The Conservatives have chosen their shortlist of three potential candidates to run for Mayor of London in 2028. They are Festus Akinbusoye, James Cleverly and Sara Gezdari. Over the weekend a “selection council” discarded Alex Challoner, the fourth person on the longlist. During the coming week, party members in the capital will see the favoured trio debate online – I’m not aware of anyone else being invited – and begin voting from 9 November. A result of the first ballot is expected to be announced on 20 November, with a second ballot to follow if needed.
I’m not a Conservative voter, but I’m not one of those who thinks all Tories are evil or that all Tory policy ideas are bad, and I would like the Conservatives in general to stop behaving like a Reform UK tribute act. Where better to start than in Greater London, where Reform is an oddball, extremist suburban sideshow? My opinions or advice may be of little interest to the rather few Londoners who are card-carrying Tories. But, for what it’s worth to them, if they are serious about winning in May 2028, here are five facts I think they ought to face.
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One: They are unpopular in London and can’t win by trying to unite the Right
The Conservatives did a little less badly in London’s local elections in May then elsewhere in England, giving reasonable grounds for hopes of a recovery in the city after years of decline. However, viewed through a Londonwide lens – the correct one for a mayoral election – the party’s results were still poor. Even though they ended up in charge of more boroughs than before, they took only 20 per cent of all the borough votes cast, which was less than in 2022. And in the most recent London opinion poll, which measured general election voting intentions, they were supported by just 16 per cent of Londoners.
If London Tories imagine that Reform’s ongoing troubles will lead to a boost big enough for them to win, even if helped by the return of the Supplementary Vote system with its second preference option, they need to do some basic maths. In May, the Tory and Reform vote share combined added up to 33 per cent. But the combined shares of Labour and the Greens, leaving aside the various Left-leaning local parties, wasn’t far short of 50 per cent. And that recent opinion poll put Reform on 13 per cent, making a a combined “right bloc” vote of 29 per cent. The Labour plus Green total was 52 per cent. For the Conservative candidate, uniting the London Right, even if that can be achieved, will not be enough.
Two: They should accept that Sadiq Khan has not been the disaster they claim
There are two types of criticism of Sadiq Khan. One type is reasoned, cogent and worthy of consideration, even if, in the end, it doesn’t persuade you. The other type is ignorant, catastrophist and forms part of larger, international narrative that falsely depicts London as a “lost” urban dystopia. Conservatives, including, astoundingly, plenty of London Conservatives, are attracted to the latter type. Cast your mind back to the party’s comically absurd election campaign videos of the past few years. It is difficult to imagine anything more self-defeating for a party that aspires to winning City Hall than contributing to this chorus of denigration or ludicrously attributing blame for its malicious fictions to the Labour Mayor.
For one thing, no Mayor of London, whatever his or her political complexion, has sufficient power to arrange for the city to become “fallen” as the nationalist Right ecosystem routinely howls. For another, dear Conservatives, Sadiq Khan has, for more than a decade, been more popular with Londoners than anyone you’ve put up against him. Disagree with him all you like, but don’t kid yourselves, as plenty of you seem to do, that somehow he is really deeply unpopular, and that his three election wins someone didn’t really happen. His victories tell you that, for a long time, more Londoners have wanted a Labour Mayor than wanted a Tory one. Their candidate will need to accept that reality and learn from it.
Three: Endlessly saying crime is “out of control” makes them sound like Nigel Farage
Firstly, crime rates in London, by whatever measure used, are not in general worse than elsewhere in Britain or in other big cities across the world. They just aren’t. So London Tories stop saying they are. It makes them sound like Nigel Farage, and Nigel Farage is not popular in London. There’s a lesson there, too.
Four: Obsessing about road-user charging does them more harm than good
There have been two, recurring headline strands of recent Conservative mayoral campaigns: one proclaims that crime has “spiralled out of control” (see above); the other insists that the Labour candidate has a secret plan to punish London’s motorists by taxing them. The most ridiculous example came in 2021, when the Tory candidate maintained to the bitter end that Khan, if re-elected, would make Londoners who drive pay a fee each time they crossed the Greater London border. It was not a Khan policy and it was never going to be.
In 2024, of course, the Tory candidate made reversing the Londonwide extension of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone the centrepiece of her campaign, seemingly believing this would trigger a popular uprising and carry her to power. Alas, the last Census found that 42 per cent of London households don’t have a car at all, and TfL analysis showed that the vehicles of the great majority that do were already ULEZ-compliant. This meant that only a pretty small minority of London voters had any direct interest in the flagship Tory policy. And when it came to the vote, support for Khan actually increased a bit in the outer boroughs. Face the fact, London Conservatives – just because you can’t abide any form of road-user charging doesn’t mean most Londoners feel the same.
Five: Their candidate must distance themself from certain national Tory attitudes
Every time certain leading national Conservatives go on a culture war offensive, they hurt their party’s chances in London. Kemi Badenoch’s speech in March about integration was in some ways reasonable, even encouraging in light of what had gone before, but also scolding, reductive and alarmist.
Every time shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp makes a spectacle of himself telling one group of British people that another one’s not really British and, by the way, they’re taking all the council houses, he alienates Londoners. Katie Lam, the shadow minister for communities of all things, seems to get her information about progress by London schoolchildren in English from unreliable sources. She and other such performers on the Tories’ populist Right platform use London as a political punchbag. London Tories assessing their choice for mayoral candidate would do well to consider which of the three is most likely to endorse them.
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As a footnote, let’s remind ourselves that London mayoral races have a habit of producing closer finishes than we – that is to say, opinion polls – expect. That said, actual upsets have been in short supply. As things stand, London’s electoral landscape looks pretty tilted against the next Conservative mayoral candidate. Whoever that turns out to be, they need to think very hard about what sort of Tory they need to be to stand a serious chance of winning City Hall.
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