“GOOD afternoon, madam. Yes, that’s my ugly mug on the leaflet! I hope you’ll give it a read. May I ask where you live?” It is well over a decade since Andy Street quit the sales floors of John Lewis for the boardroom, where he steered the venerable chain of department stores to record profits. But the former chief executive hasn’t lost the patter. This much Bagehot discovered on Erdington High Street as the wiry Conservative candidate for the new West Midlands mayoralty scuttled about, buttonholing shoppers. “I’m supporting you. I hate these politicians on ‘Question Time’ [a TV debate show],” professed Pam Rangely, a former Labour Party canvasser who had never voted Tory. “So you’re switching to the other side?” your columnist asked her. Mr Street spun around: “Did you see her face? It fell when you talked of ‘the other side’.” The former retail boss does not like to think of himself as a party man.

To tour with Mr Street around the West Midlands metropolitan region, which includes Birmingham and industrial cities like Coventry and Wolverhampton, is to discover how lightly he wears his political identity. He considered running as an independent. His banners, website and leaflets are green rather than Tory blue (one handout mentions the word “Conservative” twice in ten pages). Addressing a crowd at the Prince of Wales pub in left-liberal Moseley, he admits: “I have wobbled in my commitment to the party,” adding that he identifies most with Michael Heseltine, the bouffant doyen of centrist Toryism. “You don’t have the hair for it!” heckles a drinker. “How is that different from being a Blairite in Labour?” hollers another. “It’s a fine line,” Mr Street replies. “They’re philosophically very similar.”

Some of this is tactics. Despite Labour’s current woes, it still finds big-city Britain friendly territory. Of the three big “metro mayoralties” that will spring forth on May 4th (along with three smaller ones), only the West Midlands race is truly competitive. Even on this patch, Labour had a 9.4-point lead in the 2015 election. Siôn Simon, the party’s candidate, is rooted in the economically centrist, ruthlessly tribal culture of Labour’s “West Midlands mafia”, which includes Tom Watson, the party’s powerful deputy leader. At stake is a glittering prize: the second-largest direct mandate in Britain after the London mayoralty, control of transport, skills and housing policies affecting 2.8m people and £8bn ($10bn) of new money from the government. To win it, Mr Street must tack away from the Tories.

Yet his vague political identity speaks to something more fundamental, about him and the job. Ideologically, Mr Simon and Mr Street mostly see eye to eye. The difference has nothing to do with general outlook and everything to do with practice. That makes the West Midlands race intriguing—and important.

Take Mr Simon, a former MP now in the European Parliament. He is steeped in his party’s culture and battles. His campaign is all about Labour: he is absent in most hustings, has published no manifesto with barely a month to go before the vote and seems to be cleaving to safe Labour areas. He talks about protecting the health service (over which the mayor will have no control) and taking on “politicians in London”. Some call this posturing cynical, others hard-nosed power politics.

What the Labour world and realism are to Mr Simon, the business world and idealism are to Mr Street. He brandishes his 48-page Renewal Plan at every opportunity, spouts statistics (did you know that 60% of the Black Country lives within 1km of a bike-friendly tow path?) and demands that the West Midlands become fiscally self-sufficient, suckling less at Leviathan’s teat and paying its own way for once. The house parable in Street-land is the successful local campaign, led by a certain former retail boss, to persuade HSBC, a global investment bank, to base its consumer-banking operations in Birmingham.

Convening, arm-twisting, cheerleading: these, to Mr Street, are the essence of the job, as opposed to what he calls the “begging bowl”, “poor us” approach of Mr Simon. He wants to revive the tradition of Joseph Chamberlain, a Victorian mayor of Birmingham and icon of corporatist municipal success. “He used his business experience to ‘improve the lot of the masses’—though I’d never put it like that,” says Mr Street. Such a mayoralty demands a chief-executive-mayor with a strong personal mandate and cross-party reach. Hence Mr Street’s obsession with visibility—he hurtles from event to event at a pace Bagehot has not witnessed before—and with non-partisanship.

Never knowingly under-polled

This matters regionally and nationally. Regionally because local government in the West Midlands does not have a happy history. Once wealthier even than the south-east, this part of England has suffered from decades of inept interventions by central government and bickering between local councils. The result is a deeply divided region (central Birmingham would pass for Boston, Massachusetts, its poorer outskirts for the less fashionable districts of Bucharest), and one beset by policy failures: a collapsing care system, growing homelessness, lagging skills.

And it matters nationally, because this mayoralty may be the one that decides the future of devolution in England. In an over-centralised, economically polarised country, the emergence of powerful elected officials overseeing wide urban regions is the best hope of solving crises in living standards, productivity and housing. Yet neither Andy Burnham (a gloomy opportunist) in Manchester nor Steve Rotheram (a hard lefty) in Liverpool looks likely to do that on their patches. Mr Simon is more promising than either, but a win for him would nonetheless be a blow to the ambition with which the metro mayoralties were created. A victory for the dynamic Mr Street would make Birmingham a beacon of municipal assertiveness. So Bagehot urges West Midlanders: don’t vote Conservative, vote Street.

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot