Andrew Gilligan: A Conservative candidate can win to be London Mayor, we need to pick one sooner rather than later

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Rob Jenrick’s famous fare-dodging video on the London Underground might have been an application for the wrong job. Being leader of the opposition is a terrible gig, even when your party isn’t third or fourth in the polls. Being mayor of London, the man who controls (or in Sadiq Khan’s case doesn’t control) the Underground, is the best job in British politics.

It is closer to the Tories’ reach than we think, and closer, as things stand, than Downing Street.

That might seem an odd thing to say.

On the current boundaries, five of the 11 postwar Tory prime ministers were London MPs – more than for any other region. Margaret Thatcher was a London MP for the whole of her career. But the party gave up on London years ago. In a city of nine million people, we twice managed the difficult feat of finding a candidate less impressive and serious than Khan.

We are at or close to our lowest ebb in modern history in the capital: we have never had fewer councillors or MPs (though at the height of Blair we controlled fewer London councils than now). Our vote share in borough elections is the lowest in at least 50 years, and the lowest ever in a parliamentary election. In 1987, the Tories won 57 seats in London; in 2024, nine.

Yet even with a really poor candidate, the Tories still got 32.7 per cent of the vote at last year’s London mayoral election, more than 12 points better than the party’s London share (20.5 per cent) at the general election only a few weeks later.

If the London mayoralty were purely a party contest, Labour would have won it seven times, not four. But it is also a personality contest.

That means two things. Firstly, that the vote splintering we see in other elections is less prevalent in mayoral ones: they tend to be reported as, and treated by the voters as, a fight between the top two personalities. Other candidates have a harder time persuading voters that they can win.

Secondly, it means that the Tories do have a chance with the right personality, if they can stay in that top two. And unless Reform has eclipsed the party completely by 2028, the chances of that are reasonable: London is the least sympathetic part of England to Reform, the only region where they polled less than 10 per cent at the general election.

Khan, interestingly, didn’t outperform his party by anything like as much (he got 43.8 per cent to Labour’s 43 per cent). He is like Keir Starmer in many ways – lacking any real conviction or charisma, blowing around with the winds, generating enthusiasm from no-one – just a lot later in the electoral cycle.

He has not been a successful mayor.

Fare-dodging on the Tube is one of dozens of things getting worse because of his failures of grip. Khan’s London practises “broken windows” in reverse, where the authorities seem uninterested in petty offending and disorder. The government isn’t much interested in helping him out either, with reports this week that he’s furious at getting nothing from the spending review.

And by 2028, things will have turned really difficult for Khan. Labour’s national failings will have added to his own. The middle-class left vote will drift to the Greens, the Muslim vote to Muslim populists. There have been periodic rumours he won’t stand again, but he’ll only be 57 then and the chances of him finding a dignified exit job must be slim.

Many Tories write off London as irredeemably left-wing. That’s not true.

London is the most religious part of Britain. It is the most entrepreneurial part of Britain. It has millions of socially conservative voters in stable families. A Tory revival in London isn’t about appealing to woke, but building a better coalition of those people.

It means holding on to the traditional, but shrinking, white outer-suburban demographic which is the party’s main current preoccupation and base. It means a massive push among socially-conservative ethnic-minority voters, as some Conservatives in outer London have already managed. Bob Blackman’s Harrow East has the highest Tory vote share in the country, the only seat where the party topped 50 per cent. It means extending that approach to the inner city, to other faiths and ethnic minorities, such as Christians of African descent, and to other parts of the suburbs. The lack of infrastructure on the ground is a problem, but less of one for a mayoral campaign.

It means a push for private-sector professionals and higher-rate taxpayers, who will be getting buyer’s remorse from Labour. It means appealing to everyone who wants to see grip and leadership exercised in London. And it needs to start soon: ideally, selecting an excellent candidate several years out who can be the focus of opposition to Khan, denying that space to others.

Winning the mayoralty of London, or coming close, or even being in the debate, would be the clearest signal that Conservatism still has a future.

It’s something the party should start thinking about very soon.