Many Conservative activists in London will be excited by Sir James Cleverly’s announcement that he has resigned from Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet with the aim of become his party’s candidate for Mayor of London in 2028 – and, of course, winning the mayoralty itself. And who can blame them?
Cleverly is the “big name” some London Tories have been longing for, reasoning, with good cause, that having a candidate much of London’s electorate have already heard of is essential.
In recent years, Cleverly, has been Secretary of State for Education, then Foreign Secretary, then Home Secretary. He also has long experience at City Hall, having been a member of the London Assembly from 2008 until 2016 and an aide to Boris Johnson during that time (the photo captures how he looked during those years).
On top of that, Cleverly was born, mostly raised and educated in London and has a likeable public persona. He is likeable as an individual too: I covered both of Johnson’s terms as Mayor when I was writing for the Guardian, and always found him pleasant to deal with.
All these are obvious strengths and surely make Cleverly a strong favourite to secure his party’s nomination. But even so, he would probably not be the favourite to win the mayoral election and neither would any other Tory candidate, regardless who was running for Labour or any other party.
Why? Because in Greater London, the odds are almost always stacked against candidates from the Right of the political spectrum.
The On London guides to the mayoral races of 2021 (the one delayed from 2020 because of the pandemic) and 2024 set out why a Labour candidate can always be expected to win the mayoralty if the following three conditions apply:
- Labour isn’t running hugely behind the Tories in national polls.
- The Labour candidate inspires a normal or better Labour voter turnout.
- The Tory candidate has limited appeal beyond the Tory core.
These insights (for which credit is due to my guide co-author Lewis Baston rather than me) help explain why Sir Sadiq Khan completed his hat trick 2024 and why, as things stand, either he or any another Labour candidate will be difficult for anyone to beat 18 months from now.
It is useful to look back to the only two mayoral elections a Conservative has won – those of 2008 and 2012, when Johnson was victorious.
In 2008, Johnson’s Labour opponent, Ken Livingstone, fell short because conditions 1 and 3 were not met: Labour was behind in national polls and Johnson, a huge and popular celebrity at that time, attracted voters who didn’t usually vote Tory.
In 2012, Livingstone again failed to beat Johnson, this time because conditions 2 and 3 were not met: Labour was more popular than the Tories nationally by this time (they were recovering from their 2010 general election defeat), but what was called the “Boris bonus” still existed and Livingstone turned out less support than Londonwide Labour Assembly candidates on the day.
Will any of the three conditions making a Labour win to be expected not apply in 2028?
As things stand, condition 1 looks highly likely to be met. Labour isn’t running behind the Tories nationally at all, but a few percentage points ahead of them. Furthermore, a recent poll by Savanta for the Mile End Institute found that 33 per cent of Londoners would vote for Labour’s candidate at the next mayoral election compared with just 18 per cent who said they’d vote for a Conservative candidate.
Gallingly for the Tories, they were outscored by Reform UK, favoured by 20 per cent of respondents. This follows Labour, despite its heavy losses, still winning the largest vote share at May’s borough elections: 25.6 per cent compared with Tories’ 20. In short, Cleverly’s party is trailing Labour both nationally and in the capital.
What about conditions 2 and 3? These are trickier to judge and perhaps give Tories some grounds for hope that in 18 months time they won’t apply.
Condition 2 raises the unanswered question about whether or not Khan will seek to win a fourth term. A recent YouGov poll found that 56 per cent Londoners think he shouldn’t, including almost a third of those who voted for him in 2024.
Is there a danger for Labour that some of their less committed supporters would sit on their hands if invited to vote Khan yet again, as they did when Livingstone ran – incidentally, for his fourth time – in 2012? On the other hand, Khan’s favourability score wasn’t bad and was virtually unchanged from just before the 2024 mayoral election. By that measure, he is holding up quite well.
If he doesn’t stand again, Labour’s new candidate will need to be able to mobilise party supporters and not provide the more half-hearted with a reason for opting out or even looking elsewhere. Would the party’s London membership select such a candidate? It’s a very hypothetical question. All told, London Tories can have reasonable hopes that condition 2 for a Labour mayoral win won’t be met in 2028. At the same time, maybe they shouldn’t get carried away.
As for condition 3, that is related to condition 2 in the sense that if some erstwhile Labour voters get cold feet in 2028, they might turn elsewhere. We saw this in 2008, manifested in a particular way: post-election research for Labour by Ipsos found that significant numbers of white working-class Londoners voted for Johnson having not voted Tory in the past (essentially, the whiter the working-class ward, the greater support for Johnson was).
With Reform now a factor, even though that party fell far short of what it hoped for in the borough contests, perhaps the Tories will be tempted to compete for the 13 per cent share they ended up with. But arguably of greater electoral significance now are formerly Conservative-voting Londoners who have been put off by the party’s increasingly strident embrace of populist nationalism since the EU referendum.
It is a trend that does a lot to explain why the Tories have been electorally obliterated in Richmond and Kingston by the Liberal Democrats, stuck in opposition to Labour in Hammersmith & Fulham, and are no longer dominant in Westminster or Wandsworth, despite their comebacks in those boroughs in May.
Could Cleverly connect with some of those kinds of lost Tory voters and bring them back into the fold? Again, perhaps his party shouldn’t get its hopes up too high.
London has not been exempt from the big shifts in the national political landscape that have taken place since the general election, with the respective rises of the Greens and Reform altering the political calculus in the capital too.
But behind this proliferation, elections experts have detected a sharper broad polarisation among voters than used to be the norm, with shifts of affiliation being largely from one liberal-Left party (Labour, Green, Lib Dem) or one right-wing party (Conservative, Reform) to another, rather than swings from one side of the Left-Right divide to the other. That makes the task of closing the gap still harder for the Tories.
The return in 2028 of the supplementary vote electoral system, with its second preference mayoral vote option, will add to the range of choices available to London voters compared to 2024. Will that make any difference?
It is easy to overstate the importance of second preferences to mayoral elections outcomes. No winning candidate has owed his success to them, with first preference leads always decisive. But if anything the restoration of SV will help Labour most, as it can expect those from the other parts of the larger Left bloc who cast a second preference vote, essentially whose first preference was the Green or the Lib Dem, to weight in on its side rather than help out the Tory.
In London, however you slice and dice it, the “Left bloc” of voters decisively outnumbers the “Right bloc”. As yet, that shows no sign of changing. Consolidating the Right bloc will not be enough for the Tory candidate. He or she will have to transcend those bloc divisions to prevail.
Could Cleverly do it? His affable demeanour, so different from those of fellow Tories with London links such as Badenoch and Chris Philp, might suggest liberal leanings. His track record, though, does not.
On economic issues has has always been bone dry, firmly wedded to the view that self-interest is the natural human condition and therefore shouldn’t be inhibited. His personal website, if memory serves, used to feature footage of Milton Friedman, icon of the so-called Chicago school of free market economics, espousing the virtues of greed. He backed Brexit. Critics are already seizing on his wanting Liz Truss to lead the Tories in 2022.
At City Hall, Cleverly remained a Congestion Charge sceptic long after Johnson had accepted that the central zone (though not Livingstone’s short-lived western extension) should stay. An army reserve officer, in the wake of the 2011 London riots he spoke of policing in quasi-military terms, focusing on maximising “surge capacity”.
In 2023, as Home Secretary, he travelled to Rwanda to sign the controversial treaty for deporting asylum-seekers who had arrived in Britain using unauthorised routes. The following year, running for the Tory leadership following Labour’s general election win, he said he would bring it back, given the chance. As Badenoch’s shadow housing minister, he has criticised the Renters’ Rights Act.
This is not the c.v. of a centrist. Labour would make sure everyone knew it. And while it is true that Johnson carried baggage Labour tried to exploit without success, Cleverly, for all his profile and charm, is not a star of the “Boris” variety. For that same reason, it might be hard for him to reach nominally Labour voters as effectively as Johnson did in 2008.
Could Cleverly plausibly present himself as a soft-Right figure, even if so inclined? Would he be willing or able to distance himself from his party’s dogged determination to follow where Nigel Farage leads? Would a different Tory candidate, even if less-known, be better equipped for such exacting tasks?
A lot can and – the way things have been in British politics lately – very possibly will change in the next 18 months. But whether they do or don’t, London’s Conservatives, ordinary members and election strategists alike, still have plenty to think about if a Tory is to win in 2028, even though the party now has the big name potential candidate they have craved.
Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky and at LinkedIn. Photo of James Cleverly from Greater London Authority.
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