James Ford is a public affairs consultant. He worked as an aide to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, at City Hall between 2010 and 2012.
The votes have been counted. The results are in. The citizenry of London have spoken. Sadiq Khan will be the capital’s mayor for another term. And, as both Peter John (a former Labour leader of Southwark Council) and Ben Johnson (a former aide to Khan) have concluded “in the end it wasn’t close”. But, we might well ask, wasn’t it a lot closer than it should have been?
Sadiq Khan secured 43.8 per cent of the vote – a lead of some 11 percentage points over Conservative hopeful Susan Hall’s 32.7 per cent. That is a more convincing win than the (just over) 4 percentage points that Khan beat Shaun Bailey by in 2021, when London last chose its Mayor. However, the last 10 opinion polls (by a range of pollsters) conducted before the election (between October 2023 and April 2024) gave Khan an average 47 per centshare of the vote and an average poll lead of just over 20 percentage points (in line with Labour’s 20 point lead nationally). YouGov’s last poll – published in the Evening Standard just days before the election – put Khan 22 points ahead.
In fact, the only person seriously predicting the London election would be close was Sadiq Khan himself. Khan beat the very low bar he set himself, but significantly underperformed when compared with opinion poll forecasts.
Moreover, Sadiq’s showing in London was also outshone by other Labour candidates. In the Blackpool South by-election, Labour achieved a swing of 26 percentage points from the Conservatives. In London, the swing in Khan’s favour was just 3.7 per cent. Metro mayors in Manchester, Liverpool, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire – all of them Labour incumbents in Labour-leaning areas like London – secured much larger vote shares than Sadiq Khan achieved in London. Andy Burnham in Manchester received 63 per cent of all votes cast (a lead of 50 percentage points over his Conservative challenger) whilst Steve Rotherham in Liverpool got the support of 68 per cent of the electorate (a lead of nearly 58 percentage points over the Conservatives).
Taken with the result of Thursday’s voting across the rest of the country, the picture for the Tory Party is unequivocally a disaster overall. Even viewing the London contest in isolation, the results are bad for the Conservatives. Really bad. The party lost the London Assembly constituencies of West Central and South West, both of which the party had previously held since 2000 when the Assembly was first created. In fact, in the South West seat, the Conservatives fell from first place to third place. Overall, the number of Conservative Assembly Members fell by just one to eight AMs – but this modest reduction conceals a worrying trend. Eight is the smallest the Conservative Group has ever shrunk to – equalling the previous all-time-low achieved in 2016. This year the Conservatives only won three of the 14 constituency seats on the Assembly, securing the rest of their seats from the London-wide top-up list. (It is an idiosyncrasy of the London Assembly’s additional member voting system that parties that lose constituency seats often pick up London-wide seats as compensation).
In 2008 – the Conservatives best results since the London Authority was created – the party won 11 seats, and eight of these were constituency seats. The steady and pronounced decline of the party’s ability to win first-past-the-post contests on the assembly mirrors its decline in winning in the London boroughs (the Conservatives currently control just five of London’s 32 local authorities) and bodes ill for the party’s ability to hold parliamentary seats across London in a general election later this year. (Of the 73 parliamentary seats in London, the Conservatives hold just 20, compared to Labour’s 46).
Given this trend, did anyone really think Khan was going to lose the mayoralty? Whilst Sadiq Khan managed to underperform electorally, he clearly succeeded in manipulating expectations. It is accurate to say that Khan’s win in London is “historic” and “unprecedented”. He is the first Mayor to secure a third term in office. (Ken Livingstone tried for a third term not once but twice and lost to Boris Johnson both times). But it is interesting that terms like “landslide” and “rout” are not being applied to Khan’s win, not even by the Labour echo chamber.
There are clear and pressing lessons that the Conservatives need to take from the London elections. In future, the party needs to select a stronger candidate with a higher profile – and it needs to select that candidate much earlier in the election cycle. All credit to Susan Hall – despite securing the Conservatives’ lowest share of the vote in a mayoral contest since 2004, she performed much better than the party had any right to expect, especially the lack of effort and energy that CCHQ put in to supporting her. But why did London Minister Paul Scully not make the shortlist? Why wasn’t a current or former Cabinet Minister willing to run? Boris Johnson demonstrated what can be achieved when a political big beast is willing to stand for Mayor – and proved that doing so benefits not just the party but also the individual. Being Mayor of London is the biggest job in British politics outside the traditional Great Offices of State – the party’s top talent should be falling over themselves to run.
For far too long the Conservative Party has ignored the capital and shrugged off poor performances in elections at all levels. The party can, should and must do better in London. Otherwise, in 2028, Sadiq Khan may well be celebrating another historic, unprecedented victory in London – and claims that ‘it wasn’t even close’ will be based on more than just bluff and bluster.
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Author: James Ford
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