Alex Challoner is a former prospective London mayoral candidate
It grieves me to admit it, but Reform UK have pulled off something of a political coup in London. There are still about two and a half years until London goes to the polls to choose who should run London but they are the first party out of the traps with a candidate to challenge Sadiq Khan. Indeed, given that Khan himself has not said he will definitely run for re-election, there is even a question mark over who will beLabour’s candidate in 2028. (Khan is almost certainly waiting to see how the borough elections go in May before weighing up his odds of getting re-elected).
But it should not comfort Conservatives anywhere that Reform have effectively stolen a march on all parties.
Reform’s alacrity disadvantages the Conservatives more than anyone else. Only one centre-right party is likely to be in the ‘final two’ ofthe 2028 mayoral election (and be able to claim its share of the second-preference votes from the lower-placed parties that may well be needed to win control of CityHall), and historically that has always been the Conservative Party.
There are no silver medals in politics, no prizes for good sportsmanship, and no participation trophies for the also-rans.
I penned an article on precisely this subject for ConHome last summer. It gives me no satisfaction to have been proved right. James Ford, a former City Hall adviser to Boris Johnson, wrote in City AM in September last year that the lack of an official Conservative candidate (or even a designated spokesman for the party in London) meant that a huge opportunity to attack the current Mayor over the damaging week of tube strikes that month was missed.
The benefits of selecting a candidate early are clear. Conservative campaigning efforts across the capital – not just the next contest for City Hall but the looming borough elections, the ceaseless cycle of by-elections and the next general election campaign – would all benefit from getting a serious contender in place to shadow Sadiq, hold his failing City Hall administration to account, and remind the London electorate that the Conservatives are very much still in the fight in the capital.
Reform have consistently fielded Laila Cunningham as a media spokesperson since her defection last year (indeed, she has been far more visible than Reform’s solitary London Assembly member, Alex Wilson), so her selection as their mayoral candidate should not have come as a surprise to anyone.
This situation could – and should – have been avoided. This is a setback but need not be fatal to the party’s prospects. How, therefore, can we catch-up with, and ideally overtake, Reform?
Certainly the party needs to pull its finger out and get a serious, heavyweight candidate in place as soon as possible. That won’t happen before the local elections in May but, if a quick process is started soon, it could be done by party conference in October. And, it should go without saying, that the Conservatives should not find themselves on the back foot again when it comes to fighting future mayoral elections.
Whilst the speed of their candidate selection gives Reform UK clear campaigning advantages, it has also exposed the weakness in their policy platform for City Hall.
To date, Reform’s only offer to voters in London is to talk about crime and to promise to scrap the hated ULEZ (and they have offered no detail or substance on either issue).
Robert Cossins, a Conservative activist in the capital, has written for ConHome previously that focussing London campaigns solely on crime is insufficient to win an election. Worse still, it can come across as fearmongering and like a candidate is ‘talking down London’. Whilst Khan’s abysmal record on crime is inevitably going to be high on the list of charges any party is going to level against him, he is also failing spectacularly on housing, in transport, on the night-time economy, and on growth.
If Reform want to scrap the ULEZ, how are they going to replace the £259m a year that TfL makes in charges? And can Reform guarantee that both congestion and air pollution will not increase as a result of ditching it? Where are Reform’s plans to increase housebuilding in London?
When it comes to transport policy, what are they going to do about tube strikes…or fares and fare evasion…or tube graffiti…or the Freedom Pass… or the rising number of sexual assaults on the transport network?
The Metropolitan Police is not the only agency that the Mayor oversees (and City Hall shares responsibility for the Met with the Home Office).
Londoners are a smart and pragmatic electorate. They will expect to see credible, well-researched, and fully costed proposals. Empty rhetoric – no matter how loudly or repetitively it is deployed – will not be enough. With or without a candidate in place, if the Conservatives can come up with better solutions on the many major policy challenges afflicting London there is still hope that we can be victorious in 2028.
