The ink on the formal declaration of her election as a councillor for Woodside was barely dry before the names of one favoured Labour member was popping up as a parliamentary candidate.
By WALTER CRONXITE, political editor
Jess Rich has not yet attended her first full meeting at Croydon Town Hall as the newly elected councillor for Woodside ward before her alter ego, “Jess-Hammersley-Rich”, has been confirmed as Labour’s General Election candidate for Surrey Heath in the latest internal party stitch-up.
Surrey Heath is the stockbroker belt constituency where Michael Gove has been the Conservative MP since 2005. There’s a strong suggestion that Gove might not make it to his 20th anniversary as Surrey Heath’s MP, given the state of recent Tory polling, though it probably won’t be Purley resident Rich/Hammersley-Rich who will unseat the former Murdoch newspaper hack.
Gove’s Tory vote looks liable to get squeezed by a far-right nut-job Reform candidate, and by the Liberal Democrats’ Alasdair Pinkerton, who finished second to Gove in 2019, when the Conservative had an 18,000 vote majority. Rich/Hammersley-Rich is only there to keep up appearances, but Labour’s choice has nevertheless raised eyebrows among some of her local party colleagues.
Veteran political journalist Michael Crick, from his always well-informed Twitter account @TomorrowsMPs, broke the news of the parliamentary candidate nomination of Rich/Hammersley-Rich by Labour. It seems that this was likely a decision taken by Labour Party officials, rather than any party members living just outside Guildford, which comprises the Surrey Heath constituency.
A bit Rich: the councillor for Woodside ward, and now a Labour Party PPC
That will make it twice in less than two months that Rich/Hammersley-Rich has found favour with the apparatchiks in Starmer’s Labour Party – after several failed attempts at getting elected or selected by the people who know her best in the Croydon Labour Party.
The 30something charity worker from Purley studied drama at Essex University, where she was also involved in student politics.
Rich, as she was then calling herself, was rejected by her party colleagues in 2020 when she tried to win selection as Labour’s candidate for Croydon South.
And in 2022, by now calling herself Hammersley-Rich, she managed to lose Labour a council seat in Waddon ward in that May’s local elections.
When it was announced that Mike Bonnello was standing down as the Labour councillor for Woodside ward earlier this year, the party’s members there were denied any say in who would represent them at Croydon Town Hall.
Short form: how Jess Rich’s name appeared on the election papers for the Woodside by-election
A tweet from Croydon Labour was the first that grassroots members in Woodside heard about the “selection”: there had been no democratic selection meeting, and party officials did not even have the courtesy of emailing members with the fait accompli decision. Rich/Hammersley-Rich was imposed by the London region executive.
Woodside just happens to be part of the Croydon East Constituency Labour Party mired in a selection-fixing scandal that, as Inside Croydon revealed exclusively, is now subject to a fraud investigation by the Met’s cyber crime unit.
The nomination in Surrey Heath of Rich/Hammersley-Rich as the prospective parliamentary candidate could be seen as significant: she becomes the first figure associated with Croydon Labour to be successfully nominated for a parliamentary seat outside the borough since Tony Newman’s Labour administration bankrupted Croydon in 2020. The reputational damage which that caused is still having consequences.
There is, however, continuing confusion over what Rich/Hammersley-Rich wants to be known as.
In 2022, she appeared on ballot papers in Waddon as “Jessica Rich”, before a switch to the hyphenated version of her name, and then a shift back to “Rich” when seeking election in Woodside earlier this month.
As one Croydon Labour insider suggested this morning, “It’s probably deliberate for the voters of Surrey Heath, to distinguish her from the Filthy-Richs, the Stunningly-Richs of Hampshire or the Berkshire branch of the Offensively-Rich.”
Friends in high places?: Rich/Hammersley-Rich lists David Evans, Labour’s GS, as her election agent
At least one other member was less than amused: “Alright, she might just be a paper candidate, doing her bit for the party. But what talent has she shown at all that has seen her hand-picked twice in a short period of time? And what does this mean for the residents that she’s just promised to serve in Woodside?”
One clue to why Rich/Hammersley-Rich appears to have Labour’s official seal of approval might be found in the “imprint” that she carries on her Twitter profile, giving her agent’s name as “David Evans on behalf of the Labour Party…”.
“Everyone who is a candidate has to have an imprint with an agent’s name,” said one of our Labour sources, “but not everyone lists the actual General Secretary of the Labour Party.”
Read more: Labour admits serious breach of private data in Croydon East
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
Read more: Grumbled recriminations but little is changed at the Town Hall
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Unfortunately Electoral Calculus predicts the safe return of the dodgy smug law-breaking hypocrite https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Surrey+Heath
But they are clearly wrong. A quarter of the Surrey Heath electorate won’t be voting for Jess Rich/Hammersley-Rich
Er, I was thinking of Pob, or Mr Sarah Vine as he was known not that long ago
Yes Arf. But if 5-8% of that non-existent Lab vote in the stockbroker belt goes orange, and Faragists nibble away at the Tory vote by a little, it may be interesting.
Which is why I think our pollster friends have made a mistake, attributing a national vote share to a paper candidate