Alex Challoner: The capital can’t wait – it is time to choose a ‘Shadow Mayor’ for London

Alex Challoner is a former prospective London mayoral candidate and the current Director of London Vision Network

It is one of the most persistent cliches of modern life to complain that Christmas seems to start earlier and earlier each year.

No sooner have you put away the Halloween decorations and watched the fireworks on Bonfire Night than the supermarkets fill up with mince pies, every sausage must be wrapped in bacon and Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” is playing on a loop everywhere. This phenomenon is so well established it even has a name: “Christmas Creep”.

I am loathe to contribute to ‘Christmas Creep’ by mentioning the festive period in the midst of August – however, unfortunately for Conservative strategists and activists across the capital, opposition politics has its own equivalent: Election Creep.

It might feel like only yesterday that you put your blue rosette away, posted your last leaflet and updated VoteSource, but you can ill afford to push thoughts of campaigning to the back of your mind. The wounds from last year’s bruising battering at the ballot box may still feel fresh – and very sore – but the party needs to start making decisions about how best to fight future elections.

Election Creep is particularly acute in London.

Not only does the party face a tough battle in borough elections next May but Labour is already stacking the deck for the next GLA elections in 2028. Plans to give 16- and 17-year-olds the vote might have dominated all the headlines but, hidden away in the small print of the English Devolution Bill is a clause to restore supplementary voting in mayoral elections in England, including for the mayor of London. (The 2022 Elections Act had, briefly, made all mayoral elections first past the post).

If Labour are already thinking about contests in 2028, then so should we Conservatives, and that means starting the process of looking for someone to be the next Conservative candidate for mayor as soon as possible.

Of course, there will be those who say that it is far too soon for all that. They would probably argue that a lot can happen politically in three years and campaign decisions made in haste will be lamented at leisure if we end up selecting the wrong candidate for circumstances and realities we cannot accurately predict now. We do not currently know how well Reform will be polling in three years’ time, what impact Jeremy Corbyn’s new left-wing party could have in London (especially if Corbyn himself stands as its candidate for City Hall), and how badly Labour support will crumble across the capital.

A further argument for delay would be that we do not know with any certainty if Sadiq Khan will even be the Labour contender. Speculation has grown that the current mayor may not attempt to run for a fourth term in office. Certainly, his inability to secure any significant wins in the recent spending review, coupled with the Chancellor’s proud boast that changes to Treasury funding rules have permanently disadvantaged London in future budgets and spending rounds, should have made him consider a career change. The fragility of Keir Starmer’s premiership – and the possibility of a Labour leadership contest within the next couple of years – will probably have many senior Labour figures considering their options.

However, whilst the tectonic plates of national and London politics are in flux, I would suggest that dither, delay and procrastination are not sound foundations for a successful political strategy. Both Susan Hall and Zac Goldsmith were selected less than a year before polling day. This approach denies a Conservative mayoral hopeful the chance to really build their profile or develop a compelling policy platform.

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.

London is too big and too important an electorate to ignore or neglect – not just numerically but also economically. London is the engine room of the UK economy. The capital leads every other UK region in GDP per capita as well as foreign direct investment, productivity and net contribution to the Exchequer (which is to say that London taxpayers pay in far more to the Treasury in tax than they receive in public spending).

Whilst Starmer and Reeves have committed multiple errors and acts of ill-conceived economism in their stewardship of UK plc, it is their inability to deliver the stability and confidence that the City of London needs that has undermined their ‘Growth Mission’ and prompted the unprecedented collapse in support for Labour in the polls. Convincing the UK that the Conservatives can again be trusted on the economy means first convincing London.

Even before Labour’s latest election-rigging shenanigans, we Conservatives faced an up-hill battle to regain control of City Hall.

Far too many Conservatives write-off London as an unwinnable socialist bastion; too woke, too cosmopolitan, too different, too ‘Remain’ to see the benefits of Conservative policies.  But if Conservatives give up trying to convince a city of more than 6 million electors to vote them when that city is the economic and cultural centre of the nation, it sends a very worrying message.

The Conservatives have won control of city hall before (twice).

More importantly, Boris Johnson’s victory against the odds in 2008 was a major signal that the party was back in contention as a relevant, trusted political force nationally. (A view that was borne out just two years later when the Conservatives returned to Government at the head of a coalition). Demonstrating how much better a Tory mayor can run major organisations like the Met Police and Transport for London will help restore the party’s reputation across the country.

The road back from the political wilderness that we Conservatives find ourselves in today runs through Chelsea, Chiswick and Chingford just as much as it runs though Clacton, Cheltenham or Chesterfield. But the party will only begin to travel down the road to recovery if we start taking London politics more seriously, especially the battle for City Hall.

It is not enough for the party to just have a Shadow Minister for London. We urgently need a Shadow Mayor taking the fight to Labour – and the longer we leave it to start that process, the more of a march Labour will steal on us.