Reform UK appears to be struggling to recruit enough candidates to contest every electoral ward in the London borough elections, with just over three weeks left for nominations to be submitted.
The party took out a full-page advertisement in the Metro newspaper urging “new people with new ideas” to come forward and “represent their local community” on 7 May.
This follows a national email appeal for council candidates from party leader Nigel Farage to supporters earlier this month, and has been accompanied by emails from Reform’s Regional Director for London, Richard Bingley, to people on the party’s mailing list, tailored to the borough where they live.
There are 679 electoral wards in the 32 boroughs and Reform has previously pledged to contest every one of them, though it has not said how many of its candidates will stand in each. A total of 1,817 seats will be competed for, with more than half of the wards returning three councillors.
The deadline for candidate nominations is 9 April at 4pm.
It is to be expected that Reform will find it easier to recruit in boroughs where they stand a chance of winning seats and even council control, such as Bexley, Havering, Bromley and Barking & Dagenham, but much harder in Left-leaning inner London boroughs such as Islington, Camden, Hackney, Southwark or Lambeth where far-Right parties have attracted negligible support in the recent past.
Farage has insisted that the vetting of candidates everywhere will be improved compared with its “poor” standard in the past.
Refrom’s Metro newspaper ad claims that “Momentum is firmly with Reform UK” and the borough-level email states that Reform is “soaring in the polls”. However, although the party has been consistently ahead in national surveys for a year, the average findings of seven different polling companies have shown a decline in support for it since the autumn.
Polls of London voters continue to show Labour ahead, but by a reduced margin, with Reform, the Conservatives and the Greens jostling for second place and the Liberal Democrats fourth.
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