As the Standard has reported, Kemi Badenoch has given the go-ahead for a selection panel to compile a shortlist of contenders to be the Conservative candidate for the next mayoral election in May, 2028. The deadline for applications has since been confirmed as noon on Wednesday of this week. How long will the shortlist be? And how productive will the Tory debate be about why the party has become so unpopular in London and what it must do for that to change?
There is now the potential for a trio of experienced hopefuls to make their cases to party members in the capital and – of vital importance – to the London electorate as a whole.
Alex Challoner, founder of the Cavendish Communications consultancy and a past party adviser, has now joined Braintree MP, ex-senior government minister and London Assembly member James Cleverly, and Westminster councillor and erstwhile Bedfordshire police and crime commissioner Festus Akinbusoye in seeking the Conservative nomination.
“We will not win by doing what we’ve always done and saying what we’ve always said,” Challoner’s campaign website says. His topline pledge is to “unleash London’s full potential” by deploying officers of the British Transport Police at London Underground stations to combat fare-dodging, by producing a London Plan – the capital’s master planning document – of “no more than 30 pages” to facilitate home building, and by using City Hall funds for a “mayoral rebate” of Value Added Tax paid by members of some London gymnasiums and breweries.
VAT rates are set by national governments not London Mayors, but it is understood that Challoner would lobby for VAT paid on membership of private gyms to be dropped, bringing them into line with those of local authority gyms, and would make City Hall funds available for members of private gyms to effectively reclaim the VAT they’ve paid, up to a certain level. A similar “rebate” arrangement would be made for independent breweries.
Challoner’s argument is that drawing on the mayoral budget to effectively cut the cost of some private gym memberships would be of particular benefit to the mental health of men, as gyms are places where they feel freer to share and discuss problems. Using the same policy to assist independent brewers would, his campaign team says, result in lower beer prices, which would help the capital’s night-time economy.
A public consultation is taking place on a draft new London Plan under Sadiq Khan (closing date, 15 October), which his administration is describing as more “streamlined” than the current one, but Challoner would like to go much further.
Challoner began his career as a regional BBC journalist, was an adviser to the Tories in the 1990s and worked on the campaign of Steve Norris in the very first mayoral election contest, which took place in 2000 and was won by Ken Livingstone. In July 2024, Challoner and ex-Wimbledon Tory MP Stephen Hammond set up the London Vision Network to fund and commission polling and data-gathering with a view to informing Tory campaigning in the capital.
He has attempted to become his party’s mayoral candidate before. Hoping to run in 2024, he set out policy proposals that included setting up five new mayoral development corporations to boost homebuilding, more Tube automation and increasing the numbers of neighbourhood police officers. But he was not put on a shortlist of three who went on to take part in a sometimes hapless selection process that saw one of the trio drop out and resulted in the much-mocked and criticised campaign of Susan Hall, which fell well short of preventing Khan winning for a third time in a row in May 2024.
There had been murmurs that Cleverly would be anointed Tory candidate, without having to win the support of party members in the capital. It can surely only be good for the Tories that such a coronation has been ruled out, but the Standard has reported that the party would prefer a shortlist of just two – an outcome that would limit the potential benefit to them of a wide-ranging and honest debate about why most Londoners don’t support them.
Read my interview with Festus Akinbusoye here and Jim Waterston’s with James Cleverly here.
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