let alone knock on doors.
Bumping along on around 15% while Livingstone was basking in ratings of plus-50%, Dobson resorted to negative tactics and repeatedly attacked his rival. Livingstone was an extremist; Livingstone would set up "checkpoint charlies" to charge motorists £100 a month to drive into London; Livingstone would cost business millions of pounds.
Dobson's own policies - to appoint named police officers for every household, to appoint his own health tsar, to plant 100,000 trees to let London bloom - were secondary. The future of London Underground was the only real issue in a contest dominated by personalities and even here, Dobson's support for the government's private-public partnership was harder to sell than Livingstone's anti-privatisation line.
And there were the gaffes. When well-know media figures were caught up in the Millennium Dome fiasco on New Year's Eve, Dobson laughed at "toffee-nosed people" and had to apologise when it emerged that disabled, young and elderly people were also caught in the huge queues.
When the TV and radio star Chris Evans pledged £100,000 to Livingstone's campaign, Dobson said his mother had warned him never to trust redheads. Evans vowed to doubled his donation and £200,000 and brunettes everywhere were said to be outraged.
Downing Street appeared to acknowledge the game was up at the end of March when the pollster Philip Gould reported that focus groups showed Livingstone would easily collect most first preferences. The focus of the campaign, said an insider, switched to attempting to secure second place for their man in the faint hope that he would pick up an avalanche of second preferences in the shoot-out.
A "Frank and to the point" advertising drive, featuring Dobson's handwriting, was devised but appeared to have little impact.
It was not only the opinion polls that were writing him off as a loser. A straw poll at a British chambers of commerce conference in London put him fourth with just 15 votes, behind the Liberal Democrat, Susan Kramer, on 77 with Livingstone on 140 and Norris on 141.
A friend of Dobson yesterday said he was bitter at his treatment by the party and media. Giving up a job he loved, running the NHS, he has faced constant flak in the race to be mayor.
"Frank wanted to be health secretary until the election and was happy filling the shoes of Nye Bevan," said a minister. "He gave it up, stood and has a horrid time. It has been terrible for him."
Before his mayoral ordeal, when Dobson rang close friends, the York-born politician would announce "Dick Whittington here" to start the chat with a joke.
The real Dick Whittington travelled from York to London and was lord mayor twice; Dobson never looked like pulling it off once.
His friends are divided over what he will do next. Speculation that he could return to the cabinet has been played down by No 10 while rumours of a peerage may prove premature. All Dobson will say is that he would be honoured to remain Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras.
His colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party believe he has been badly treated, said a minister, and would rebel if an inquest blamed him for not winning.
But Dobson, whose humour will probably emerge grittier than ever, knows politics can be a cruel business.
Knock knock Who's there? Frank Frank who?
