Having covered every London Mayor election campaign since 2008, I found much of the vowing and pledging at Wednesday’s unveiling of Reform UK’s entry for the next race for City Hall rather familiar. On transport policy, policing and crime, and in their confident assertions that they are more in touch with the desires of Londoners than is Sir Sadiq Khan, both candidate Laila Cunningham and party leader Nigel Farage sounded a lot like the last two Conservatives to have a go at beating him.
That they failed was attributed by Farage to those Tories being imperfect candidates who received far too little backing from their parties nationally. Reform, he assured the gathered national media, would do better than that. Cunningham (pictured), he said, was now “the head of Reform UK in London” and he explained that her early selection for a ballot that won’t take place until May 2028 demonstrated Reform’s intention to make this May’s borough elections “a referendum” on the direction the capital is taking.
Cunningham herself spoke directly to Reform’s self-image as the true Voice of the People, dismissing the Tories as irrelevant and describing the 7 May votes as “the first step to reclaiming our city” from Mayor Khan and a chance for Londoners to “vote out every councillor who’s propped him up” and end the Labour-Tory “status quo”.
Then she was into the crime-and-decline narrative we’ve been hearing non-stop from all parts of the populist Right in recent years – including, of course, Farage’s friend and ally Donald Trump – and reminiscing about the London of her 1980s and 1990s youth, depicting it as a lost golden age. Statistics were offered to bolster this account – we’ll get back to those another time – along with individual stories of having to tackle street criminals herself. “This is the London Sadiq Khan has created,” she said.
Cunningham raged on this theme at length, claiming incorrectly that the Mayor appoints the Met Commissioner (it’s the home secretary who does that, while “having regard” to the Mayor’s view) and promising that under a Mayor Cunningham there would be “zero, I mean zero, tolerance of crime” thanks to “visible policing” under “a new sheriff in town” who would be “launching an all-out war on crime”. And woe betide anyone in the Met who didn’t get with the project. For them, there would be a “serious reckoning”.
Transport for London, too, would face her wrath – that is to say, the transport unions would. “If that means automating the trains, that is exactly what I’ll do,” she said. She would also liberate motorists, saying she would scrap the entire Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which she called “a tax on driving to work”. As the “war on crime” began, the “war on motorists” would end. She also said she would liberate them from traffic, but not how.
Having further embellished her picture of London as a city consumed by fear, she asked her audience to imagine it being “restored to its former glory” and having “our flag flown proudly” everywhere “as a symbol of our British pride”. Nostalgia for a better London deemed “lost” is a defining characteristic of populist Right narratives.
Cunningham then revealed that she would be compiling “the most serious, detailed plan for London that any party has produced” by going “borough to borough, estate to estate, high street to high street, listening to Londoners” and “young people like my children who feel they’ve been pushed out of their own city”. This would be about “the survival of our city,” she said, and the next mayoral election “a binary choice – Khan v Cunningham”.
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE
Most of this was hard to distinguish from what the Conservatives have been saying year in, year out, except for being slightly more extreme.
In saying she would she would scrap the ULEZ in its entirety because it is “too expensive to drive to go shopping, and that’s why people aren’t going out” she went further than the last Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, who made abolishing the second expansion of the ULEZ a flagship element of her campaign in 2024, but never advocated doing away with the scheme in its original form – which, though implemented by Khan, was devised under Boris Johnson and covered the central London Congestion Charge zone only. And she dropped her initial opposition to its first expansion, which took the ULEZ boundary out to the North and South Circular roads.
Since her defeat by Khan, Hall has cultivated an even more conspicuous populist Right profile, continuing to use social media to applaud venomous cultural nationalists such as Rupert Lowe MP, whom Reform have disowned, and competing with one of the London Assembly’s two Reform members over who can sport the most ostentatious Union Jack wardrobe accessory. When running for Mayor, though, she did not advocate Union Jacks being flown all over town.
Fully automating London Underground trains on the grounds that this would destroy the power of the tube unions is another ambition Conservatives have been expressing for a long time. And on crime and policing Hall and Cunningham are very hard to distinguish, at least at first glance.
Both of them insist that the capital is being engulfed by a “crime wave” that Khan could get the Met to end but can’t be bothered. Recent falls in Met-recorded crime levels of homicide and in other categories of offending have not impressed them. However, while calling for more police officers on the streets, Hall did not explicitly advocate so-called zero tolerance policing methods.
Farage is as big on this as Cunningham. Interviewed by the Daily Mail over Christmas, he invoked the approach of the New York Police Department when Republican Rudolph Giuliani was Mayor of that city between 1994 and 2001. And at Wednesday’s press conference he expanded on this.
Recalling his years working in New York, he said, “you wouldn’t dare leave a bar or restaurant until you saw the car ready on the side of the road”. And yet, he continued, “after two terms of Rudi Giuliani, New York had become one of the safest cities in America, all done by one man – one man’s drive and determination”.
SPOT THE PROBLEMS
There are three obvious objections to the policy positions Cunningham and Farage set out: one is that the new messenger is delivering old news that not enough Londoners have wanted to buy in the recent past; another is that some of them would be very hard to implement; a third is that there is evidence suggesting some of them might not work.
Hall’s furious opposition to the second ULEZ enlargement always looked disproportionate in a city where nearly half of all households don’t even have a car and where, even two years ago, only a minority of those that did were going to be hit by the daily air quality charge. Nevertheless, she appeared to believe pundits who predicted a massive suburban uprising against it.
In the event, there was a small swing towards Khan in nearly all of the London Assembly areas newly affected, and the number of non-compliant vehicles is reducing all the time. Have Cunningham and Farage noticed how serious Hall’s misjudgement was?
The Tories have been demanding more automated “driverless” trains for years. Consideration of them at TfL has been going on for just as long, as has the large financial cost of bringing them in. In 2020, accountants KPMG put the price of such a change at £7 billion and said it represented poor value for money. A year or so ago, a figure of around £20 billion was put on making the change to just three of the older lines (Bakerloo, Central and Piccadilly). The government’s latest lump of capital funding for TfL totalled £2.2 billion over four years. Where would Cunningham get the money she’d need?
It isn’t just about rolling stock, it’s about new platforms, signalling and more. It’s also about staff. Farage on Wednesday made the classic false comparison with the Docklands Light Railway, which is fully-automated. But it also has Passenger Service Agents on board to manage the doors, operate the train manually if required and help in emergencies – pretty much what tube “drivers” do.
Unlike those of newer metros in other cities, the old, deep level tube tunnels are very narrow, making exiting a stricken train outside a station difficult. Trains on most tube lines are already “driven” by computer software, and much tube-related industrial action is by station staff, not “drivers” anyway. The DLR is also affected by strikes.
Boris Johnson, who would later never cease demanding “driverless trains”, told a Tory AM way back in 2010 that although Underground trains with no one in a cab at the front looked to be a future possibility, that was “a long day’s march from saying there is going to be nobody on the train”. It still is.
There have been numerous studies of what the NYPD did under Giuliani and numerous challenges to the claim that a “zero tolerance” approach to minor street offending and disorder based on “broken windows theory” led to a “crime miracle” in New York.
The term “zero tolerance” has been rejected by Bill Bratton, who was NYPD Commissioner for Giuliani’s first two years, as an accurate description of his philosophy, and a College of Policing review of the evidence found that aggressive order maintenance under the “zero tolerance” banner does not, of itself, reduce crime. Farage either doesn’t know about these things or doesn’t care. Perhaps he should get out of his car more.
WHAT ARE THEIR CHANCES?
A new opinion poll, released today, shows Labour well ahead in the not-yet-started 2028 race for City Hall. The party is backed by 32 per cent of London voters, with the Conservatives second on 20 per cent and Reform on 19. The Greens are fourth on 13 per cent and the Liberal Democrats fifth on 11.
The poll was of party preferences, with no individual candidates named. Cunningham and Farage took it as read that Khan will seek a fourth term in 2028. However, although he stated an “intention” to back in September, this should probably not be taken as a guarantee.
Another factor in the speculation equation is the coming return of the second preference vote, so unscrupulously abolished by the Tory government for 2024. This makes the new poll look even better for Labour, as the centre-and-Left voter bloc (Labour, Green, Lib Dems) commands a 56 per cent share, and the Right bloc (Tories and Reform) just 39.
Who will lead the field on the Right, the Tories or Reform? Will supporters of each give their second preferences to the candidate of the other, or will it be more messy than that? Cunningham’s making Susan Hall look like Roy Jenkins could leave the Tories with an interesting decision. Should they moderate themselves towards the centre or keep on trying to be more Reform than Reform, as they have been to little effect for most of the time since their general election pasting?
What is clear is that Reform has been making up ground on the Conservatives in London: the previous poll by the same company, Savanta, which came out in June, had the Tories eight points ahead of Reform. Other recent surveys have confirmed this shift. Now we wait to see if Cunningham’s selection as mayoral candidate and elevation to “the head of Reform UK in London” further boosts her party’s standing in the capital.
On the one hand, she has obvious attractions as a candidate. She is confident in the spotlight, the daughter of migrants from Egypt, a bit glamorous and mother to seven children (strictly speaking stepmother to two of them according to her Wikipedia page, though that’s neither here nor there). Pre-pandemic (and post-divorce) she ran a network of female-only, home-based co-working groups under her previous surname of Dupuy. Being a former Crown Prosecution Service lawyer can hardly hurt her credentials as a would-be hands-on crime-fighter. As an electoral proposition, she is nothing if not vivid.
On the other, she can come across as both a bit wild and a bit posh. And while her stories of talking to ordinary Londoners (“I was in Zara the other day…”) deserve a hearing, her “I’m listening” pitch – which is very Susan Hall – will need to include having ears for voters outside of the Reform hardcore if she’s going to have the bit of crossover appeal she’ll need. Hall came nowhere near it. As for rallying Reform activists, it is perhaps worth noting that she appears to have been handpicked by Farage – certainly, there was no mention of any sounding out of members, let alone a contest or a vote. Cunningham’s Muslim background, which wasn’t mentioned on Wednesday, might not be to all of them’s taste.
Proper policy positions will have to be developed and thought through. The seemingly blithe assumption that promising tube train automation, “zero tolerance” and scrapping the ULEZ are surefire winners suggests that process has yet to begin. Farage seemed to think the mayoral election is next year, not more than two years hence. The sole mention of housing – the issue that really presents a danger to London’s future – was Farage saying in passing that London will have to “build tall”. How popular would that be with older Londoners, the age group most likely to vote Right?
An unanswered question so far – On London has inquired – is whether Cunningham will defend her Westminster Council seat in the marginal ward of Lancaster Gate, which she won as a Tory in 2022 as Laila Dupuy.
As for Farage, his charm school touch remains consistent. Pressed further on Wednesday about the (still-growing) number of allegations that he directed antisemitic and other racist taunts at fellow pupils when attending the elite Dulwich College school in south London in the 1970s, he said: “I don’t apologise for things that are complete made-up fantasies…absolute nonsense by people with very obvious, if you looked, political motivation.”
A cynical view about the early launch of Cunningham’s campaign is that it is largely to give fresh impetus to Reform’s national campaign to misrepresent London as the “Third World shit-hole” of Twitter trolls’ unpleasant imaginations. Cunningham insists she loves the place. How much of it will love her back?
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