The announcement by James Cleverly that he hopes to become the Conservative candidate for Mayor in 2028 has dominated discussion of his party’s hopes of winning. That is unsurprising: Cleverly is the high-profile figure some London Tories have long been hoping would step forward. Until recently a very senior national government minister, and before that a member of the London Assembly, he has obvious strengths as a candidate.
But he also has weaknesses opponents could exploit. Meanwhile, the Tories, as the borough elections showed, continue to be unpopular in the capital. To persuade Londoners to give them a second look, they need to present a quite different sort of Conservatism to that being offered at national level by Kemi Badenoch and her front bench.
That will be a difficult job. A good way for the Tories to start would be ensuring they have a proper contest to choose their candidate with an open, honest and serious debate about how best to strike a chord with Londoners who might be receptive to a change after 12 years of a Labour bossing City Hall. Festus Akinbusoye would like to be a part of it.
THE PERSON
He was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1978 and came to live in London when he was 13. He arrived with his mother and his twin sister. His late father, a state-level politician and businessman, had settled in the UK capital a few years earlier, having decided that a Nigeria run by the army after its latest military coup was not for him. Thirty-five years on, his son has created a successful business and served as Bedfordshire’s police and crime commissioner (PCC). In May, he became a member of Westminster City Council.
The time in between has been eventful. “We had a pretty good life in Nigeria,” Akinbusoye tells me when we meet in the lounge of the Corinthia Hotel near Charing Cross. “We had chauffeurs, we had a maid, we had a pretty big house.” His son’s assumption was that his father had enjoying similar comforts in the UK capital. Not so. Awaiting him was “a two-bedroom flat above a textile factory in Upton Park”. One of the two rooms was already occupied by a family of four. A peripatetic two-year spell in temporary accommodation followed: Bromley-by-Bow, Plaistow, even a B&B in Earl’s Court before Newham provided the family with a council flat in Canning Town.
London was revelatory in more ways than one: “I thought, ‘look at all these white people!'” In Nigeria, one of his teachers was a white British woman. “She was lovely,” Akinbusoye recalls, “so I thought all white people were angels until I was chased by National Front guys in Beckton and I got the ‘n’ word for the first time.”
Throughout his London teens, Akinbusoye attended St Paul’s Way school, at that time a local authority comprehensive, in Bow Common. He describes his homelessness period as “a shock to the system” and “deeply destabilising”, but pays tribute to his parents for their example of resilience and their readiness to, as he puts it, “see the good that this country has got to offer, despite its problems.” This attitude, he stresses, has stayed with him.
He remembers getting his first job, age 15, working in the summer holidays for a fellow member of his church who had a construction company. Later, he struck out on his own, doing painting and decorating for people he knew and at one point on a Canary Wharf tower. “I’ve always been a self-starter in business,” he says.
His post-school education journey takes in City of Westminster College, the London College of Printing and Distributive Trades and a masters in international studies and diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies. At university, he played basketball to a professional level for a team called Watford Royals, later to become the London Lions.
While still living in the family council house in Canning Town, he worked as a waiter (“My dad was like, ‘you’re not sitting around my house doing nothing, Festus’”) before starting a company supplying security for a cinema in Wood Green. But when he took his business plan to banks he was repeatedly turned down. On one occasion, in the Square Mile, he was told, “I’m sorry Festus, we don’t do business with people from your postcode.” In the end, he got financial support from the Prince’s Trust. The business is still going.
Akinbusoye – pronounced Akin-boo-so-yay in case, like me, you didn’t know – has four children. He has revealed in articles elsewhere that while also running his business and being a PCC, he raised three of them, two boys and a girl, as a single parent, with the youngest aged just two when he became their primary carer. “I have been mum and dad for the best part of about 15 years,” he says. “We’ve been through a lot.” The circumstances that led to his shouldering that responsibility are not dwelt on. What is plain, however, is that Akinbusoye is proud of the young adults those children have become.
“My experience as a single dad has shaped who I am, and my politics,” he says. “It’s shaped my attitude to family. It’s shaped my absolute soft spot for children, and safeguarding and protecting and providing for them. If politics is not helping to make their homes better, it is not worth doing.” A second marriage produced a fourth child, another boy, but the marital relationship didn’t last. Akinbusoye says he keeps in regular touch with his youngest, now aged eleven and living with his mother in the United States.
Having moved to Milton Keynes in order to be able to buy a home, he became a parliamentary assistant to three local Conservative MPs and chaired Milton Keynes Conservatives. In 2015, revisiting his east London roots, he contested the rock-solid Labour West Ham constituency. Becoming Bedfordshire’s (PCC) in 2021 was his first taste of electoral success.
In 2023, he defended the Mid-Bedfordshire parliamentary seat for the Tories after Nadine Dorries vacated it, but became a by-election victim of Labour’s then-rising tide. The following year, he failed to secure re-election as Bedfordshire’s PCC. But his appetite for office remained. With his older children self-sufficient, he returned to London and made a home in St John’s Wood. He won his council seat in Abbey Wood ward, defeating a former Tory councillor who had defected to Reform UK.
His energetic pitch to be the Tory candidate for London Mayor has included commissioning an opinion poll about mayoral voting intentions which found that, in the polling company’s words, “a Conservative candidate from outside the political establishment could have particular appeal” and that one who had “run a successful business” and “experience tackling crime and policing” might be looked on favourably by London voters.
The poll prompted a terse rebuke from the well-connected Conservative Home. At that stage, James Cleverly, whose credentials as a former home and foreign secretary would qualify him in many eyes as a political establishment figure, had yet to make public his interest in running for Mayor. There had, though, been a strong revival of the long-recurring rumours that he might fancy the job. Another contrast between the two men that the poll did not implicitly explore was their respective attitudes to Europe: in the 2016 referendum, Akinbusoye voted to remain in the European Union; Cleverly was a firm backer of Brexit.
THE POLICIES
Unsurprisingly, Akinbusoye’s personal experiences as a Londoner, both as a child and a young adult, influence his thinking about the key London issue of housing. That doesn’t mean he isn’t broadly aligned with many Conservative criticisms of Sadiq Khan’s planning policies, an area where London’s Mayors have considerable powers for shaping the landscape for building homes and everything else.
He has grouped his ideas for increasing supply and affordability under what he calls “a London yes plan” (shown below). This includes making responses to consultations on housing schemes more representative of local people rather than being (in his words) “self-selecting” as now, and supporting leaseholders involved in disputes with managers (including with asserting their “right to manage“).
He also advocates a more flexible and collaborative approach to working with the development sector. This would entail creating a City Hall unit for unblocking stalled sites and negotiating “affordable” homes requirements on a case by case basis, an approach recalling that of Sir Edward Lister, who was in charge of planning for much of Boris Johnson’s time as Mayor. It would be a significant break with the model favoured by Mayor Khan, whereby schemes meeting a set affordable “threshold” are put on a fast track to City Hall approval and those falling short are taken aside for a viability grilling.
Akinbusoye would make different use of the social and affordable homes funding provided by national government, too. He is pledging to “simplify” the allocation of grants to housing associations and councils and to “measure success by homes delivered”. And he would replace Mayor Khan’s London Living Rent tenure, designed to help renters move towards home ownership, with one he calls Rent To Save. What would the difference be?
London Living Rent levels are set below local market rates, making it easier for renters to save for the deposits they need in order move out of renting and into Shared Ownership. Akinbusoye is blunt: “That’s not happening,” he says. But revised as Rent To Save, it would have to. “There would be a 20-60-20 model,” he says. “The renter would get a 20 per cent discount, below market rate, the developer would would keep 60 per cent as revenue, and the remaining 20 per cent would be saved in a low risk investment account on the renter’s behalf rather than given to them as is currently the case.”
This would be for a four or five year period, generating interest throughout. “At the end of that period, you would get your lump sum, and then use it towards buying, perhaps in a different affordable development, and someone else can move in [to the Rent To Save rental home],” he explains. People who chose not to do that would not be evicted, but neither would the money they had put aside be theirs. Instead, it would be spent on other affordable housing schemes. Their discounted rent would continue.
It is Akinbusoye’s different, perhaps more stringent, alternative to one of Khan’s “affordable” policies designed to help those many households that will never be poor enough to qualify for a social rented home yet cannot afford to buy a home either. “The bottom line is that we can’t have a situation where people are making £60-£70,000 a year and they can’t afford to buy anything in London because all of their money goes on rent,” he says.
London Living Rent homes are currently built by a mixture of housing associations, councils and private developers. Akinbusoye would seek to incentivise private sector involvement by providing some grant funding and allowing the developer to be the landlord too. Encouraging more building for private rent in general would be an aspiration, “because that is often the exit from living with mum and dad”. Even so, he underlines, the big question for that group of Londoners remains “what next?” At Conservative Home he has written more about the difficulties of those he has dubbed the Crushed Middle.
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As a former police and crime commissioner, albeit outside the capital, where he also served as a Special Constable, Akinbusoye’s views on how he would handle the broadly equivalent powers and responsibilities that come with being Mayor of London are of obvious interest. He aspires to increasing the number of warranted officer from its current 31,000 to 40,000 and bringing back borough command units in place of the larger basic command units. Asked to set out how he would make the Met a better organisation, he began by talking about how the people employed by it are feeling.
“The Metropolitan Police is an employer of something like 50,000 people,” he says. “What is the morale of people in those jobs? If people are happy, they can’t wait to get to work in the morning.” He wonders if the damning Louise Casey Review into standards of behaviour and the internal culture of the Met, published in 2023, has had some adverse consequences.
He says it contained “some good elements” and is glad the Met has got rid of clearly unsuitable people. But he questions “some of the approaches the Met has taken in dealing with its own officers”, asking, for example, “if you made a joke that was not malicious, it just came out the wrong way, should that lead to a sacking?” Might it better if, say, a sergeant told such an individual, if he or she is essentially a good officer, “you’ve been an idiot” and gave them a chance to stop being one in future?
Akinbusoye is confident that “the vast majority of police officers want to do a good job” and despairs that their best work gets very little media coverage. As Mayor, he says he would demonstrate appreciation for this in person. “How much time does the [current] Mayor spend talking with frontline officers?’ he asks. “You can’t just rely on what the Commissioner tells you. As Mayor, you’re the chairman of the board. A chairman of a FTSE 100 company who does not know what’s happening in the factory is not going to be a very good one. If you just rely on what the chief exec tells you, you’re going to fail. Direct engagement with your team is very important.”
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A recent opinion poll suggested that Londoners think Sadiq Khan has done quite well on transport, as Akinbusoye acknowledges. But is not alone in being worried about the decline of capital’s bus service. “If you live in outer London that is not good news for you,” he says. “If you live in Bromley, if you live in Surbiton, if you live in parts of Bexley or Havering, being able to get buses if, for example, you work in a pub at night and don’t have a car, it’s a real challenge. I don’t think the Mayor’s really done a good enough job in prioritising that.” For Akinbusoye, the Super Loop initiative doesn’t go far enough.
He opposed Khan’s expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone to the whole of Greater London, but, significantly, says he doesn’t intend to make the issue “a big part of my campaign”. This is quite striking in view of Cleverly already saying he would “review” the zone if he became Mayor. However, Akinbusoye sticks to his argument that, “from a moral point of view” it is wrong penalise those Londoners whose vehicles fall short of ULEZ standards when public transport is less plentiful.
He takes a dim view of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods too. These are almost entirely on borough-controlled residential streets, meaning no Mayor would have direct power over them. However, some are supported by Transport for London funding which falls into City Hall’s domain. Akinbusoye’s case against LTNs is that they have grown from a well-intentioned environmental experiment into a measure that displaces traffic and its attendant noise and pollution from affluent neighbourhoods on to streets where poorer people are more likely to live, adding to congestion in the process.
Akinbusoye is big on cycling, describing it as a “passion”, but he has misgivings about some of the provision being made for it on roads and is unhappy about the behaviour of many cyclists. “I think it’s important that we have a safe place for cyclists to use the road,” he says, “but unfortunately some of the people who are causing the problems are cyclists, who do not stop at traffic lights, who hit pedestrians who are trying to cross. Somehow we have created this anger that is brewing on our roads, this battle between motorists and cyclists, which I don’t think is necessary.”
He is also extremely critical of the bus stop bypasses, also known as floating bus stops, that have become controversial features of many London streets. “They need to go,” he says, underling how problematic they are “if you are a disabled person, if you are an elderly person, if you are a blind person”.
He has doubts, too, about some other bike lane implementations, such as when both sides of a street have one allowing two-way travel. “I’ve ridden in a peloton,” he says. “We didn’t take up that much space.” As for dockless hire bikes, he describes them as “a massive nightmare” in Westminster and, like others, is frustrated by policy inconsistency across the boroughs. The number of injuries to riders and others bothers him too: “I am really concerned about the rapid growth in this, and it being out of control”.
THE CONSERVATIVES AND THE VOTERS
It’s been reported that four of the Conservatives’ meagre total of nine London MPs have already given their backing to James Cleverly, along with a number of local Tory leaders. Akinbusoye, however, continues to maintain that he would be the “fresh face” needed to strengthen his party’s chances at the next mayoral election. While going out of his way to criticise no individuals, he describes himself as “somebody who is not tarred by the history of the party” and has “a new story of Conservatism to tell Londoners”.
Characterising himself as “not massively dogmatic” or “ideological”, he thinks his values “align relatively well with London overall, whether it’s on business, whether it’s on fairness, whether it’s on the environment or housing, education or family”. He expresses deep concern that the country has become “so divided on partisan lines”, arguing that “we need leaders who can actually build bridges”. He is not, he says, “wedded to this idea that anybody who needs the help of the state is feckless and useless”. A politician’s job, in his view, is to “try to create an optimal environment for people to be able to realise their potential”.
Such sentiments might prompt Londoners who have forsaken Conservatism in Richmond, Kingston, Hammersmith & Fulham and also Wandsworth and Westminster – which despite the party’s comebacks in the those boroughs in May, have become marginals – to look more favourably on the party again. Yet at a national level, the strident, post-Brexit nationalism and Farage-like culture warring that has been putting such Londoners off continues.
This has been personified by London MP and shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, who for 18 months has been claiming that large numbers of British people living in social housing in London are “foreign” or somehow not really British, thereby implying that immigrants are to blame for social housing shortages. Historically, Akinbusoye and his family would, of course, have been among Philp’s targets.
Akinbusoye, understandably, declines to rebuke Philp for these tactics and mentions having had a good relationship with the Croydon South MP when he was policing minister in the last Conservative government. His broad view of social housing, not shared by all Conservatives, is that it is needed – “It helped me to get to where I am today, and I’m grateful for that” – but he also makes the general observation that borough allocation systems can generate resentments.
Bridge-building may not be easy, given the polarised mood of voters Akinbusoye is well aware of. But he is under no illusions that a Conservative cannot win the mayoralty without doing it, and he believes he is well-equipped to succeed – to reach across the the sharply-drawn line between the large majority of Greater London voters who prefer liberal-Left politicians and the minority who lean to the Right.
“I think I’m the kind of Conservative who those people you’re talking about would want to listen to,” he says. “This is about a candidate who can go into any part of London to get votes. Just resorting to our core voting block is not going to be enough.”
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